“The most beautiful things are those that madness prompts and reason writes.”
—Andre Gide
Tag Archives: writer
Please Excuse the Mess
Wow… it’s a bit dusty in here. Just give me a minute to clean up, and we can get back to the business of night-owling.
– sld
Thus Ends the Intermission
I’m just coming out of an intermission from writing with a couple of awesome events and a few more terribly sobering ones in my rear view. Oh, but fear not! I’m ready to dazzle with my poignant, yet witty observations once again. Get comfy, switch on those bedside nightlights, and keep your eyes peeled.
– sld
Thoughts on Cormac McCarthy’s The Road
I’m suffering from a book-hangover. I can’t stop thinking about The Road by Cormac McCarthy… oh, the haunting simplicity of it.
McCarthy’s prose is sparse, but tells so, so much. He doesn’t offer an excessive amount of detail; the narrator observes the way, I think, a starving, shivering, half-broken man clutching his young son would look at the world. Speech interactions between the man and son are short and few, and serve great purpose in showing their nature. The bleak, rotting landscape remains constant, yet never dulls in impact, and struggles are repeated time after time, but increase concern for the man and his young son. McCarthy offers a beautifully heartfelt story of hope, love and how far one will go to make sure another keeps on going.
What struck me the most about McCarthy’s writing was how he handled the fear and violence. In The Road‘s post-apocalyptic setting, one expects the characters to fear other men, to worry about being killed and/or looted. Once I realized a main concern was avoiding rampant cannibalism, even planning to commit suicide if he and his son were doomed to meet such an end, I began to notice how McCarthy presented it.
The scariest part of the novel came about midway through, when the man and son enter a house and find a padlocked hatch door inside. The boy begged his father to not open it, to leave the house. As a father, the man felt obligated. Of course, he thought someone was locking away food. In just a few short sentences, McCarthy describes the harrowing scene as the man peeks into the basement room, and my eyes welled as I read.
He started down the rough wooden steps. He ducked his head and then flicked the lighter and swung the flame out over the darkness like an offering. Coldness and damp. An ungodly stench. He could see part of a stone wall. Clay floor. An old mattress darkly stained. He crouched and stepped down again and held out the light.
Huddled against the back wall were naked people, male and female, all trying to hide, shielding their faces with their hands. On the mattress lay a man with his legs gone to the hip and the stumps of them blackened and burnt. The smell was hideous.
Jesus, he whispered.
Then one by one they turned and blinked in the pitiful light. Help us, they whispered. Please help us.
See how simple the writing is? And it still brought such powerful imagery.
Now – don’t think I’m weird – after I read this part of the book, I stopped to analyze it, and my mind went to Chuck Palahniuk. (Yeah. I do this sometimes. Just one of my warped ways of teaching myself new tricks.)
There’s no questioning my love for Chuck Palahniuk. He has this no-holds-barred, in-your-face style that, without fail, awakens my senses, my entire body. I marvel at his ability to tell stories with equal amounts candidness and artful prose, but Palahniuk’s signature trait is his razor-sharp description without actually describing much.
I thought, how would Chuck have handled this situation?
Well, I can only guess, but I think he might have offered an image of the man’s missing quadriceps hanging somewhere like cured hams, or the salty, briny combination of piss, sweat and preserved meat, how they huddled together like slaughterhouse cows, or he may have thrown in a fun fact about how rats will eat human flesh and develop a taste for human blood… . Gross, I know. Anyway, my point is that good old Chuck wouldn’t necessarily change the language McCarthy used, but he would, without a doubt, throw in some extrasensory detail, or a little satire to give us accompanying imagery, to really drive the visual in our minds, to make us cringe even more.
Is Chuck’s signature trait necessary here? Does it make the passage better? Not especially, and here’s why: McCarthy’s story doesn’t call for it. The Road doesn’t want to exploit the violence or the fear, not in the way Palahniuk’s works can and must. Think about the reverse of this exercise… if we removed those extra visuals from, say, Fight Club, what would happen to the story? Fight Club, a story wrought with fear and violence, is about a crazy guy who forms a club that terrorizes cities. Without the satirical anecdotes and the visual asides, the story would become somber, lacking in that off-color comedic relief needed to escape the beating. Still interesting, though, just not as much so.
If I were writing my version of The Road, I would’ve bored myself to tears trying to flower-up the language and come up with completely unique sensory descriptions for the never-changing landscape. I would’ve muddied up the basement scene with too much description, trying to paint an overly vivid visual of the dirty, tear-streaked faces, the protruding shoulder blades, the smell of rot and burnt hair… I could go on and on, making this scene much, much more than it needs to be. I would put too much emphasis on it, making the story about cannibalism, not about the love shared by a man and his son. McCarthy and Palahniuk, both in their expertly crafted methods, weave stories so readers will experience what they want them to experience. And that is a skill, I hope, I can learn in time.
