Posts filed under ‘TEACHING & EDITING’
Keep Actions in Chronological Order for More Dramatic Scenes
Yesterday I came to the end of The Piano Teacher by Janice Y. K. Lee. It’s an intriguing read, and highly suspenseful - but among other things, it has reminded me of John Gardner’s injunction that actions in a scene should nearly always be described in chronological order.
This is a point of craft I regularly teach to my nonfiction writing students at NYU. Gardner’s argument is that getting the sequence right avoids jarring readers out of the dream state that makes good fiction so compelling. And my argument is that even with nonfiction, it helps with clarity, allowing readers to understand what’s going on the first time through a passage.
And now I have found still a third reason: it makes the action not only clearer, but far more dramatic—especially if the scene is already a good one.
I realized this as I read Lee’s book and found she sometimes gets her order mixed up. The result is that some of her most compelling moments can’t be seen clearly for what they are, and thus are less dramatic than they could have been. Yes, this novel did very well, got lots of good reviews, etc.. But as suspenseful as it is, it could have been much more so.
To show what I mean, I’ll rewrite part of a scene from pages 48–49 of the 2009 Penguin Books paperback edition. The main characters here are Will Truesdale, an older man, and Claire Pendleton, the young heroine. The setting is a party in Hong Kong, and they have just been introduced to each other by a third character, Claire’s friend Amelia.
Original version
“I like your scent,” he said. “Jasmine, is it?”
“Yes. Thank you.”
“Newly arrived?”
“Yes, just a month.”
“Like it?”
“I never imagined living in the Orient but here I am.”
“Oh, Claire, you should have had more imagination,” Amelia said, gesturing to a waiter for another drink.
Claire colored again. Amelia was in rare form today.
“I’m delighted to meet someone who’s not so jaded,” Will said. “All you women are so worldly it quite tires me out.”
Amelia had turned away to get her drink and hadn’t heard him. There was a pause, but Claire didn’t mind it.
“It’s Claire’s birthday,” Amelia told Will, turning back around. She smiled, brittle; red lipstick stained her front tooth. “She’s just a baby.”
“How nice,” he said. “We need more babies around these parts.”
He suddenly reached out his hand and slowly tucked a strand of hair behind Claire’s ear. A possessive gesture, as if he had known her for a long time.
“Excuse me,” he said. Amelia had not seen; she had been scanning the crowd.
“Excuse you for what?” Amelia asked, turning back, distracted.
“Nothing,” they both said. Claire looked down at the floor. They were joined in their collusive denial; it suddenly seemed overwhelmingly intimate.
Revised version for correct sequence of actions
“I like your scent,” he said. “Jasmine, is it?”
“Yes. Thank you.”
“Newly arrived?”
“Yes, just a month.”
“Like it?”
“I never imagined living in the Orient but here I am.”
“Oh, Claire, you should have had more imagination,” Amelia said, gesturing to a waiter bearing a tray of drinks. Claire colored. Amelia was in rare form today.
But Will only smiled. As Amelia turned away and out of earshot, he said to Claire, “I’m delighted to meet someone who’s not so jaded. All you women are so worldly it quite tires me out.”
Amelia faced them with her fresh drink. “It’s Claire’s birthday,” she said to Will. She smiled, brittle; red lipstick stained her front tooth. “She’s just a baby.”
“How nice,” he said. “We need more babies around these parts.”
The remark seemed not to interest Amelia, and she turned away again, this time to scan the crowd. In the few seconds that she did so Will reached out his hand, and very slowly tucked a strand of hair behind Claire’s ear. A possessive gesture, as if he had known her for a long time.
“Excuse me,” he said. He pulled his hand back.
“Excuse you for what?” Amelia asked, returning her attention. She looked at each of them.
“Nothing,” they both said. Claire stared down at the floor. They were joined in their collusive denial; it suddenly seemed overwhelmingly intimate.
I won’t claim to have achieved a masterly rewrite here. But in my view, even this is an improvement—it makes clear both how deliberate Will is in picking his moment so he won’t get caught, and how Claire’s awareness of his cunning heightens her sense of conspiracy. I am not disparaging the juiciness of Lee’s writing; only she could have created these characters and the delicious atmosphere they inhabit. But a good editor or teacher could have helped her make this and many other scenes even better than they are.
Exercises
Exercise 1: Find some of your favorite highly dramatic scenes from novels, short stories, or memoirs and go through them. Is the action told in or out of chronological order?
Exercise 2: Now take one or two of these scenes and deliberately move small actions around so that they occur out of order, as they do in the original version of Lee’s scene. What do you imagine the effect would be on a reader?
Exercise 3: Look at some of your own scenes and see how you handle sequence. Is the order correct, or could it be improved—and if the latter, would this make the action more dramatic?
And finally, if you don’t like my version of Lee’s scene, let me know - and let me know how you would do it differently.
My favorite ellipsis
Last night in the essays class I teach at NYU’s School of Continuing and Professional Studies, the subject of ellipses came up. In a story, an ellipsis consists of leaving something out. The “something” can be anything from a few words to entire events. Unless we are reading quite technically, we usually only notice an ellipsis when it goes wrong - when the gap seems awkward or omits information we’re looking for. But when an ellipsis goes right, especially at the level of a sentence or a phrase, it can produce prose that is wonderfully economical and far more enjoyable than if the writer had included what has been omitted.
