Last time, I talked about worldbuilding techniques. Those are the ways authors build a world in the readers' minds--the world the characters live in. Every story requires worldbuilding, even if your story is set in an environment your readers know well.
The mistake a lot of unpublished authors make in worldbuilding is the "information dump." I don't know who invented that term, but it's the mistake of providing much more information than the story needs, especially to an audience who doesn't yet have reason to care about any of it.
My theory is, you can get away with any amount of exposition if the reader wants to read it. The trick is to make them want to read it. So whenever you're building your story's world, and you, through exposition, start telling readers all about the last five hundred years of chaos your world has gone through, please hesitate and ask yourself one question:
Why would my readers care about any of this?
This question is not rhetorical; it's essential. If you can provide a good, solid answer, keep writing that exposition! But if you can't...
Oh. Here's a bad answer to that question: "Because if they don't have this information, they'll never understand the implied threat of murder Vanessa's making in Chapter Six when she looks behind the mirror and talks about ghosts." The only time this answer is good, is if you're writing Chapter Six, and Vanessa just now looked behind the mirror and talked about ghosts.
What many beginning fiction writers don't get is, you don't want your reader to understand everything right away. Questions, remember? You want to raise questions in your readers' minds because questions make readers keep reading. If Vanessa's combination mirror move/ghost talk seems really out of place, readers are going to suspect they can't take her action at face value. That's when you tell the readers what her actions mean--right when they want to know the most. Or maybe in the very next scene, if stopping the action for an explanation would wreck the story's rhythm. But soon. Do it soon, or the reader will put stop reading and say "Nothing in this story makes any sense."
One other worldbuilding hint. I promised you a preview of one of the stories we're publishing in Issue #19. The story is our third place winner, The Gear Master's Wife, and we think it contains some of the best worldbuilding our magazine has ever received. The author, John Burridge, manages to mix questions with suggested answers in such a way that, even though we don't fully understand the world the story takes place in, we feel we understand enough. I want to draw special attention to one sentence in that story. The main character makes ice sculptures, and is making sculptures with religious meaning for his city's big holiday. Here's the sentence:
The next morning, the Guild of Bakers came to collect his ice statues for the Longnight Folly.
What kind of world names their biggest holiday "Longnight Folly"? The answer is, this story's world, which is cold, austere, and formal. So does everyone act stupid and foolish for a night on this holiday? No, it's a serious religious holiday. Yet in the context of the story, it works... even though you never really understand what the holiday's about or why it matters so.
So why would a guild of bakers come by to pick up the ice sculptures? I have no idea, but I bet the author does, and his confidence shines through in every description.
See, the story isn't really about the holiday or the guild of bakers. That's all background. The story is about a man who just suffered a terrible loss. The important thing is, he suffered it in this story's world, which is so stark and formal that readers can intuit the sculptor isn't going to get much help for his pain. This story's world doesn't have a lot of use for clumsy, awkward feelings. So, people in this world have a real problem when they're overcome with emotions too strong to contain. Since an act like crying or getting roaring drunk would be unthinkable here, the man's feelings escape him in a rather unorthodox way that causes a lot of trouble, and that is what the story is really about.
Every description and every action characters take hammer home the world's formality. Who cares why bakers collect the ice statues? It's interesting--it makes the world seem more real, because somebody (the author) put a lot of thought into that choice--but it's not important. What's important is what's shown in every line, and demonstrated in every description: this is not a place where you'll get comforted when you're sad.
So when you're building your characters' world, figure out what its most important element is, and focus on that. In The Zen Thing, the story I discussed last time, it was the bizarre relationships among deeply flawed people. In The Gear Master's Wife it's the world's coldness. What is it in your story's world?
Showing posts with label writing I admire. Show all posts
Showing posts with label writing I admire. Show all posts
Sunday, March 3, 2013
Sunday, February 24, 2013
Worldbuilding
The term "Worldbuilding" dates at least back to the 1970s and refers to the work involved in creating a fictional world. When referring to prose ficiton, worldbuilding is all about giving fictional characters an interesting (to the reader, anyway) place to live.
(Remember, the world has to be interesting to the reader, not necessarily to the story's characters. The purpose of writing fiction is to make readers, not characters, experience specific thoughts and feelings.)
Stories that are set in the real world require just as much worldbuilding as stories set in galaxies far, far away. The difference is, readers can generally be assumed to have a basic knowledge of the real world.
That's not always true, though. At OTP we get a fair number of submissions from countries where life is rather different than it is in the US, or even the US and the UK and its related countries. For issue #19 we received, liked, but ultimately had to reject a story that couldn't be fully appreciated unless you knew a lot more about Serbian history than we do, and that we suspect our readers have.
A couple of times we've published stories by African authors, and we've had to ask them to be a little more explicit about what certain objects are, or whether it's going with custom or against custom for a character to do some act that, in the story, annoys neighbors. I'm sure some African readers probably wondered why the author bothered explaining something "everybody knows," but the point is, OTP is a global magazine and there's very little in this world that "everybody knows." (For one thing, all of our stories are written in English and only about 1/8 of the world's population can speak English. Reading it is a different question, and even harder to answer.)
