Whole words, whole sight

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

Revised version for correct sequence of actions

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.

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:

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.

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.

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.

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:

What wonderful yet thorny motives this passage suggests - not for why we write, but why we ought to write.

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:

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 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 | Download

Published in Hudson Valley Magazine, September 2009

Twice a month each summer, a small walking tour comes to a halt on the dirt road outside the cabin where I live at the Byrdcliffe Art Colony in Woodstock. A dozen or so persons with little maps in their hands listen as the guide speaks, gesturing now and then in my direction. I can’t quite hear what she’s saying, but I’m sure she’s mentioning the name of my cabin, Quartette, and adding that like the rest of the colony, this low little building was built in 1903 or thereabouts and is therefore historic.

I am invisible behind my window, I know. And as I sit there, looking at all these people looking back at me but not seeing me, I find myself wondering about this veneration of an official past. I have lived at Byrdcliffe each summer for nine years, and it seems to me that not only myself but my neighbors, who like me have foolishly persisted in trying to be artists and writers, inhabit a reality undocumented by historians. It is a fragile reality, but alive — as beautifully ugly as a chicken-of-the-woods fungus growing on the bole of a tree. And you can’t press a fungus into a history book without killing it.

To read more, download the PDF.

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.

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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?

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