Here is perhaps my favorite ellipsis of all, in a passage from Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby:
“Then came the war, old sport. It was a great relief, and I tried very hard to die, but I seemed to bear an enchanted life. I accepted a commission as first lieutenant when it began. In the Argonne Forest I took two machine-gun detachments so far forward that there was a half mile gap on either side of us where the infantry couldn’t advance. We stayed there two days and two nights, a hundred and thirty men with sixteen Lewis guns, and when the infantry came up at last they found the insignia of three German divisions among the piles of dead. I was promoted to be a major, and every Allied government gave me a decoration - even Montenegro, little Montenegro down on the Adriatic Sea!”
Little Montenegro! He lifted up the words and nodded at them - with his smile. The smile comprehended Montenegro’s troubled history and sympathized with the brave struggles of the Montenegrin people. It appreciated fully the chain of national circumstances which had elicited this tribute from Montenegro’s warm little heart. My incredulity was submerged in fascination now; it was like skimming hastily through a dozen magazines.
He reached in his pocket, and a piece of metal, slung on a ribbon, fell into my palm.
“That’s the one from Montenegro.”
To my astonishment, the thing had an authentic look. “Orderi de Danilo,” ran the circular legend. “Montenegro, Nicolas Rex.”
“Turn it.”
“Major Jay Gatsby,” I read, “For Valour Extraordinary.”
Fitzgerald here is like a magician on his day off, absent-mindedly pulling a pigeon from behind his ear in such a way we are convinced we merely overlooked the bird: a sleight of hand so quick and deft as to seem natural and not a trick at all.
The importance of stupidity in scientific research (and in writing)
Just heard of a neat article about why feeling stupid on a regular basis is actually a good sign if you’re doing serious scientific research. The article is by a fellow named Martin Schwartz, a professor of microbiology and biomedical engineering at the University of Virginia, and it was published in April of 2008 in The Journal of Cell Science. Here’s an excerpt:
Productive stupidity means being ignorant by choice. Focusing on important questions puts us in the awkward position of being ignorant. One of the beautiful things about science is that it allows us to bumble along, getting it wrong time after time, and feel perfectly fine as long as we learn something each time. No doubt, this can be difficult for students who are accustomed to getting the answers right. No doubt, reasonable levels of confidence and emotional resilience help, but I think scientific education might do more to ease what is a very big transition: from learning what other people once discovered to making your own discoveries. The more comfortable we become with being stupid, the deeper we will wade into the unknown and the more likely we are to make big discoveries.
What I like about this excerpt - and about the entire article - is that with a very few changes, it could be speaking of writing. Writing seriously, regularly, searchingly, means feeling stupid on a regular basis. For that matter the same applies for writing even reasonably well, at least for me. I’ve had writing students come up to me anxiously after class and say, “There must be something wrong; I find writing is terribly hard work. It takes me hours.” And I tell them, “You can relax - that’s normal.”
Among well-known writers, E.B. White and Kurt Vonnegut are known to have commented on feeling stupid at times. Joan Didion often wrote of being a trifle thick about certain things, if quick in other ways. Not bad company.
You can find the full article by Martin Schwartz here.
Updated edition available of “A Better Approach to Outlining”
If you find outlining difficult, irksome, etc., and you haven’t yet read my guide to the topic, I invite you to check out the latest edition. I’ve illustrated the differences between topic-based and point-based outlines with examples, and explained the latter technique more fully. You can find this updated edition, as well as my handy guide to using “road maps,” on the Writing Guides page.
Samuel R. Delaney and the “annealing moment” of doubt
Reading the excerpt below makes me think of how difficult yet rewarding it must be to peel and eat a durian, that strange fruit found only in southeast Asia, and guarded by not only a foul odor but a thick husk of thorns. The excerpt comes from an essay by the science fiction writer, literary critic, and teacher Samuel R. Delaney called “Of Doubts and Dreams.” It’s part of a collection of related essays by Delaney titled About Writing.
Delaney is talking in this essay about doubt - doubt as a barrier to writing anything at all, to start with; but doubt also as an aid to good writing, or more accurately to the search for good writing. In particular, he notes, cliches of both language and thought must be seen for what they are and discarded - even though they are often the first things that come to mind when we set out to write. He goes on:
The act of refusing to put down words, or crossing out words already down, while you concentrate on the vision you are writing about, makes new words come. What’s more, when you refuse language your mind offers up, something happens to the next batch offered. The words are not the same ones that would have come if you hadn’t doubted . . .
If there is a privileged moment somewhere in the arc of experience running from the first language an infant hears, through the toddler’s learning that language, to the child’s learning to read it, to the adolescent’s attempts to write journals, tales, dramas, poems - if there is a moment, rightly called creative, when the possibility of the extraordinary is shored up against the inundation of ordinary rhetoric that forms, shapes, and is the majority of what we call civilized life, it is here. This is the moment covered - in the sense of covered over - by the tautology against which so many thousands of would-be writers have stumbled: “To be a writer, you must write.” You must write not only to produce the text that is the historical verification of your having written. You must write to project yourself, again and again, through the annealing moment that provides the negentropic1 organization which makes a few texts privileged tools of perception. Without this moment, this series of moments, this concatenation of doubts about language shattered by language, the text is only a document of time passed with some paper, of time spent pondering a passage through a dream.
