How it’s going: It’s Sunday! It’s actually Sunday #3. So there’s that.
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Check List:
Writing prep – x
Writing – in progress
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Revision – o
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Monthly Archives: April 2020
Mistake 7: Three Levels of “About”
Every story that sticks with you has the same three layers. The first layer is the story the character is living. This action layer has the plot problem, the real world, face-to-face, the antagonist and protagonist locked in struggle. This layer is the action and reaction.
The second layer is the inner journey of the character as influenced by the antagonist (or any cast member, really), subplot, secondary theme. It’s the one taking place inside the character’s head, the layer where we watch this person become someone new by the last page.
The third layer is the one where you say something about the world or the reader or the way the reader sees the world. This is the theme layer, the crawls-under-your-skin layer, the connection to the conversation happening in books and media and world events outside of the world in the story.
Without that third layer, you can still have a story. I had a story. I had things that happened and a character that realized he needed to change and the change that he made. And when you finished reading, it all went away.
One of the genres that does the third layer best is horror. Really good, crawl into your skull, and whisper hello, weeks after the fact, horror. Take Hereditary, which is about witchcraft, but also saying something about families, and well trod paths and those unavoidable destinies. Scary Stories To Tell in the Dark (movie version) had a horror story around each character such that the ending of each story was truly delightfully frightening.
I didn’t understand the third layer of story until I read Lisa Cron’s works, Wired for Story and Story Genius. Though the example story she develops is a little Hallmark (in Story Genius), there’s a reason Hallmark sells. And the concepts are easily illustrated so that you can apply them to your own work, big or small.
So about 22 drafts in, I had a character. I had a supporting cast. I had a villain and a couple antagonists and a wider world. And it didn’t mean anything. I hadn’t truly nailed down the why of the story and how that why fit into the world I live in.
You ever see Buffy? I am devastated to declare that it’s a classic, because I am now old enough to call things I saw as a teenager “classics”. Sure, she’s the chosen one. In the world of Buffy, it means she protects humanity from evil monsters. But what if your hunting territory is much smaller? And no one can leave? Then we would call your territory a prison. And the chosen ones serve an entirely different purpose. That wasn’t the third layer. The third layer went a little something like: if you are going to play a game, forced or not, and you play against the gamemakers, can you ever truly win? Can you dismantle the system once you’re inside of it? Once you win enough to make real change, you’re a part of the system. And that makes you part of the problem.
Voice: Covers
I thought Dr. Dog did “Heart It Races” and then some other band covered it. That band was Helsinki Architecture, which earned mad points for the name alone. It turns out, Helsinki Architecture came up with this eerie beat laden ballad and later, a folk type band covered it.
Covers are the greatest way to completely change the meaning of a song without altering a single word. When Hozier does Beyonce, it’s very much Hozier. I’m still wrapped in flannel, my toes digging into the soil of the forest as I wait for dawn, even though I know this should be an anthem as Beyonce presented it.
Sometimes covers can be controversial. Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive” is an anthem of the domestic abuse victim as survivor and don’t you damn well forget it. But when Cake took a stab, their signature spoken word and sort of singing took a triumphant victory and turned it into something else. I have a theory that these songs can be sung by the same person, just at different times in their fight. At some point, you are victorious over your abuser, apart and whole and changed and alive. But at some point before that, you are trying to get up the courage to walk out that door. To change the locks. To get up off the floor. Both viewpoints are necessary. Neither one is better. Just different.
You have at some point written a story. You have perhaps not realized that you were the only person in the whole entire universe who could have written this story at this time as this person that you are. Were. Point being, sometimes people do things differently. You weren’t telling the same story. You were talking about the same thing from different angles. Neither one is better. Both are necessary.
Community: Nanowrimo
One of the craziest ways to get a novel on the page and existing in the real world is to participate in Nanowrimo. I would not have survived all the way through grad school without it.
Just before the bottom dropped out of the economy, I was quietly flitting through grad school in a foreign country, talking to no one I didn’t live with and quietly fading into my own shadow. I had attempted National Novel Writing Month before – and failed horribly. This time, I had no social obligations, I had a lot of studying to do, but I also had nothing left to keep me going outside of textbooks and tests. Deep in my soul, I was bored.