Even stories set in today's America and aimed at educated audiences in today's America require worldbuilding. Here's a good example from "The Zen Thing" by Emma Duffy, recently published in One Story magazine. Watch this combination of family history, characterization, mood setting, and scene setting. Anita is the story's main character and the setting is a family get-together.
[Frank] and Anita's grandmother are eighty years old. They met five years ago at Fresh Seafood, where Anita's grandmother worked as a cashier. They were both living in mobile homes at the time, but Frank's was a double-wide, and so they decided to move in there. Everyone is glad for it, especially Frank, who seems to have no family to his name whatsoever and will now, he knows, have his ass wiped by Anita's parents when the time comes. He has already asked Anita's mother, who is a nurse, to be his medical power of attorney. Everyone is pretty sure Frank is gay, and possibly black, though Anita's grandmother, having never had any experience with either, is unaware of this.
That's 100% worldbuilding. You can't understand this story until you understand the family and the world they're living in. In this case their world is one of unrealistic hopes, long-smoldering grudges, and nasty intrusions from the uglier parts of reality the characters intend to ignore for as long as possible.
Worldbuilding is much more difficult, though, when a story is not set in a world that shares most of its features with the one the audience lives in. When I was active on critters.org, I read a lot of unpublished (and unpublishable) SF/fantasy novels, or at least their opening chapters. I've seen authors desperately try to stuff six books' worth of notes about their world's history into the reader without once asking the question, "What must the reader know to fully understand my story?" The answer to that question is, "Much, much less than what you need to know to write your story."
In other words, we can read and enjoy The Hobbit without having to read The Silmarillion. (Good thing, too, if you ask me!) That's because the best writers figure out how to imply or suggest what readers need to grasp about a world without having to write "information dumps"--those heavy, leaden walls of text that previously speedy and nimble stories crash into and die from.
As an example, in the excerpt above, readers could not be expected to guess that Anita's grandmother has had no experience with gays or black people, so the story told them. Readers also couldn't be expected to guess that Frank may well be both gay and black, so the story told them. But now that you know these two things, and that Anita's grandmother and Frank have been living together for five years, what can you guess? See, that's the art of worldbuilding--giving the readers just enough pieces of the puzzle for them to assemble the rest. The finished picture in the reader's mind doesn't have to be exactly the same as the one in the writer's mind, just close enough to provide a useful framework for the rest of the story.
Next week I'll give you a preview of a story we're publishing in Issue #19. That story does one of the best jobs of SF worldbuilding I've ever seen from an author who isn't already famous for writing great SF, and I'll go into some detail (with the author's permission) about how I think he does it.
(Remember, the world has to be interesting to the reader, not necessarily to the story's characters. The purpose of writing fiction is to make readers, not characters, experience specific thoughts and feelings.)
Stories that are set in the real world require just as much worldbuilding as stories set in galaxies far, far away. The difference is, readers can generally be assumed to have a basic knowledge of the real world.
That's not always true, though. At OTP we get a fair number of submissions from countries where life is rather different than it is in the US, or even the US and the UK and its related countries. For issue #19 we received, liked, but ultimately had to reject a story that couldn't be fully appreciated unless you knew a lot more about Serbian history than we do, and that we suspect our readers have.
A couple of times we've published stories by African authors, and we've had to ask them to be a little more explicit about what certain objects are, or whether it's going with custom or against custom for a character to do some act that, in the story, annoys neighbors. I'm sure some African readers probably wondered why the author bothered explaining something "everybody knows," but the point is, OTP is a global magazine and there's very little in this world that "everybody knows." (For one thing, all of our stories are written in English and only about 1/8 of the world's population can speak English. Reading it is a different question, and even harder to answer.)
Even stories set in today's America and aimed at educated audiences in today's America require worldbuilding. Here's a good example from "The Zen Thing" by Emma Duffy, recently published in One Story magazine. Watch this combination of family history, characterization, mood setting, and scene setting. Anita is the story's main character and the setting is a family get-together.
[Frank] and Anita's grandmother are eighty years old. They met five years ago at Fresh Seafood, where Anita's grandmother worked as a cashier. They were both living in mobile homes at the time, but Frank's was a double-wide, and so they decided to move in there. Everyone is glad for it, especially Frank, who seems to have no family to his name whatsoever and will now, he knows, have his ass wiped by Anita's parents when the time comes. He has already asked Anita's mother, who is a nurse, to be his medical power of attorney. Everyone is pretty sure Frank is gay, and possibly black, though Anita's grandmother, having never had any experience with either, is unaware of this.
That's 100% worldbuilding. You can't understand this story until you understand the family and the world they're living in. In this case their world is one of unrealistic hopes, long-smoldering grudges, and nasty intrusions from the uglier parts of reality the characters intend to ignore for as long as possible.
