The Other Side of Writing

A lot of space on this blog has been dedicated to writing the Great American Novel, to perfecting your poetry, or to making your writing as appealing as possible for your reading audience. I do this because, in my experience, a lot of people want to take their writing up a few notches, preferably to a level where they can get it published or at least read by a larger audience. They want to know all the tricks of the trade for bringing something out to the public; writing a story that plenty of people will want to read and will enjoy reading. This is an admirable goal and one worth pursuing. However, now and then I recognize that a lot of people want to develop their writing for more personal reasons. They are not as interested in the New York Times Bestseller List as they are in making their story real. This requires some special tools indeed.

Now, what actually is, "making their story real"? Well, I have seen plenty of people get into writing as a form of self-help. They write their stories as a therapeutic process, putting their stories onto the page as a way of interpreting past events, relationships, traumas, and any point in between. I have known more than a few recovering addicts who turned to writing as a way of identifying and dissecting the pathology of their own compulsions and internal drives to better understand themselves and what they must confront. And indeed, there are a number of prison programs that get inmates to write about their past to better understand why they ended up on the wrong side of the bars. This requires a different kind of writing than all the talk about narrative and subtext. While in these cases, grammar and such aren't very important, in some ways it is much more difficult.

To "make a story real" requires a willingness to to write things down that you might not dare say out loud because hearing such things makes them real. Putting terrible experiences onto paper is a very effective way of purging pain from the system, but it's only the first step. Real creation requires more than just listing the events that occurred - that's the reporting side of writing. A story becomes real when we write about our feelings of the event. If we did something terrible, what drove us down that road? If we fell victim to someone else, what feelings swirled through us in that moment? After that moment? The next day? Events happen all the time, but they become real when we discuss how we, as humans, participated in them. Even if we existed in a state of shock, understanding that moment is just as important as any other.

Of late, I've done some writing about an accident I was in as a teenager. I've written about it before, but looking back on those earlier works, I defused the feelings by stepping around the trauma of it all. Just the fact that I wrote about it at all was a great first step, but the more I felt secure enough to let my mind swim deeper into the trauma of that moment, the more I discovered about my unresolved feelings from that moment nearly 40 years ago. 

Now I write about it, and I can feel the numbness, the shock going through my mind as I tried to figure out whether I was alive. It's easier now to express what it felt like to go stumbling into the foggy night, bloody and sore, trying to find another person, a house, a phone. How my eyes transfixed on a porchlight and I staggered toward it like a beacon of sanctuary, all my pain subsiding as I placed my energy toward reaching that one porchlight. I buried all my feelings in the name of survival and forced myself to reach that porch and get help - there was no other way to do things. And having written that, I now recognize how I often bury my feelings during stressful times in order to survive, and all that trauma is something I can identify now.

Will it be a novel? A bestseller? An epic poem? Not a chance. But I dug into those feelings, piece by piece, writing about each one until I understood it. It required patience, a little bit of pain, and a good amount of faith, but writing about my feelings and asking myself constantly, "How did I feel about this?" got me somewhere special. Maybe someone will read the final product, maybe not. But It is, by far, the most important writing I ever did - so who cares if anyone reads it?     

Character versus caricature

In most stories, we know enough about the main character to portray them in a way the reader can understand. We should know what they basically look like, their basic height and weight, and any stand-out features they might have - a limp, freakishly large hands, eyes of different colors, etc. Once I lay out these details, I have the basic character - the 5'11", 220-pound, brown-haired, blue-eyed, balding guy with a shuffle to his step and evidence of a history of broken noses. He is drawn-out. He exists. He is real.

And frankly, he is boring.

Boring? Not the best way to describe a main character (and since this is also a bang-on description of me, it's definitely an unusual choice). I mean, there's nothing wrong with that description, and it is something the reader can immediately understand. However, the description is little more than a report about the character's appearance. None of that description really does anything, and in this regard, it's boring - not the best main character to have.