Part of Nanowrimo is attending write-ins, getting together with your local writing community, and meeting people who are just as strange as you. After all, you’ve all promised to write 50,000 words in only 30 days.
We met in Leeds, in York, on the train and in the rain and in cafes and in tiny little alleyways that had existed since before running water came to that part of England. It was magical. It was wild. I created utter crap. It was great.
I have done Nanowrimo nearly every year since and while I created several book-shaped objects, it was also what prompted me to dust off my very first failed project and to try again. That was draft 2, and a few other drafts. More importantly, the writing community in Nanowrimo has consistently been the same type of wild, creative, welcoming energy that promises yes, you can do this. Whatever this is.
They will help you gag your inner editor, they will help you work out that one detail, they will pick you up and kick you in the butt when you’ve spent the last ten minutes starting at a blinking cursor. We’ve all read those essays and articles about how writing is solitary. It exists just passed the door of your mind, a door through which only you can enter. They can’t turn the knob or help you push it open; but they can help kick you through it. If you haven’t yet, I highly recommend looking up the Nanowrimo website.
Titles: How I Live Now
Meg Rosoff’s How I Live Now sounds not a whole lot like her. When she’s onstage, she has a presence and voice that fills up the room and all the little spaces in your skull. But the protagonist of How I Live Now is a fifteen-year-old bad-attitude madly-in-love girl who fills up only her own space. Much of the work –
Massive spoilers
Is filled with the feeling of dirt and death and decay, even before the invasion. There is a sense of a dissolution of a life as she falls in love and the sense of a family unit breaking down when the siblings begin to fracture over whether they should go with the army, bunker down, or strike out on their own.
When I think of this book I think of scenes from war films, largely WWI, of brown and green and hot, bloody red, and blackened corpses. Then, all the way at the end of the novel, there is a single sentence where the color changes to white. White, cold light. It is a scene where the girl reunites with her lover and they come together, not clinging to the past they have lost, but coming together in the now.
From a reader perspective, that sentence is an immense payoff – especially if you read the book in one sitting. If you haven’t already, I’d put it on your to read list, somewhere near the top. It’s good.
I’m a fan of titles that add to the work and aren’t necessarily spoken within the work. Something that adds a whole new dimension, over and over again every time you read it with new eyes.
Time: Short Story
The best short stories have been the shortest. Even the short stories that take pages and pages to tell feel short in my memory, and in the way I can encapsulate their meaning to myself later when the work is not in front of me.
The usual advice is to start a short story as close to the ending as possible. It’s similar to a scene in a novel and though a short story may have multiple scenes, it should begin as close to the eureka moment of the epiphany as possible. Or, depending on genre, the uh-oh moment.
Neil Gaiman’s postcard story fills the same space in my mind as Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard To Find” – though one of these took a decade and a TV show to understand. If you’re having issues with O’Connor’s short story, watch Netflix’s Longmire series. Also read the books, they’re great, but watch the show. Just, the whole thing. The explanation happens during the investigation into a murder of a main character but that’s all I’ll say about it.
Ted Chiang’s short stories, including the short that became the movie The Arrival, may take entire evenings to read. When I think back to any particular one, though, what I remember most is the revelation.
As with any consideration of time and structure choice – whether you should be writing a novel, short story, or poem – remember that all of these has a epiphany. You don’t get to pick the epiphany, the reader does that, and it won’t be the same one for everybody. But some epiphanies can happen in an instant, and some need a running start to get there.
Talking to Yourself: Mo Haydr
I first stumbled on Mo Haydr’s works when I was a poor, broke grad student haunting the local library in Leeds. My favorite sections were horror and crime, and Haydr’s work settled comfortably in both. One of the first books I read was Pig Island which made me, as a reader, pretty mad. I could respect what she was saying with the plot, but I could also respect that I had checked out a library book and could just shove it back in the return bin without remorse.
Years later, I read Wolf. It took the underlying young woman protagonist arc that was first mapped in Pig Island and said, well, yes, but what if the other characters did something a little differently? It was a good book on its own, but a fantastic counterpart to Pig Island. Even if I weren’t already a fan, as a writer I could really get behind the conversation taking place between the two works.
