When NOT to Connect the Dots
One of the joys of a Netflix account these days is the ability to re-discover old, beloved television. I’m a bit of an old fogey when it comes to the media I enjoy; I grew up listening to motown with my mom, and watching Nick at Nite, so I know more about I Dream of Jeannie than whatever was on MTV when I was a teenager. One old television show I’m happy to be re-watching is The Wonder Years. It’s a classic show that often beautifully taps into the experience of growing up and facing a large and frightening world, particularly during a time of fracture and conflict (the show is set during the 1960′s).
As much as I love the Wonder Years, though, I also love to use it as an example for what NOT to do when write a short story or novel. What works in the framework of a half hour television show — a framework in which we often expect strong, clear emotional setups and sentimentality — often falls flat in writing. A teacher of mine called this problem “The Wonder Years” syndrome.
Here’s the setup: you’ve managed to pull your characters into a nice juicy conflict and given them a great payoff. The action has come together into a nice, poignant moment. And then, you ruin it. You step in with a large heavy-handed voice-over and connect the dots for the audience, telling them exactly what it is they’re seeing, what it means, and how it is significant in the larger picture. If you’re familiar with the show, you’ll know that this sounds familiar; at the end of some great bit of poignant action, the voice-over will come in and wrap everything up tidily, telling you what everything means.
After the jump: how to resist the syndrome.
Too many roads in a novel
can lead to chaos.
When you’re writing a novel, there are many ways that you’ve simply got to cut out the clamor in your life and focus on what’s important. You’ve got to turn off the radio, close your email program, close the door to pets, kids, and spouses, and even turn down invitations to parties once in a while. All of these are important ways to reduce the cacophony in the world and focus on your novel.
But what about the clamor in your novel?
Being in the thick of writing a novel is a very exciting time. In many ways, it feels like all the worthy thoughts you’ve had thus far in life, all the astute observations you’ve made or odd characters you’ve encountered, can now finally find the perfect outlet in your large, ambitious work. In the draft and note-taking stages of novel, it’s easy to use your novel as a kind of “drop box” or catchall for everything writerly you’ve been saving up.
The result is chaos and clamor.
If you throw everything but the kitchen sink at your novel, you’ll end up with a snarl of wires, a bird’s nest, an orchestra with everyone playing different songs at once. It won’t be pretty. But the urge to add simply everything — a murder plot, a complicated family, many flashbacks, multiple converging storylines, a political scandal — remains tempting.
After the jump: why we can’t resist the clamor — and how to cut it out.
In this week’s mailbag, I’m tackling comments on my post wondering whether books should be social, as well as my post discussing how to plug into a new world, whether it’s a fantasy world of your own making or just a different sort of experience. Let’s see what readers had to say!
In response to “Should Books Be Social?”, J said:
Um, I never thought about that. Goodreads on the contrary is where I met my “tribes”. There are lots of groups dedicated to “trashy” books you can join. You won’t be judged. If you are self conscious you can create several accounts and have one for your book snobs friends and one for your guilty pleasures. I read all over the map, respected books and trash but I have no shame so I keep everything in one account.
Thanks, J. I love the prospect of a community that judges a little less and simply enjoys the wonderful pastime that is reading; but this fracturing you suggest into separate accounts is precisely what I’m worried about. Who has the time to separate oneself into all of these different selves? I like the enthusiasm and community behind Goodreads — I just think many online social networking sites end up making us perform our lives rather than live them.
mary said:
Anyway, GR sounds like a goldmine to me. As it is, I turn only to my county library for monthly ‘picks’ of good books in various genres. But they are quite good at giving you several reviews from Booklist, etc. Plus, they always say: “if you like such & such an author, you’ll probably like this.” And those quiet little librarians can have pretty out there tastes, too.
It never occurred to me Book Snobs existed, but of course they must–it’s human nature (though I do not believe any person has finished “Infinite Jest” except maybe its late author. I know that NO one has honestly read “Pale King” all the way through–and I am a CPA who prepared tax returns for decades ’cause I LIKED doing them!
Definitely, the algorithms that sites like Goodreads and Netflix offer are truly useful and downright revolutionary — they allow you to enter the collective brain of millions of people and extract recommendations uniquely tailored to what you’ve liked. I’ve appreciated Goodreads’ recommendation feature greatly.
And I have finished The Pale King, mary, or what exists of it — though of course, it is itself unfinished!