Worldbuilding is much more difficult, though, when a story is not set in a world that shares most of its features with the one the audience lives in. When I was active on critters.org, I read a lot of unpublished (and unpublishable) SF/fantasy novels, or at least their opening chapters. I've seen authors desperately try to stuff six books' worth of notes about their world's history into the reader without once asking the question, "What must the reader know to fully understand my story?" The answer to that question is, "Much, much less than what you need to know to write your story."
In other words, we can read and enjoy The Hobbit without having to read The Silmarillion. (Good thing, too, if you ask me!) That's because the best writers figure out how to imply or suggest what readers need to grasp about a world without having to write "information dumps"--those heavy, leaden walls of text that previously speedy and nimble stories crash into and die from.
As an example, in the excerpt above, readers could not be expected to guess that Anita's grandmother has had no experience with gays or black people, so the story told them. Readers also couldn't be expected to guess that Frank may well be both gay and black, so the story told them. But now that you know these two things, and that Anita's grandmother and Frank have been living together for five years, what can you guess? See, that's the art of worldbuilding--giving the readers just enough pieces of the puzzle for them to assemble the rest. The finished picture in the reader's mind doesn't have to be exactly the same as the one in the writer's mind, just close enough to provide a useful framework for the rest of the story.
Next week I'll give you a preview of a story we're publishing in Issue #19. That story does one of the best jobs of SF worldbuilding I've ever seen from an author who isn't already famous for writing great SF, and I'll go into some detail (with the author's permission) about how I think he does it.
Sunday, December 23, 2012
It's Okay to Tell, if You Do It Well
I get nervous when I see someone use the writing cliche "Show, don't tell." I get nervous because it's the kind of advice that's useful to beginning fiction writers at a certain point in their development, and after that point, I think it's limiting at best, and harmful at worst.
Think of the advice to "get plenty of exercise." I don't think many people would hear "get plenty of exercise" and assume they should never sleep, since sleeping is the opposite of exercising. Yet when I participated in on-line critique forums and when I listen to developing writers critique each other, I notice people saying "show, don't tell" as if they really believe prose is never supposed to tell.
"Show, don't tell" really means "Use behavioral examples, don't simply state facts." It means "make your characters do things that demonstrate the point you, the author, want to make."
So instead of writing "Pat was an alcoholic," write "Pat started the day with a glass of vodka and finished it with several more" or something. We'll all agree the second example is more evocative than the first. But if you take "show, don't tell" to heart, all you'll ever do is describe people's actions. You'll never once step inside their head and let us know what they're thinking or feeling, because that would require telling. (And that's fine if you're trying to out-Hemingway Hemingway, but he used telling plenty of times. From A Farewell To Arms: "The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong in the broken places. But those that will not break it kills." That's as telling as telling gets.)
Internal narration is one of the most powerful techniques a fiction writer can use, and it's a form of telling. In fact, it's a technique only available to prose writers. Movies can't do it, at least not without voice-overs. Plays can't do it. Movies and plays really do need to show, not tell, because movies with long stretches of a character telling things is difficult to sit through, even when done well. That's why it's very difficult, in a movie or play (especially a play), to get across certain basic facts about characters, like their birthday, without using carefully staged tricks, such as showing a calendar while showing someone celebrating with a birthday cake. Or, of course, by having a character TELL the audience, in dialogue, "Isn't it your birthday today? It's December 23, right?" (And if the response is, "No, that was your first husband--mine's in May," now the audience has been told and shown the first speaker used to be married to someone else.)
Great fiction writers "tell" all the time, because when done well, prose can get complex layers of information across better and faster than any other storytelling medium. Here are three examples of good telling from three award-winning short stories published in the last two years.
His name was Howard Ritche, and he was only a few years older than she was...
from Corrie by Alice Munro
I always think I can finesse these situations--the last was maybe seven years ago, when I received an award at the college where I teach--but in the event I am clumsy and fall back on false hurry.
from Things Said or Done by Ann Packer
Martha filed for divorce. She collected the apartment on Central Park West and a considerable sum of money, then went to counseling. Lovers did not materialize to replace the discarded husband.
from Volcano by Lawrence Osborne
Look at the word "discarded" in "discarded husband." The use of that adjective is an example of "telling" that no non-verbal storytelling medium can reproduce. We never even see the husband. A movie, at best, would have to use some kind of montage sequence showing Martha signing divorce papers, still having the apartment (with a shot of a sign saying "Central Park West" so we learn the name), getting a check or payment with a number the average audience member would call "considerable," then going to counseling, then being alone in a lot of places that indicate she's looking for romance, then remaining alone in those places as romance happened for everyone around her but not her. That might work, but it would take a while and halfway through the montage we'd guess where the movie was going and be bored with the scene before it finished. Yet "Volcano" accomplishes all of that and more so quickly the reader doesn't have time to be bored, and so evocatively the reader's imagination is activated and fills in everything the story is just suggesting.
My point is, there is good telling, and there is bad telling. If you want the best treatment of good vs. bad telling I've ever seen, get The Making of a Story by Alice LaPlante and study Chapter Five: "Why You Need to Show and Tell." I've backed up some of her points in this entry, but there's no substitute for the line-by-line dissection of long passages from short stories to demonstrate when one technique works better than the other.