There are millions of guides on writing out there. They attempt to blueprint how to write a novel. Workbooks on developing characters ask me to answer these ten questions about each of my characters…. now subtract one feature and keep it a secret… my character is complete! Authors expose the secret to the perfect mainstream novel: describe everything! Literary writers tell me to avoid plots at all costs. In the end, no one can tell me what will work for me. I’ll still read books on writing, but I have to examine my motives and purpose for a story. No one can tell me how to do it; I have to figure it out on my own.
There is no formula, and we are its prophets.
– sld
Generate Nerve-Shredding Story Tension—Power of the Secret-Keeper
Great reminders here… What do you think? Are you a secret-keeper? – sld
Image via the award-winning show “House.”
It’s tempting for us to create “perfect” protagonists and “pure evil” antagonists, but that’s the stuff of cartoons, not great fiction. Every strength has an array of corresponding weaknesses, and when we understand these soft spots, generating conflict becomes easier. Understanding character arc becomes simpler. Plotting will fall into place with far less effort.
My POV? All memorable stories are character-driven. Plot merely serves to change characters from a lowly protagonist into a hero….kicking and screaming along the way.
One element that is critical to understand is this:
Everyone has Secrets
To quote Dr. Gregory House, Everybody lies.
All good stories hinge on secrets.
I have bodies under my porch.
Okay, not all secrets in our fiction need to be THIS huge.
Secret #1—“Real” Self Versus Authentic Self
We all have a face we show to the world, what we want others to see…
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Words on Writing : 9.30.14
“Write hard and clear about what hurts.” – Ernest Hemingway
Words on Writing : 9.18.14
“Amateurs sit and wait for inspiration, the rest of us just get up and go to work.” – Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
Words on Writing : 9.10.14
“The only way you can write the truth is to assume that what you set down will never be read. Not by any other person, and not even by yourself at some later date. Otherwise you begin excusing yourself. You must see the writing as emerging like a long scroll of ink from the index finger of your right hand; you must see your left hand erasing it.” – Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin
Rants & Ramblings
I’ve been reading a ton of books by shiny new authors lately, and I’m finding myself unable to trudge through most them to the end.
Take the book I stopped reading a month ago: A man time-travels to present-day San Francisco to locate and destroy a virus that is killing off crops in his own time, and this present-day guy gets involved accidentally, and there’s the whole butterfly-effect thing (except in this book, it’s all dragonflies) and the future man ends up being the present man’s great-great-great-great-grandson, and another future guy is trying to kill people… that’s as far as I could get, about halfway though. There is a ridiculous number of characters for such a fairly simple plot, and only a fraction of them are memorable. A villian introduced in the second chapter didn’t make another appearance until just before I decided to ditch, and I had no memory of him at all – a badly executed foreshadow. Then there’s the wonky point-of-view. The bulk of the story is told in third person until the present-day guy is introduced, and his parts of the story are in first person. I’m sure this technique is cool when done correctly, but this author chose to wait until several chapters into the story to introduce present-day guy. Overall, I found the story cliched and unoriginal, but I really thought this was going to be one I could finish… made me wish I was reading Twelve Monkeys instead.
I read a short story branded as a novel that had no plot. Not even an inkling. A man on a spaceship makes a decision to commit suicide. That part took up a whole page. The other 20 pages give a painfully detailed explanation of the artificial intelligence from which the man was rescuing himself. I skipped over entire pages to get to the end, to read actual story line, but disappointment and confusion awaited me there. I understand what the author tried to do. No doubt, he’s read other stories with similar techniques, probably Bradbury and the like, but he couldn’t make it work for his own.
When I read stories like these with all their stereotypes and flat writing, I get scared. I’m reminded of those poor souls who sign up for highly publicized and televised singing competitions, claiming music as their life’s purpose. They audition before God and the free world only to reveal they are, in fact, tone deaf. The contestants wear nervous smiles, waiting for the judges’ praise. I imagine they really don’t know they aren’t hitting the notes until someone tells them. Their dreams are shattered. No, they cannot sing. And that’s my fear: Someone telling me, “No, you cannot write.” There are so many aspiring authors with terrible, horrible, awful novels, and I do not want to be classified as one them.
Some might say my hypervigilance of sucky writing only means that I do not suck. Or it means that I will never, EVER finish my novel because I’m too scared of simultaneously fulfilling and killing my dreams upon its completion. Time will tell, I suppose. For now, I will swagger on toward my goals, praying for a keen eye and an engaging voice.
– sld
Top 10 Tips for Survival!
from Think Like a Publisher: 33 Tips to Write, Promote, and Sell Your Book
The Night Owl's Guide to Reading 