Now, am I suggesting that a main character, therefore, has to be 6'9", a svelte 310 pounds, freakishly blond hair with black streaks, red eyes and a brutal scar across his cheeks? Well, you would remember that visual, but that character might not fit the story very well, especially if the story was about a middle-aged writer contending with his mortality. Rather, you need to take the elements of the character and make them stand out in a memorable way, so that the 5'10" person has a more engaging description. One way to do this is to think of the old art of the caricature.

We think of the usual caricature as something we get from some guy with an easel out on Navy Pier. For $10 he draws a real exaggerated sketch of you, making a few features stand out dramatically. The portrait of you usually includes having your head's proportion to your body similar to Charlie Brown, your expression expanded to utter joy, merriment, or something else incredibly positive, and usually posed with some dramatic gesture or with a prop as oversized as your now-humongous head. It works; it makes a statement and you get a chuckle out of it. However, the important part is that you remember those key exaggerated points.

A character should be no different in their description, even if they retain normal human body proportions. Look at our writer example. Describing him as 5'11" is accurate but clinical; making him "a boringly average height" loses the detail but adds to the dimension of the character. Instead of citing his weight, suggest he "could afford to miss a few meals" and now the reader starts painting his own picture. Is he balding, or are the last few proud follicles of a once-proud head of thick brown hair stuck on his broadening scalp in a desperate comb-over? Do we need to state he has a limp, or is it better to mention this as a part of his actions? "He walked to the deli, his left leg slow to keep up" gives description as an action, keeping the story moving while offering the reader details along the way. 

These tricks take a boring -looking character and make them interesting in the sense that they have depth and dimension. If you want to make your character stand out with freakish height or other aspects, well, that's your call. However, even with a stand-out character, they become recognizable when their description is emphasized and engaged with, even exaggerated, to make the point stand out. They don't need to be fully-misshapen caricatures, but emphasizing their key points will connect the reader to even the most boring middle-aged writer.      

Should Heroes Fail?

If there's one common theme of the human experience, it is that people love the success story. Whether it is someone rising up from nothing to take on the world, or overcoming the seemingly unconquerable and achieving their goal, people eat that up. We hear those stories, read about them, watch them on the screen, and a part of us lives out that dream. It gives us a rush, knowing that anything is possible, and everything under the sun can occur if we just press on. We don't get that rush from stories of failure, we get it from victory.

However, if this is the way to go, why do people write stories where the protagonist falls short? Fails to reach their goal? Loses the girl? Dies? What's up with that? I'm not sure if this is breaking news, but most everyone has had a romantic relationship fail - why would they want to read about it? Sorry, but been there, done that, wrote a book on it (literally). And yet for some reason, there we are, talking about plenty of books that end tragically. Also worth noting - plenty of them are actually pretty good. So how does that work out, and what's the catch?

The first thing I like to bring up is defining what a hero actually is, at least in a literary sense. The hero - preferably a good or admirable person but this is not mandatory - is someone who steps up to adventure beyond their known world and into the risk of the unknown. This could be the dashing knight setting off to slay a terrible dragon, or a young country bumpkin seeking their fame in New York City - whichever the case, it is someone taking on the so-called "Hero's Journey" and ultimately driving the plot of any story. Whether they are willing or reluctant, their cause noble or selfish, they go into the unknown and face the many obstacles awaiting. 

Now, why did I go on about the whole hero definition? The hero is the reader's anchor to this story, and that connection is what makes the hero's experience important - because the reader is living out that adventure as well. However, a very important thing happens along this way - the hero changes. The events and obstacles along the way give that hero the opportunity to learn and even grow, and as this progresses, there's every chance they start seeing the world differently - perhaps even realizing their beliefs at the beginning were misguided. The dashing knight might discover the terrible dragon is not terrible at all, but is being manipulated by a far greater danger. Perhaps our young bumpkin sees how the big city might not be the place of dreams anymore. Now there's a real problem - the conflict between pursuing a goal and learning about something greater.