So I say quit worrying about whether your prose is showing or telling, and worry about whether it's evoking thoughts and feelings in the reader. In the end, fiction is about what the reader thinks and feels.
Think of the advice to "get plenty of exercise." I don't think many people would hear "get plenty of exercise" and assume they should never sleep, since sleeping is the opposite of exercising. Yet when I participated in on-line critique forums and when I listen to developing writers critique each other, I notice people saying "show, don't tell" as if they really believe prose is never supposed to tell.
"Show, don't tell" really means "Use behavioral examples, don't simply state facts." It means "make your characters do things that demonstrate the point you, the author, want to make."
So instead of writing "Pat was an alcoholic," write "Pat started the day with a glass of vodka and finished it with several more" or something. We'll all agree the second example is more evocative than the first. But if you take "show, don't tell" to heart, all you'll ever do is describe people's actions. You'll never once step inside their head and let us know what they're thinking or feeling, because that would require telling. (And that's fine if you're trying to out-Hemingway Hemingway, but he used telling plenty of times. From A Farewell To Arms: "The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong in the broken places. But those that will not break it kills." That's as telling as telling gets.)
Internal narration is one of the most powerful techniques a fiction writer can use, and it's a form of telling. In fact, it's a technique only available to prose writers. Movies can't do it, at least not without voice-overs. Plays can't do it. Movies and plays really do need to show, not tell, because movies with long stretches of a character telling things is difficult to sit through, even when done well. That's why it's very difficult, in a movie or play (especially a play), to get across certain basic facts about characters, like their birthday, without using carefully staged tricks, such as showing a calendar while showing someone celebrating with a birthday cake. Or, of course, by having a character TELL the audience, in dialogue, "Isn't it your birthday today? It's December 23, right?" (And if the response is, "No, that was your first husband--mine's in May," now the audience has been told and shown the first speaker used to be married to someone else.)
Great fiction writers "tell" all the time, because when done well, prose can get complex layers of information across better and faster than any other storytelling medium. Here are three examples of good telling from three award-winning short stories published in the last two years.
His name was Howard Ritche, and he was only a few years older than she was...
from Corrie by Alice Munro
I always think I can finesse these situations--the last was maybe seven years ago, when I received an award at the college where I teach--but in the event I am clumsy and fall back on false hurry.
from Things Said or Done by Ann Packer
Martha filed for divorce. She collected the apartment on Central Park West and a considerable sum of money, then went to counseling. Lovers did not materialize to replace the discarded husband.
from Volcano by Lawrence Osborne
Look at the word "discarded" in "discarded husband." The use of that adjective is an example of "telling" that no non-verbal storytelling medium can reproduce. We never even see the husband. A movie, at best, would have to use some kind of montage sequence showing Martha signing divorce papers, still having the apartment (with a shot of a sign saying "Central Park West" so we learn the name), getting a check or payment with a number the average audience member would call "considerable," then going to counseling, then being alone in a lot of places that indicate she's looking for romance, then remaining alone in those places as romance happened for everyone around her but not her. That might work, but it would take a while and halfway through the montage we'd guess where the movie was going and be bored with the scene before it finished. Yet "Volcano" accomplishes all of that and more so quickly the reader doesn't have time to be bored, and so evocatively the reader's imagination is activated and fills in everything the story is just suggesting.
My point is, there is good telling, and there is bad telling. If you want the best treatment of good vs. bad telling I've ever seen, get The Making of a Story by Alice LaPlante and study Chapter Five: "Why You Need to Show and Tell." I've backed up some of her points in this entry, but there's no substitute for the line-by-line dissection of long passages from short stories to demonstrate when one technique works better than the other.
So I say quit worrying about whether your prose is showing or telling, and worry about whether it's evoking thoughts and feelings in the reader. In the end, fiction is about what the reader thinks and feels.
Sunday, April 29, 2012
Second Person POV, part 1
Second person point of view gets a lot of bad press. The most positive opinion I've seen of it in print suggested second person POV is an especially distant form of first person, where the author uses "you" instead of "I" as the pronoun for the POV character. That argument makes a lot of sense if you're talking about the bored, hard partying, thoroughly disconnected protagonist of Jay McInerney's Bright Lights, Big City, one of very few novels ever written in second person. The "you = distant I" theory doesn't work so well for other second person stories, like one I've discussed in a previous blog entry: Pam Houston's "How to Talk to a Hunter."
I find second person interesting because hardly anybody will admit to liking it, yet it never goes completely away. The obvious objection to second person is that the author seems to be writing from the viewpoint of the reader, but that objection doesn't make sense in many cases. If a story begins, "You are the new breed: an eight-year-old with a Ph.D. in mathematics and an affinity for soul music," clearly the author's not writing from the reader's point of view. In fact, the only time I've ever seen second person used to represent the reader is in those old Choose Your Own Adventure books. (Yes, there are new CYOA books out there, but I mean the ones that made you roll dice while fighting monsters. Anyway...)
