Good to see you, writers and friends!
The acronym GIGO can mean two things: Good In = Good Out or Garbage In = Garbage out.
Related: the sports advice that if you only want to win the game, play someone worse than you at it; but if you want to up your game, play someone better!
Feel free to skip down to the CHALLENGE (it’s in really big print near the end), after we update our list of National Novel Writing Month goals for the wrap up. Please comment your new data in the thread, together with mention of any plans, if you feel inclined, and maybe new things and other discoveries you learned this time around. Might come in handy for all of us in January’s seventh annual DailyKosWriMo (for all kindsa on-paper creativity, not fiction alone).
Goals________________
Blueshift — 50k goal
bonetti — 50k goal: 70,007 as of Nov30 midnight.
dconrad — 50k goal: at 27K as of Nov30
elenacarlena — 20k goal: 5k as of Nov24
mettle fatigue — finish story: 60 words up as of Nov24 … extended to DailyKosWriMo
Mt Baker Dem — 50k goal: 50,113 of Nov30
NoBlinkers — 50k goal: at just<22k as of Nov 30
Reppa — just write! : at 4761 as of Nov 30
RexyMeteorite — 80-100k goal: 70K as of Nov17
strawbale — The Travellers: 4676, words as of Nov 30
TheRiversChild -- novelette 8.5-10K: a few100s as of Nov10
<tt> GIGO </tt>
The key thing is to read/re-read authors who are masters of the craft. Of the precise genre[s] and overlapping ones we’re writing in, and of specific types of scenes/passages, e.g., fight scenes, as bonetti showed us. And masters of fiction language/writing generally. The ones whose huge successes shape reader expectations and demands, and the formative ones, too. For example, when P Carey posted about the poetics of place, one of the authors/works he quoted and detailed was Raymond Chandler, from The Big Sleep.
But this is not the usual kind of re-reading. We already got all we could that way.
Now we gotta be students again. Get an inexpensive clean copy of the given book, grab some highlighters that won’t bleed through the page, some ballpoint pens and 3”x3” stickynotes, and annotate like hell!
Anyplace in the text we find great phrasing, great lines, great anythings — the kinds that exemplify skills for upping our own game— we highlight’em, write a phrase or two in the margin about exactly what’s so powerful about it, then print a word or phrase in BIG letters specifying the skill topic on the far edge of a sticky note, and stick it on the page so the topic shows beyond the book-pages to help us find it again at need.
The magic thing is, marking up books like this itself ups our game. Might never even need to use those sticky notes. Because it’s all in the process. Us absorbing power and technique, and even refreshing ourselves on great mechanics —spelling, grammar, punctuation, syntax, organization/sequence, sentence fluency, paragraph fluency— to re-hone fine, because don’t our skills get blunted by doing things always only the way we do, the same old same old game?
But won’t it make us mere copyists? Nope. Because at the same time we’re reminding ourselves how the masters do it, we can’t help feeling/noticing how we’d choose to do it our OWN way. (That can go in the margins, too!)
Here’s an article that applies: “How Bob Dylan used the ancient practice of imitatio to craft some of the most original songs of his time.” Imitatio legitimatio! Or Why I teach a college course connecting Taylor Swift’s Songs to the works of Shakespeare, Hitchcock, and Plath.
Here’s another “Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them” by Francine Prose (yes, it’s really her name). a two-time past president of PEN American Center and admired creative writing teacher. I’ll paraphrase here from a summary on how she sees great lit being great for upping our game on character, dialogue and all the other elements of fiction:
- Chapter One: Close Reading
Can fiction writing be taught? Workshops and classes have their place, but close reading is crucial, as follows:
Slow down to get every word, they are the raw material of the craft. Ask why the writer chose a particular one rather than alternatives.
"The well made sentence transcends time and genre" through the grammar of long, short, complex and simple sentences, and the rhythm of their interplay.
Reading closely shows not rules for building an effective paragraph, but countless examples of directions the writer might take.
Narration offers the audience it’s point-of-view, most commonly first person and third.
The works of Heinrich von Kleist and Jane Austen especially show ways to develop characterization. In The Marquise of O—, Kleist dispenses with physical description, yet “tells just as much about them as readers need to know, and then releases them into narrative that doesn't stop spinning until the last sentence . . ." Action and dialogue too advance characterization without reliance on physical description alone.
Caustic as in actual speech, or cleaned up/improved, dialogue can reveal not only what characters choose to say but motivations and emotions below the surface.
One or two valuable details well chosen may create a more memorable impression than a barrage of description.
Rather than physical cliches or mere placeholders, gestures illuminate characters and move the narrative.
Examples from his short stories display his ability to successfully break fiction "rules", and be an unbiased observer of characters and their conversations, rather than being their judge.
- Chapter Eleven: Reading for Courage
Writers may fear revealing too much of themselves. They may fear to resist pressures to only write a certain way. They may wonder whether the act of writing is worth it, considering the state of the world. Or simply to create "weeds" instead of "roses". Close reading is a way to discover how others grow their gardens, and determine risks well worth taking.