In this regard, plenty of heroes fail at their initial mission. The knight leaves the dragon alone to vanquish the greater evil, and maybe dies in the process but does so having first spread this truth to other people. The bumpkin goes back to home in the country, putting up with everyone's taunts of failure but knowing the simple is the most genuine way to live. Did they fail? Technically, yes. Did they grow? Definitely. And in plenty of ways, the satisfaction of knowing our hero ultimately did the right thing in the end, perhaps even costing them their life, is just as good as a story about someone's success.

Of course, growth and success is even better as far as stories go. If the hero lives on for the sequel, that's great (and potentially a franchise). However, never be afraid to explore the possibility of failure, and what it can offer the reader in terms of telling a genuine story.       

The Between-Draft Lessons

Yes, I talk quite a bit about how writers should, above everything else, write things. This is what they do, so do it - worry about the edits later. In my last post, I really went on about how easy it is to get distracted by editing, revising, perfecting, etc., and how it really takes us out of the actual creative mind. Therefore, I felt it was important to offer a few notes on when we should be doing the non-writing stuff, and how we should commit to it. It's not as difficult as it may sound, but it's an important part of developing the personal process.

Most of us know the different stages of our writing drafts. Starting with notes, we create a rough draft, a second draft, then an endless series of further drafts, followed by a final product (in theory). Each one of these drafts holds a special role: the first one is solely to create - the committing of an idea to paper. The second draft is hammering out broad problems - PoV changes, weak characters, missing/necessary scenes, and plugging up plot holes. By the end of the second draft, we know what characters we need, their purpose, how they interact, and the main plot arc. Subsequent drafts become waves of clean-up - fixing contradictions, filling in weak descriptions, and side-plots. Any draft after that should be polish - making the characters stand out, tweaking dialogue, putting in jokes or other asides, and fine-tuning the critical turns in the plot. At that point, you do the grammar/spelling/punctuation check-up, weed out unnecessary words, then put a bow on it. This is how it should be done - but this doesn't discuss the space between.

In my experience, both as a writer and as a person who has talked with writers, when creating the first draft and even when working the second draft, something happens other than typing; learning. By the end of a draft, plenty of writers discover more about their story and their characters that might never have occurred when they started writing. It is as if the events and personalities evolve as that draft is being created, all while the story unfolds. This is great, but this demands that after the draft is finished, the writer would serve their work best by taking an interim step between drafts and think about what happened.

Just as every story is a journey and a character should grow in the process, the author should go through the same metamorphosis. Once a draft is completed, the writer should take some time to contemplate what they learned about the characters through the act of creation, and whether they discovered something fascinating about them. After the first draft, take some time to think about that journey, and whether it feels genuine. If you don't understand the character's growth, you might be missing some important aspects of the story. After the second draft, you should know the character well enough to understand the journey and their changes, so now you need to think about anything that can really emphasize that transition. This is where sub-plots and so forth become important - they define aspects of the character's growth that the main arc does not imply.

After I finish a draft, I shelve it for a bit so I can really process what has happened. I think about those people I wrote about, and what I learned about them in the process of converting them from thoughts to words. At this point, it's perfectly acceptable to not write - you are preparing yourself for the next draft, and making it something special.

After that, get back to writing.         

Bad Writing Habits

For the past nine years, I have raised two cats that were rescues at just a few weeks old. As abandoned kittens, they weren't weaned properly, they didn't quite know about cleaning themselves, and they were oddly scared of the dark. Fortunately, they grew out of these things, but that doesn't mean they are perfect. Over the years, they developed their own idiosyncrasies, and I honestly can't explain them. The little boy kitty enjoys sitting on my papers when I edit (much to my chagrin), and the little girl will run off with straws. Oh - they are also both hooked on Q-Tips. If I use a Q-Tip for anything, I have to take special measures to dispose of it, because those little beasts will somehow track the scent, chase it down, and drag it out of the garbage so they can eat the cotton, chew on the rest, swallow some parts of it, then throw up in the hallway. Seriously - these cats have gone into garbage cans and dug through trash if they figure out a Q-Tip is in there. It's like owning pet raccoons in that regard, but I don't know what formed their compulsion.