After the jump: more comments, more responses.
Some stories are meant to be rough roads.
Don’t apologize for them.
I love writing workshops. I’m an unashamed supporter of them; they give us accountability, which is what really helps me turn out work, and they give us fellow writers to talk writing with. I could go on all day about writing workshops, and I’ve written about them a lot in the past.
That said, workshops aren’t perfect. One problem with them is that they tend to encourage a certain kind of writing. The readers and students in a workshop have a lot on their plates; they tend to support the stories that are the most sensational or entertaining. They would rather smooth out all the interesting rough edges of an experimental or heavy work, and laugh or be pulled in by the sure entertainment of a page-turner.
Nothing’s wrong with writing entertainingly; I’m all for it! But it does mean that other kinds of work have a harder time surviving. Some writing is designed to give the reader a rollicking good time; some is designed to ask tough questions, to challenge us as readers and as people, and to take us on spiritual or emotional journeys. These books are not always the easiest to read, or the best-suited for breaking into digestible, workshop-sized pieces. But that doesn’t make the writing any less necessary.
After the jump: choosing what your story will do.
It’s time to draw a line in the sand —
do you want to create, or sell?
The blogosphere is full of writing websites these days. There are blogs that will tell you about writing grammatically; there are blogs that will tell you how to write English if you’re an English language learner; there are blogs that discuss the literary world and its politics. Overwhelmingly, though, there are blogs that tell you how to make money from your writing.
They talk about the money-making opportunities in copywriting, in proofreading, in commercial blogging, and in ebooks. These blogs are well and good, and I’m not judging them for having a different goal than this blog and for aiming for that goal (often very well and informatively). The effect of this overwhelming number of writing blogs about money-making, however, is that it’s creating a culture of writing as profession compared to writing as passion. If writing is your passion, then I do believe you can make money from it; but somewhere along the line, you’re going to have to choose what your primary goal is, and which takes priority.
What Does a Passion for Writing Mean?
The blogs out there will probably hasten to tell you that you don’t have to choose. You can have fun and make a profit, they’ll tell you. Just follow these steps. First, spend most of your time developing contacts and advertising yourself. Get on these social networks. Oh, and remember to write something once in a while.
The problem with this focus is that if passion doesn’t come first, it’s pretty much nowhere. Writing primarily as a money-making venture or a career-builder is missing something. It’s missing the times of quiet and solitude that writing creatively requires. It’s missing the agony, anguish, and fear of rejection. It’s missing the anxious scratching out, the crumpled papers, the miserable rejected files lurking in your computer’s trash. It’s missing the calm joy that can come from writing something that is just right, or the feeling that you have something to say that no one else can say as well.
After the jump: the difference, and making your choice.
How Much Does Talent Matter?
When it comes to the debate among writers about whether talent or hard work is more important, most people will say at first that there’s no substitute for work ethic. But after that initial comment, you’ll hear some conflicting views. Deep down, many of us are still biased toward the idea that raw talent — something you’re born with — is really what matters. Talent, the innate ability or proclivity toward doing something well, has a powerful draw for us as artists. We want to feel that we’re special, that we have some birthright that makes us naturally entitled to be artists. That’s why writers are often the people who end up defending the idea of talent the most.
But how much does talent matter? Are we writers born and not made? We hear stories about people like Keats composing some of the greatest works in the English language in his early twenties, and we begin to wonder if we can learn to be great, or if it can only be encoded in our genes. We can certainly improve our writing through hard work and thought, but is there a glass ceiling, an innate limit to how high we can go?
After the jump: my take on talent.
This week has some nicely contrasting posts to comment on. First I’m responding to comments about sinking your teeth into your writing, and then I’ll talk about my disgruntled article on the New Yorker review of IKEA furniture. Lots to do, and lots to say, so let’s get to it!
Jonna said:
Giving this kind of detail and attention to your writing does not only add to your work and make it better for other people read but using emotion can make you want to write more because now there is more behind the writing than just words there is connection to the writers emotions as well.
Good point, Jonna, and one that I didn’t think of! If the writer is more emotionally engaged in the work, she’s far more likely to see it through to the end, and give it the treatment worthy of her emotional attachment to it.
mary writes about another writer’s experience:
With the help of one good teacher, he discovered the secret: conflict. Not only that, but BIG exciting conflict. The hero must need/want something but must go through obstacles to get it. And the more the stakes are raised by things like violence, anger, betrayal, etc., the more you access the emotional excitement you’re talking about.