I can't find a second person POV story that's ever been published in a magazine with strong editorial standards that would be improved by changing the POV. The latest one I've read is "You, On a Good Day" by Alethea Black. This story is in issue #163 of One Story magazine. It starts by talking about an unhappy protagonist with a strong sense of restraint:
The story goes on to list many, many things "you" don't do today, and sometimes, why "you" don't do them. The reader learns a great deal about "you" and "your" life up to that point as it lists things "you" don't do. About two-thirds of the way through, the story shifts to the positive:
On this day, you wake up and remember the sight of your four-year-old nephew aiming all of his fire trucks at the television during the coverage of the California wildfires because he wanted to help.
This story could have been written as "I don't do this, I don't do that," and then "Instead I do this, and I do that," and it could have worked. But I think the protagonist would have come across as the most self-obsessed narcissist this side of Narcissus himself.
The story could have said "She doesn't give the finger..." and "On this day, she wakes up and remembers..." That might have worked. But I think the story's effect would have been less immediate, and possibly more annoying, because at some point readers would expect to learn a name, or be given a reason not to know the name, and I doubt I'd have liked the story as much. Using the second person here lets the author write about self-obsession without annoying the reader.
The magazine's web site (www.one-story.com) has a short interview with the author, and the author is asked about the second person POV choice, and she says the story came out of a talk she was giving herself at one point, when she was presumably talking to herself like "You shouldn't do this, you should do that." I can see that kind of thinking in her story, and I think it works.
I think at least 99% of good fiction would fail if it were converted to second person. However, I believe second person works in extremely rare circumstances, and in those circumstances, nothing else will achieve the effect you're going for.
Read any good second-person stories lately? Which ones?
Wednesday, March 21, 2012
Dialect
It's tricky to use dialect well when writing fiction. In earlier times (think Mark Twain) writers could get away with all kinds of deliberate misspellings and other obvious tactics to indicate dialect, especially in dialogue. For several decades now, editors have disliked that approach for a variety of reasons, including the view that deliberately writing poor grammar or spelling for a character's dialogue can seem insulting to the character, or the character's ethnicity.
Still, dialect exists and if you're writing about a part of the world in which it's spoken, you have to address the challenge head-on. I like the approach Dead Man Breathing, one of our honorable mentions in issue #17, uses: it italicizes the dialect and isn't afraid to explain its meaning when the meaning is not obvious in context. Yet it recognizes readers will get most of it on their own. However, the dialect doesn't sneak into the narration; only the character's thoughts use dialect.
Contrast that approach to the one taken by Larry Brown in his award-winning story Kubuku Rides (This Is It). (I hate that title, by the way. I'll explain why I think the title is the worst short story title I've ever seen next time.) This time, the point is how Brown integrates dialect into the narration. Here are its opening lines:
Angel hear the back door slam. It Alan, in from work. She start to hide the glass and then she don't hide the glass, he got a nose like a bloodhound and gonna smell it anyway, so she just keep sitting on the couch.
His other stories I've read don't use that dialect; it was something that worked well for one particular story, so he used it. I think it provides a great deal of atmosphere and does so without insulting or making caricatures out of the characters.
So there are at least two effective ways to write dialect when you have to. Pick the one that works best for your story's purpose.
Still, dialect exists and if you're writing about a part of the world in which it's spoken, you have to address the challenge head-on. I like the approach Dead Man Breathing, one of our honorable mentions in issue #17, uses: it italicizes the dialect and isn't afraid to explain its meaning when the meaning is not obvious in context. Yet it recognizes readers will get most of it on their own. However, the dialect doesn't sneak into the narration; only the character's thoughts use dialect.
Contrast that approach to the one taken by Larry Brown in his award-winning story Kubuku Rides (This Is It). (I hate that title, by the way. I'll explain why I think the title is the worst short story title I've ever seen next time.) This time, the point is how Brown integrates dialect into the narration. Here are its opening lines:
Angel hear the back door slam. It Alan, in from work. She start to hide the glass and then she don't hide the glass, he got a nose like a bloodhound and gonna smell it anyway, so she just keep sitting on the couch.
His other stories I've read don't use that dialect; it was something that worked well for one particular story, so he used it. I think it provides a great deal of atmosphere and does so without insulting or making caricatures out of the characters.
So there are at least two effective ways to write dialect when you have to. Pick the one that works best for your story's purpose.
Friday, March 16, 2012
Not a "Setup" Story
A "setup" story is our term for any piece of fiction that promises the reader a good story, but never gets around to delivering it. We get a few of these in every contest. Sometimes they read like the first chapter of a novel. The problem is, stories like that don't work without the rest of the novel.
The first time I read our third Honorable Mention story in Issue 16, The Hand of God, I wondered if it was a "setup" story. I felt closure at the end of it, though, so I didn't think it was. I took a deep look at it to figure out why I found the ending so satisfying, when one could argue the story leaves enormous, and important, questions unanswered.