Writers, however, are a little more manageable than cats, and their habits can be explored, explained, and more easily changed than by saying, "Bad! Bad writer!" and going after them with a spray bottle. And, of course, the first part of correcting any bad habit is identifying the habit to the writer themselves. The things they do may not seem like bad habits to them, but with a little discussion and exploration, they can see the problems in their habits and find some proper workarounds.

One of the main problems is "The Perfect Chapter (or paragraph, sentence, whatever)." Maybe you've seen this writer, maybe you once were this writer, maybe you are this writer, but we can all fall for it. We have an idea for a piece of work and we begin the process of creation. Whether it's a poem or an epic novel, we start on it, get a bit into it, then decide we want to make sure that beginning is flawless. We hear about how important the first chapter, sentence, whatever is supposed to be, so we turn our obsession toward perfecting it. The rest of the project is nowhere near complete, but there we sit, obsessing on the first part of it, trying to paint the perfect smile on a portrait we haven't even sketched out.

I cannot say this enough - when we do this, we prevent ourselves from creating, which is the most important part of the process. Usually we decide to polish the first paragraph or the first line because, subconsciously, we feel stuck with creating the rest of the project. Either we're a little burned out, or something doesn't feel right, or it's just not going where it's supposed to. In any case, we turn away from that problem and focus on some editing challenge that really doesn't make a difference in the larger sense because the rest of the project could change that sentence's meaning anyway. If you find yourself pursuing The Perfect Chapter, ask yourself why you aren't creating anything new. If you think deeply about it, you will figure out the problem isn't the need for The Perfect Chapter, but the fact that you've hit an obstacle, and that's where you should apply your efforts. Create first, edit later.

One other very bad writing habit involves falling in love with a phrase, a verb, a descriptor - anything you can think of that can become a part of your content. A prime example is demonstrating conflict with two phrases, and joining them with the word, "but." Example: "He had to finish the race but his legs started cramping." Now, there's nothing wrong with the word, "but." However, if it becomes your go-to move in contrasting two points, it will wear on the reader after a while. (Oh - starting a sentence with "But" can be a mood-killer as well.) Throwing in the occasional "however" or other contrasting conjunctions can offer some variety and keep the reader engaged, particularly when they are used to strengthen a sentence. What if our example sentence becomes, "He had to finish the race even as his legs started cramping." or, "He had to finish the race despite cramping in his legs." Each one gives a different feel and a sense of urgency that a simple "but" leaves out. 

If you feel you are falling victim to word usage repetition, do a word count to demonstrate how much a word shows up. Let that figure inspire you to think about other ways you can say things. And, as opposed to certain cats, learn to change your bad habits.          

Repetitive Redundancy and Repeating Things

We are told this early on in our writing experience: Word repetition should be avoided whenever possible. Be it nouns, verbs, descriptors, pronouns, whatever, nothing is more boring than finding the same word more than once in a sentence. It feels clumsy, basic, and uninspired, and out loud it creates an unmistakable grating sound. We learn to mix up our word choices, vary our verbs, and sometimes rewrite entire paragraphs to avoid ugly duplication. Eventually, our writing has all the variety of a Midwestern dinner buffet. At that point, we start learning when repetition might be a good thing.

Consider this sentence: "He ran out of his house, through the backyard, into the fields, away from every bad thing that ever happened to him, until he could no longer breathe." Pretty good as far as keeping the word blend in there. But what happens if we actually put some word repetition into this? "He ran out of his house, running through the backyard, running into the fields, running away from every bad thing that ever happened to him, running until he could no longer breathe." Repeating the word "running" is exhausting, but that actually serves a purpose by emphasizing just how important it is for this character to run away from whatever bothers him so much. In this case, repetition works to the writer's advantage because it takes its toll on the reader, which is exactly what this sentence should do.