How freeing! To be able to have both timelines, the present and of course, the darkest timeline. Or perhaps, in creating a response timeline you may find you were already in the darkest timeline. In writing complete worlds, we aren’t bound to characters talking to each other. The entire structure of our universes unfold in new and different ways with a single, “But what if I did it a little differently this time.” Perhaps you learn that you have grown optimistic in aging or perhaps the person you become takes the patina of age as whatever the opposite of rose-colored glasses might be.
You can’t respond to yourself unless you’ve said something in the first place.
Rhythm: The Stop
Gilmore Girls’ actress, Alexis Bledsoe, once talked about doing tongue twisters to practice for the high-paced chatter style of Amy Pace’s drama.
I typed that whole sentence off the top of my head. I really enjoyed Gilmore Girls while it ran on TV for a few reasons. My mom and I could watch something that wasn’t Murder She Wrote for the Third Time and it had enough angst to soothe my tortured teenage soul.
Years later, I caught the same affected rhythm in Life, starring Damien Lewis, a couple other great people, and a kickass ending that turned the show from a deep think mystery into an incredible character study.
It isn’t the rapid-fire back and forth that makes you sit up and listen to the characters in either show. It’s the sudden stop. That space is the impactful moment.
Consider Barns Courtney’s “99” if you don’t feel like watching roughly 7 seasons (all-together for Gilmore Girls and Life combined, minus the new Gilmore Girls. This could have been a footnote) of television. It slaps, but the neat parts are where the sound ceases and we continue into the next rollicking phrase.
The rapidfire exchange in prose has a different sudden stop. Either the long winding sentences have a sudden short interjection, or the short staccato style sentences give way suddenly to a long, winding, run-on sentence of effervescent vowels and sibilant consonants.
Consider, also, a helpless passenger in a getaway vehicle on a hilly road. Sometimes the impact is when you hit the ground; sometimes it’s when you launch into the air.
Setting: Geography Determines the Winner
If ever there is a battle with the word “hill” in it, know that the winner had the high ground. Or the line of sight to the enemy, or otherwise used the rolling downward momentum to destroy.
When I was in eighth grade, we all took US History from a retired green beret – long story – who would periodically tell us stories that we would have to determine were true or not. That part doesn’t matter. The part that does is that his motto was: geography determines the winner.
Who has clean water?
Who has the roads to carry food to the forces?
Who has the high ground to see the enemy?
Who has the fortress with the underground streams?
Who has the fortress with no secret tunnels to get food in a time of siege?
Who has owns the getaway route?
Who locks the door of the murder house?
Who has the better geography?
Because that person is going to be the winner, unless you take very careful steps as the creator. And the winner determines how the story is told.
Practice: Copy Style
Somewhere in college I had a very earnest travel literature teacher. He was actually pretty good; terribly enthusiastic about Mark Twain as we all should be, and as happy to talk about the world the authors lived in as he was to talk about their works.
One day, he talked to us about writing. One part of understanding travel literature or literature in general is understanding how that literature is created.
He recommended getting a notebook and hand writing a paragraph or two from a famous author, just to feel how the words came out of the pen. Do a page each day for a year and you will develop your own style.
What you’ll actually get is a keen understanding of other people’s styles. Try this instead. Get a notebook and write a paragraph of someone else’s work. Then try your own work in their style. Did you say enough? Did you say too little? How does the punctuation feel? Are you inspired to continue?
By practicing your words in another style you get incrementally closer to finding the one that pours forth and sounds irrevocably like the voice in your head when no others are speaking.
If this one doesn’t sound quite right, turn the page. Try again.
I didn’t keep it up for a year. I hit the normals like Hemingway and Shakespeare, and the not quite normals like Amy Tan, John Steinbeck. For a little while, I was terribly studious of the micro style. The comma placement, the sentence length, the rhetorical questions. It wasn’t until I turn to the macro style – the living setting, the satirical description, the single sentence reveal that upends the universe – that I discovered how to say what I was trying to say.
The comma placement in Steve Martin’s Pleasure of My Company told me less than the slight handful of sentences that revealed the core of the character. The short and devastatingly sensorial re-visitations of a single location in Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, the earnest and bombastic humor in Terry Pratchett and Mark Twain, the intertwining of physics and magic in Diane Duane’s Young Wizard series gave me permission. I could say what I wanted to say, the way I wanted to say it.