Without spoiling anything, here's why I think the story is complete, rather than just a setup. The first key is, the reader knows more than the protagonist. The protagonist is a kid, and is interpreting everything through a kid's eyes. We can read between the lines and see more about what's going on, and more importantly, what's going to happen next, than the kid can.
I think this story exemplifies OTP's theory of what a story does and needs to do. Does the story raise questions in the reader's mind about the story's elements? Definitely. Does it address those questions? (Note that I didn't say "answer," I said "address.") Yes, it does. Does it answer them completely? No, but it does answer one question pretty thoroughly, and that's the question of how life in this town has coped with its weird event, and how this kid is coping. Furthermore, we think we can extrapolate what's going to happen next, at least to a degree.
That last point might be the most important. Because we can guess with some certainty what's going to happen to the characters after the story officially ends, we don't need to read about it. Adding more scenes to the story would make the story dull unless those scenes added believable, but unexpected, new events.
In fact, the only way to make The Hand of God longer would have been to add a new series of events that fit the world, but did not fit our expectations. Since the story doesn't do that, we can assume our suspicions about what comes next are correct. That means the story does not tell an ending or even show an ending. Instead, it evokes an ending in our minds by leading us to a conclusion that we can't avoid.
Therefore, to us, The Hand of God is not a setup story, but a complete story that evokes an ending we supply ourselves. And we liked it enough that it made "Honorable Mention."
For fun, compare the evoked ending to The Hand of God to the ending of A League of Pity (first-place winner), which leaves absolutely no doubt in any reader's mind about what happens next: nothing of consequence. League's last paragraph ends the story completely. (Is that why it takes first place? No. I'm just making the comparison to show you there's more than one effective way to end a story.)
The first time I read our third Honorable Mention story in Issue 16, The Hand of God, I wondered if it was a "setup" story. I felt closure at the end of it, though, so I didn't think it was. I took a deep look at it to figure out why I found the ending so satisfying, when one could argue the story leaves enormous, and important, questions unanswered.
Without spoiling anything, here's why I think the story is complete, rather than just a setup. The first key is, the reader knows more than the protagonist. The protagonist is a kid, and is interpreting everything through a kid's eyes. We can read between the lines and see more about what's going on, and more importantly, what's going to happen next, than the kid can.
I think this story exemplifies OTP's theory of what a story does and needs to do. Does the story raise questions in the reader's mind about the story's elements? Definitely. Does it address those questions? (Note that I didn't say "answer," I said "address.") Yes, it does. Does it answer them completely? No, but it does answer one question pretty thoroughly, and that's the question of how life in this town has coped with its weird event, and how this kid is coping. Furthermore, we think we can extrapolate what's going to happen next, at least to a degree.
That last point might be the most important. Because we can guess with some certainty what's going to happen to the characters after the story officially ends, we don't need to read about it. Adding more scenes to the story would make the story dull unless those scenes added believable, but unexpected, new events.
In fact, the only way to make The Hand of God longer would have been to add a new series of events that fit the world, but did not fit our expectations. Since the story doesn't do that, we can assume our suspicions about what comes next are correct. That means the story does not tell an ending or even show an ending. Instead, it evokes an ending in our minds by leading us to a conclusion that we can't avoid.
Therefore, to us, The Hand of God is not a setup story, but a complete story that evokes an ending we supply ourselves. And we liked it enough that it made "Honorable Mention."
For fun, compare the evoked ending to The Hand of God to the ending of A League of Pity (first-place winner), which leaves absolutely no doubt in any reader's mind about what happens next: nothing of consequence. League's last paragraph ends the story completely. (Is that why it takes first place? No. I'm just making the comparison to show you there's more than one effective way to end a story.)
Saturday, February 25, 2012
Good Ambiguity: An Example
One of the authors whose story did not make the final round of judging gave me permission to quote a line from it that I greatly admired.
His story opened with a family barbeque. The main character is an adult woman probably in her late 20's or early 30's. The opening paragraph ends like so:
While the [family members ate and drank], I tried not to think about sleeping with my sister's husband.
I liked that opening a lot, and I liked it even more an instant later when I recognized I wasn't sure if the narrator had already slept with her sister's husband, or was just imagining doing it.
Now in my opinion, one of the problems with this story was how quickly that question got answered. The next sentence settled the matter, and I'd have preferred to see the tension stretched out a bit longer. The point is, though, that here we have an author who is being ambiguous in a way that helps a story, instead of hurts it. Usually it's a serious problem when we read a sentence and we're not clear on what it means. Writing is all about communication, right?
Yes, and in communication, what is not said can be even more powerful than what is said. The above line says quite a bit, and teases us even more with what it holds back. That's compelling writing. If the rest of the story had impressed us as much as that line did, it would have made the final round of judging.
His story opened with a family barbeque. The main character is an adult woman probably in her late 20's or early 30's. The opening paragraph ends like so:
While the [family members ate and drank], I tried not to think about sleeping with my sister's husband.