What wonderful yet thorny motives this passage suggests - not for why we write, but why we ought to write.
- “Negentropic,” if you’re wondering, means “characterized by a reduction in entropy, and a corresponding increase in order.” ↩
Webcast: How to develop “reader sensitivity”
In his 1985 book “How to Write Like a Pro,” magazine writer Barry Tarshis makes the following provocative statement about what it takes to be a good writer:
The most important attribute you can have as a writer is something I call “reader sensitivity.” I define reader sensitivity as an ongoing awareness of how your readers are processing and reacting to what you’ve written. It’s being able to put yourself in your reader’s shoes . . .
In accomplished writers, reader sensitivity appears to be intuitive, in the same way that some entertainers have an innate feel for how an audience is responding to their performance. But in the event this awareness is not an intuitive part of what you, as a writer, bring to writing, you are operating under an all but fatal handicap - and you will remain handicapped until you sensitize yourself to the likely response of your readers.
Reader sensitivity - part 1: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download Reader sensitivity - part 2: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download Reader sensitivity - part 3: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download Reader sensitivity - part 4: Play Now | Play in Popup | DownloadThe perils of making it up: readers “might want their money back”
Here’s a question that often comes up these days among writers and readers of nonfiction alike: Is it okay for a writer to “make things up”? Interestingly, at least one critically well-received travel writer thinks it is not only okay to make stuff up, it is essential to do so if the writer is aiming for not mere truth, but that far headier concoction, “poetic truth.”
The writer in question is Sara Wheeler, author of such travelogues as Terra Incognita: Travels in Antarctica and Travels in a Thin Country: A Journey Through Chile. She is also the author of a biography of Apsley Cherry-Garrard, the English explorer who won fame for not only being the sole survivor of Scott’s disastrous expedition to the South Pole, but for writing a stunning book about the experience, The Worst Journey in the World.
Wheeler was understandably taken with Cherry-Garrad’s morose epic, given that she had been to the same continent herself. Cherry: A Life of Apsley Cherry-Garrard came out in 2002, to excellent reviews. Two years later, writing in The Times of London, Wheeler confessed that she had, uh, well, made some things up.
How to combine thought and story in an essay
Why write a personal essay? One reason is that few other forms allow a writer to combine story and idea, action and thought; in short, to not only relate incidents from your life, but to muse about the implications.
The question is, how to do this so that it works? You might think that an easy answer would be to write a story, than divide it into scenes; then, in between the cracks of the scenes, insert your musings. Asterisks or white space or some other visual device can be used to signal the transitions. This is certainly what I thought, in making my own first attempts at thoughtful essays.
I quickly discovered that my first-draft readers found such conglomerations hard to read. They didn’t see how the stories connected to the ideas, and worse, they found the story portions aimless and boring: “I couldn’t understand where the story was going or why I was reading it.”
For a long while I didn’t understand why this was. I had labored to select just the right events to make up my scenes, and I had described these events as well as I knew how. My readers constantly told me I was a “good” writer, a clever writer, the essays were “well-written,” and so on. So what was the problem?
“Capital Campaigns” by Andrea Kihlstedt is now out in a 3rd edition
Around this time last year, I had the pleasure of working for several months with nonprofit consultant, trainer, and fundraising specialist Andrea Kihlstedt on the third edition of her book, Capital Campaigns: Strategies That Work.
When we first got together, Andrea showed me a copy of the second edition. Being familiar from visits to the Foundation Center in New York City with the existing literature on fundraising, I knew at once the book was good: unusually authoritative, and also unusually practical. Andrea told me she didn’t want to just update the content - she wanted to make it more readable as well. She’d surveyed clients who relied on the book, and the only negatives they had reported were that some of the chapters seemed long, and the prose a little intimidating.
Andrea had gotten her publisher to agree to a friendlier, more modern layout for the new edition. That by itself would be a help. She also hoped to make chapters shorter by passing drafts to me as she completed them, so that I could recommend cuts. Beyond that, she asked, did I have any other suggestions to improve readability? In fact I did. Based on a close analysis of several chapters, I came up with some simple recommendations she could use while revising.
For writing memoirs - to be or not to be a camera?
If you’re writing a memoir, you must decide from the outset: do you want to be a camera, or a person?
If you’re a camera, you’ll see everything that happened and relay it to your readers in great detail - but you’ll feel nothing and admit nothing. This will allow you to make your version of events and people as crazy as you like, without taking responsibility for your own involvement, either back then or now.
If you’re a person, on the other hand, you’ll have to admit that yes, you participated actively in your life: you not only saw what went on, but you made decisions, you had choices. This will apply not only to the story of back then, but to the here-and-now, where you as the flesh-and-blood writer have feelings and thoughts and opinions about what you’re telling us.