When he felt a story flagging, he went back to his pages & forced himself to pinpoint conflict/obstacles. If they weren’t there, he rewrote the pages and included these features.
It’s amazing how simple the recipe can be in an exciting story, and yet how often we shy away from those simple ingredients! People aiming for literary fiction in particular often avoid the very things that make stories interesting, as though they’re embarrassed to have more plot than meta-drama. We can all take a lesson from potboiler fiction and throw some conflict into the stew.
After the jump: more comments, more responses.
If you’re writing a novel, you’re probably getting a lot of questions about it from friends, loved ones, neighbors, coworkers, and just about anyone else you run into. These people are well-meaning; they are interested in what you’re working on, and they’re probably curious about the writing process, not being writers themselves. But for someone like myself who guards her novel-writing process carefully, mentioning the novel can seem like opening a big can of worms. For those of you being plagued by questions about your novel, here are a few tips for surviving the most common questions likely to dog your steps in the coming months.
What’s it about?
This will be the first, the most common, and the most difficult to answer question. I always find this question a little depressing to answer; the minute my one-sentence explanation leaves my mouth, I realize what a small, pathetic, and silly topic it really is, and I’m left wondering why I would want to write a novel about that in the first place.
How to deal
It’s up to you whether you want to answer this fully or not. Novel-writing is an intensely private process and I frankly believe that being asked about the topic can seem a little pushy, as though you are being asked about your religious beliefs and practices. Few non-writers realize how invasive the question can seem, however, so be tolerant. Answer politely that you’re not sure yourself, or that it’s vaguely about the place in which it’s based. Don’t feel pressured to justify the novel’s existence and explain why it’s a revelatory topic.
After the jump: more questions you’re sure to be faced with.
When to Stop Reading
I’m about to offer a shocking piece of advice: stop reading. Drop that book you’ve got open right now. Put down that cozy Austen novel you’ve read twenty times; push away the latest cutting-edge collection of short stories. Reading is valuable, delightful, crucial, essential to the writing life; but there’s a time when it has to stop.
For writers, reading can be our favorite way of procrastinating. It feels so delicious because it doesn’t feel like wasting time, and so often it isn’t. “I’m improving my writing skills,” we’ll tell ourselves when we’re curling up with a book instead of thinking about our own writing. “I’m learning about plot movements and character development.” Doesn’t it feel good to get something done, even if it isn’t the thing that really needs to get done?
Now, though, with the start of a bright new year, it’s time to put reading back in its place and push writing to the top of the heap. Here are a few ways to keep reading where it belongs.
1. Read what helps your writing only.
There are plenty of big old classic novels I’ve been meaning to read, as well as some lighter fare. But neither of these types of writing are what I’m particularly interested in writing. To keep your reading productive, choose wisely; read things that you think will be related to the work you want to do. If you’re writing short stories, read some short stories! If you’re writing about a historical event, only read about that historical event. If you’re writing about a particular religion or culture, read about that religion or culture. Now isn’t the time for that beach read or that dusty tome you’ve been meaning to plow through for months.
After the jump: more ways to keep reading in its place.
It’s a new year, writers! I hope you’re as excited as I am to fill your year with creative thinking, reading, writing, and living. For the first review of the year, I’d like to do a quick survey of some of the products from the past. If you’re going to be a writer, you’ll need some basic, essential tools. The good news is that unlike other art forms like painting or dancing or heavy-metal collage, you don’t need a tremendous amount of materials or startup capital. All you really need is an open mind, a keen eye, and an ear for language. But to make the writing experience more pleasurable and productive, here are a few things that might sweeten the deal a bit.
Some basic writing software: Ommwriter
As I wrote about Ommwriter earlier this year, Ommwriter doesn’t just want to give you a black screen, which I often find to create little haloes around the too-bright text. It wants to give you a more immersive writing experience that even feels fairly Zen. Open Ommwriter and you’ll be presented with a soothingly blank landscape of a snow field with a single tree in the corner. The rest of the screen is a simple text field for you to type, undistracted. That’s not the only feature Ommwriter has, however. On the right are a series of buttons to help customize your focused writing experience. You can have your typing make sounds like a typewriter if you like the productive click-clack of letters going on the page. You can even include soothing sound effect loops of wind chimes or soft throbbing beats.
After the jump: more of the best writing tools I came across this year.