I liked that opening a lot, and I liked it even more an instant later when I recognized I wasn't sure if the narrator had already slept with her sister's husband, or was just imagining doing it.
Now in my opinion, one of the problems with this story was how quickly that question got answered. The next sentence settled the matter, and I'd have preferred to see the tension stretched out a bit longer. The point is, though, that here we have an author who is being ambiguous in a way that helps a story, instead of hurts it. Usually it's a serious problem when we read a sentence and we're not clear on what it means. Writing is all about communication, right?
Yes, and in communication, what is not said can be even more powerful than what is said. The above line says quite a bit, and teases us even more with what it holds back. That's compelling writing. If the rest of the story had impressed us as much as that line did, it would have made the final round of judging.
Sunday, February 5, 2012
I Can Take My Own Medicine
We've handed the 10 finalists for Contest #16 to the prize judges. By next weekend, we ought to know which stories have been accepted.
Coincidentally, after three rejection slips of my own, I got an acceptance letter, too.
What that means is, there's a good chance that while we're editing the winning stories from Contest #16, my own work will be undergoing editing from the people at Cliffhanger Books, who will be publishing a short story anthology I'll have a story in. Since one of this blog's areas of focus is editing, I've got a chance to show behind-the-scenes secrets of editors from two perspectives. Assuming the authors permit, we'll be giving you glimpses of how and why we edit our winning stories, and I'll also be sharing some of the edits the Cliffhangers people make to my fiction.
None of these features are likely to start for at least a week, of course, so until then we'll be doing what we've done so far: highlighting prose I especially admire from great short story writers, and occasionally questioning the decisions of editors who let something pass that I would have wanted a bit more thought put into.
Three hundred pounds of Texas chili, cornbread and Lone Star beer, finished off with big black cowboy boots and a little string tie around the area of his neck.
Bloom describes the character in a way that gives you a perfect idea of what kind of person the counselor probably is, yet the description is nearly 100% metaphorical, or at least greatly exaggerated. (Surely he's wearing more than boots and a string tie.) Talk about "evoking" as opposed to just "showing" or "telling"! Before I read that line, I had never considered attempting to describe a character based solely on his or her diet. I'm not sure it would work for many characters or in many stories, but it works in this one.
Wednesday, January 25, 2012
Negatives Used Positively
Last time, I wrote about how grammatically correct double negatives ("I don't mean to say I don't like it") are harder to follow than positive statements ("I mean to say, I like it"). Generally when I write, I try to use positive statements about what is instead of talking about what isn't.
Sometimes, though, negatives can emphasize a point that positives wouldn't make as strongly. Here's a quote from one of British comic P. G. Wodehouse's later novels, the 1974 Jeeves in the Morning:
At a moment like this, with old boyhood friends meeting again [...] you might have expected a good deal of animated what-ho-ing and an immediate picking up of the threads. Of this, however, there was a marked absence.
The second sentence strikes me as a very droll, and much more clever, way of showing how awkward the meeting must have been than just talking about how awkward it was.
This technique can work in more serious situations, too. Imagine you're writing about a character whose child ("Sally") was gone and there was no expectation of her return. (Dead? Or just gone to a distant college? Keep those two options in mind.) You could write something like:
Everywhere I looked, Sally wasn't.
Note how the "dead" versus "college" options change how hard a sentence like that can hit the reader.
My all-time favorite negative description, though, comes from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams. Adams is writing about spaceships appearing in the skies all over the world and the effect they had on people.
Many people went straight into shock as their minds tried to encompass what they were looking at. The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don't.
I find that last bit astonishingly evocative, and I struggle to come up with a positive comparison that would work as well as the negative one does. By using the negative, Adams gets across how wrong it is for the ships to be hanging in the sky like that, and why they are boggling so many minds.
(Oh, and congratulations to reader "Dwarzel" for guessing what my favorite Hitchhiker's quote was.)
Do you have any examples of negatives used positively? Quote them in the comments--I'd love to see them.
Wednesday, January 18, 2012
Creative narration in "Girls Only"
I subscribe to the magazine One Story, and I particularly liked the piece featured in issue #157: "Girls Only," by Karen Shepard. Shepard weaves a narrative spell by using a definitely non-standard point of view. The story's about a group of young women who became friends more or less because no one else wanted to become friends with them. They're kind of rotten to each other, but the story admits they don't know how else to get along.
Anyway, this excerpt might make you think the story uses standard, everyday third-person omniscient POV:
They watched some more, all of them thinking some very unbridesmaidly things, some of them ashamed of themselves and some of them not.
But I say this story uses something else. The narration seems, too often, to come from inside the characters, or inside a character who's just like the main characters but is not one of them. Consider this:
"The playground," Anna repeated. "What was he doing there?"
"Playing?" Cleo suggested.
Sometimes Anna hated Cleo, she really did.
See? That's more attitude than you usually get from third-person omniscient. Plus, the narrator is not omniscient, as we see here:
"Where've you been?" Ticien asked, as if she already knew, and maybe she did. She was more like Cleo than any of the others.