Here's another example, this time through poetry. In one of the writer groups I attend, a fellow writer, poet, and all around good egg introduced us to a poem called a triolet. I had never known about such a thing, but once I heard about it, I became a little bit obsessed. A triolet can come in many forms, but one of the standard forms is an eight-line poem where the 1st, 4th, and 7th lines are the same line, the 2nd and 8th lines are the same line (different from the 1st, 4th, and 7th), and the rhyme scheme is ABAAABAB (the 3rd and 5th lines can be whatever you want as long as they fit the rhyme scheme. If this sounds complicated, well, it is at first, or at least until you see one. I would use my fellow writer's example but I do not know it offhand and didn't get permission anyway. Therefore, here is a simple triolet:

Untitled

Love lingers in the morning light,
A gentle touch, a whispered name.
It holds us close through darkest night—
Love lingers in the morning light.
Though time may blur our keenest sight,
The heart remains a steady flame.
Love lingers in the morning light, 
A gentle touch, a whispered name.

This kind of poem lives for repetition, using if specifically to reinforce a point. Now, this being poetry, there are allowances for repeating one's self and such, and many grammatical rules are optional. However, this emphasizes that using the same words or phrases can be a positive, even moving experience. You just need to know when to do it, and have a good sense of why it matters. In short, learn the rules so you know the best ways to break them.

As Monday will be Memorial Day (and my brother's birthday, my next post will not be until May 30th.       

  

Celebrating Writing

I'll admit it - my past few writing entries have not been the most upbeat pieces I've ever composed. Fear, frustration, loss - these kind of themes have been prevalent lately, and not just because that's what writers experience in their existence as creatives. Don't get me wrong - writing can be a very emotional process, and a lot of those emotions have some heavy weights attached. However, that's kind of the point of this piece. When we write about feelings, our emotional selves, or basically about any topic we choose, don't be afraid to explore the joy of things as well. It's out there, and it deserves its day in the sun.

Yesterday, I had the honor of attending my oldest niece's wedding (names/images omitted because I forgot to get permission). A very lovely service held at a church the family has attended for some time, then a reception at quite an enjoyable hall, this was a day replete with experiences to write about. Of course, like any event, this comes with some emotional gravity as well. You can't have a big family gathering without thinking about those who did not live to see that day. The mind can wander around a lot in that space, but for certain occasions, it's important to focus on the parts you want to remember. Mostly, my niece and my new nephew tying the proverbial knot.

Events such as this fill us with plenty of emotions, so sometimes our writing can be scattered or unfocused if we try to write about everything going through us at that time. Writing just one piece would not do anyone justice, so I am writing several pieces about this day, each one pulling out a different emotion, each one playing its own note instead of trying to find a chord that covered the entire event. (Yes, I am treating this beautiful day as a writing workshop, but it is the kind of perfect example that really brings home the point.)

The first thing that came to mind was the concept of perfection within the moment. I experienced this as a feeling of harmony, a sense that sometimes the world flows as we predicted and nothing goes wrong because it was meant to be. The weather was ideal, the church absolutely immaculate. If there were any last-minute emergencies, errors to be corrected or fires to be extinguished, I saw none of them. It was just two people who are really meant to be together, and everything went as it should - not even a crying baby or equipment malfunction. Maybe I am overlooking a lot of things, but this is what I write when I am dictating from a place of harmony. From another perspective, maybe I would feel differently about the music, my manners, or whatever. However, from the pleasant place in my mind, the day could not have gone any better.

Now, once I talk to the married couple again, I am sure there will be plenty of funny stories about behind-the-scene antics, some near-disasters with drunken guests, and other things that would be worthy of less-harmonious stories (I know there are definitely other angles to write about). However, for now, while writing from such a pleasant place, I literally do not care about those things. Those will be for later stories, if there's a need for them. For now, this is just about writing from a peaceful place, and letting that mood translate the events.