- Books to Be Read is a long list of recommendations noted for what elements in the eleven chapters each book especially illustrates. Some in the list are:
*Gary Shteyngart The Russian Debutante's Handbook Paragraphs
*ZZ Packer Drinking Coffee Elsewhere Gesture
*Jane Austen Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility Paragraphs Character
*Mark Twain The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Narration
*Anton Chekhov (trans. Constance Garnett) Tales of Anton Chekhov: Volumes 1-13 Detail Gesture Courage
*Gertrude Stein The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas Sentences
* Virginia Woolf On Being Ill Sentences
*James Joyce Dubliners Sentences Gesture
*Rex Stout Plot It Yourself Paragraphs
* Katherine Mansfield Collected Stories Gesture
*Raymond Chandler The Big Sleep Sentences Gesture
*Rebecca West The Birds Fall Down and Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: A Journey Through Yugoslavia Sentences
*Isaac Babel (trans. Walter Morrison) The Collected Stories Paragraphs Courage
*Elizabeth Bowen The House in Paris Detail
*Jane Bowles Two Serious Ladies Narration Dialogue
*Flannery O'Connor Wise Blood Narration Gesture A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories Words Flannery O'Connor Collected Stories Detail
*John le Carré A Perfect Spy Dialogue
*Alice Munro Selected Stories Words
*Richard Yates Revolutionary Road Words
*Jay McInerney Bright Lights, Big City Narration
*Bruce Wagner I'm Losing You Character
*Marcel Proust (trans. Lydia Davis) Swann's Way Gesture
*William Strunk The Elements of Style, Illustrated Sentences
*etc
But sometimes reading doesn’t supply all we need for good in = good out. For example, we might need a setting or context we don’t know first hand and cannot get to.
This might be controversial, but I think high quality films and television programs can be very useful for exploring built or natural environments, and how people move and speak when they’re there.
Or, at least, how everyone is accustomed to believe they do. It’s up to us to identify what’s truest to life.
Thing is, a forest isn’t just “a forest”, generic on the page. There’s a world of difference between how it feels being in a rainforest vs the Joshua Trees landscape vs someplace looking green yet actually tinder-dry, helpless to the slightest spark and flame.
The amazing thing about television and film, also, is that they only have sight, sound and dialogue at their disposal —those are bother their powers and their limitations— yet they still manage to convey a wealth of vicarious sensory inputs. In turn, by taking notes (heavy on the pause button!) we can translate that words alone.
Second-hand DVDs help keep costs down, BTW.
And as actors learn to do, there’s people-watching, in real time or from memory, to recognize unique behavior and fine nuances of facial expression and body language. No stalking anyone, or invading anyone’s privacy, of course! Just reflecting on what we recall from the past, and what we make effort to notice in the present, to choose selectively for our characters’ reactions and interactions, based on what we witness all around us across our lives. Actors say the great loss that comes with fame is that they can’t do it anymore because people recognize them, they’ve lost the ability to anonymously observe. But we still can!
In Talking Mysteries, Tony Hillerman wrote/said that starting a new book in his mystery series made him need to get out and go deep into the realworld of his setting, mostly the Navajo Nation area. You’d think, since he lives (lived) there, that he wouldn’t have to. But he found that mindfully re-observing it re-attuned him more acutely.
To how sounds carry on the wind out there, and birds of prey wheel in the blazing blue. How leg muscles drag through the slide of rock underfoot or smack on highway blacktop. Ephemeral scent of short-lived desert flowers, long-lived evergreens, smoke of homefires or wildfires and sometimes fires unspeakable. Grit in the eyes and on the tongue, stale canteen water or crystalline fresh or mineraled from elusive springs, sun crisping the skin to parchment, the dark cool odors of caves, the blessed touch of the slightest shade under a tree or porch roof or north side of a boulder. The lineaments of faces of people who don’t know you and have reason to suspect your intentions, or people who do and have reason to feel betrayed. Or reason to trust.
Stuff like that. That’s just my phrasing in the moment, of course, based on having been out there a little in the past. If you’ve read any of his books, or others that make the setting utterly palpable, you know what I mean. <big>Immersion</big>. So, if we can’t personally be there at the moment of writing, we utilize what’s next best —memory included— so we can transmit it to readers via text.
“Awwwwwww heck!”, I bet you say. “It’s no fun reading and watching like that!” Um, this go-round we’re not there for just fun. We’re there to up our game by learning from the master-players. We can always come back another time for fun.
“But this’ll ruin it!” Nah, not if the writers/film-makers we study are genuinely good at their craft. It can be really exciting to discover their strengths, and then when we come back some other time just for the pleasure of it, we’ll enjoy it the more because of having discovered there’s more there to enjoy.
We can use it all!
CHALLENGE!
200 words about a character who’s gone to/arrived somewhere trying to find something out.
Imply 3 feels!
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