At key points in "Girls Only," the narration can be more judgmental than the characters (which is saying something), but it can also be more sympathetic. The narrator, if it were a person, might be a better friend to these women than they are to each other, and I think that's a difficult, effective, and interesting trick to pull off. It certainly makes "Girls Only" into a kind of story it could never have been had it used a much more standard approach to point of view, at least in my opinion.
Have you read this story? Do you agree with me, or do you think something else is going on?
Anyway, this excerpt might make you think the story uses standard, everyday third-person omniscient POV:
They watched some more, all of them thinking some very unbridesmaidly things, some of them ashamed of themselves and some of them not.
But I say this story uses something else. The narration seems, too often, to come from inside the characters, or inside a character who's just like the main characters but is not one of them. Consider this:
"The playground," Anna repeated. "What was he doing there?"
"Playing?" Cleo suggested.
Sometimes Anna hated Cleo, she really did.
See? That's more attitude than you usually get from third-person omniscient. Plus, the narrator is not omniscient, as we see here:
"Where've you been?" Ticien asked, as if she already knew, and maybe she did. She was more like Cleo than any of the others.
At key points in "Girls Only," the narration can be more judgmental than the characters (which is saying something), but it can also be more sympathetic. The narrator, if it were a person, might be a better friend to these women than they are to each other, and I think that's a difficult, effective, and interesting trick to pull off. It certainly makes "Girls Only" into a kind of story it could never have been had it used a much more standard approach to point of view, at least in my opinion.
Have you read this story? Do you agree with me, or do you think something else is going on?
Wednesday, January 11, 2012
My favorite opening sentence
I have to start the real "writing and editing" part of this blog off with the opening of one of my favorite short stories of all time. It's George Lassos Moon by David Gates, originally published in GQ magazine and then collected in the 2002 edition of the O. Henry Prize Stories book.
Here's the first sentence:
Aunt Lissa's saying something very serious, and bad Carl's playing with the metal creamer thing.
My mind boggles when I think about how much of this story's world the author creates with one simple sentence. Look what we can deduce:
1) Carl's easily distracted and probably kind of dopey. We don't know how old he is but we suspect he's fairly young.
2) The word "bad" in front of "Carl" is, to me, amazing. Who's saying that? In whose view is Carl "bad"? This is not a first person story, and the narrator isn't omniscient either (though you can't tell that from the first sentence alone). "Bad" is such a value judgment. Who's forming that value? It's either Carl, or the world. You can read that sentence both ways, and both ways, it works. (Can you tell it's not the aunt?) I think the word "bad" is what elevates this sentence into something multi-layered. Try reading the sentence aloud, once without the word "bad" and once with it. See what I mean?
3) "the metal creamer thing." Now, here the story makes an assumption that you, the reader, have been in one of those chain restaurants that has a little metal pitcher of milk or creamer on the table. Something like an IHOP or a Denny's. If you grew up in a country other than the US, you might have no idea what a "metal creamer thing" is, but even such a reader can tell Carl doesn't know what else to call it and probably, right about then, doesn't care. "Metal creamer thing" indicates lazy thinking and a lackadaisical attitude, as does the fact that he's "playing" with it. And of course, he's playing with it so he doesn't have to hear the "very serious" thing that his Aunt's saying.
I smile every time I read this sentence.
Are there any first sentences of short stories you find especially powerful and effective? If so, go ahead and put one in the comments section. Be sure to name the story and the author, though.
Here's the first sentence:
Aunt Lissa's saying something very serious, and bad Carl's playing with the metal creamer thing.
My mind boggles when I think about how much of this story's world the author creates with one simple sentence. Look what we can deduce:
1) Carl's easily distracted and probably kind of dopey. We don't know how old he is but we suspect he's fairly young.
2) The word "bad" in front of "Carl" is, to me, amazing. Who's saying that? In whose view is Carl "bad"? This is not a first person story, and the narrator isn't omniscient either (though you can't tell that from the first sentence alone). "Bad" is such a value judgment. Who's forming that value? It's either Carl, or the world. You can read that sentence both ways, and both ways, it works. (Can you tell it's not the aunt?) I think the word "bad" is what elevates this sentence into something multi-layered. Try reading the sentence aloud, once without the word "bad" and once with it. See what I mean?
3) "the metal creamer thing." Now, here the story makes an assumption that you, the reader, have been in one of those chain restaurants that has a little metal pitcher of milk or creamer on the table. Something like an IHOP or a Denny's. If you grew up in a country other than the US, you might have no idea what a "metal creamer thing" is, but even such a reader can tell Carl doesn't know what else to call it and probably, right about then, doesn't care. "Metal creamer thing" indicates lazy thinking and a lackadaisical attitude, as does the fact that he's "playing" with it. And of course, he's playing with it so he doesn't have to hear the "very serious" thing that his Aunt's saying.
I smile every time I read this sentence.
Are there any first sentences of short stories you find especially powerful and effective? If so, go ahead and put one in the comments section. Be sure to name the story and the author, though.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)