Materials for Writers

 

 

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NOTE: Mention on this page does NOT constitute a recommendation from Meredith Sue Willis. These are things that looked interestng to me-- please check for yourself, and let me know of any broken links or information that needs to be updated.
                                        -- MSW

 

 

Notes on the Scene in Fiction

In common speech, "scene" is the place where an action or event occurs, such as the scene of the crime. It is also commonly used to refer to a public display of passion or temper as in, "She tried not to make a scene." It is also a sphere of activity, as when we speak of observing the political scene. In slang, it is a situation or set of circumstances– "a bad scene."

In theater, film, and novel, it is an essential unit of action. In drama, there is a new scene when a new character enters. The setting is fixed and the time continuous, usually "real" or natural time. In film, a scene is a shot or series of shots constituting a unit of continuous related action. In the novel, it is above all a dramatized moment– shown, not told. It can include dialogue, monologue (thinking) description, action, etc. etc. The dynamics change. People talk and act.  Something happens.

In fiction, while there are lots of things besides scenes– passages of narration and long internal monologues, for example– most writers eventually come to the point where they want to dramatize their story with a scene. Dialogue or other interaction between two or more characters often marks the heart of a scene. You can have pages and pages of narration, or pages and pages of the vicissitudes of one character's thoughts or suffering, but the building block of fiction is a series of scenes with connecting and surrounding material. The sene is the way the story moves to its next level: this is where the other parts of the story come together; or, it may be the beginning of everything, after which the next parts deal with the repercussions of this dramatized part. A scene is "dramatized," although not necessarily dramatic in the sense of having a lot of shouting or overt action. It generally demonstrates or "shows" rather than tells.

 

Example of a non-scenic narration (sometimes the best way to tell your story):
     He went into the store and bought a paper. The clerk was disturbed by his appearance and manner.

Example of a Scene:
    He walked into the store. He was as pale as a mushroom raised in darkness, his clothes loose and also mushroom colored. She watched him stand for a long time in front of the newspapers, and finally take one from the pile of dailies.
    "How much is it?" he asked, holding it out as if it might be poisoned.
    "Fifty cent," she said.
    "Oh." He continued to hold it out with one hand, while he got out a wallet with the other, worked out a dollar, never taking his eyes off her or lowering the paper.
    She made his change quickly, and he walked out. "I don't like the looks of that," she said to herself. "That is creepy."
 

 

 

 

 

Weather

In a city like New York, the weather has a more subtle influence, but where I grew up in West Virginia, everyone talks about the weather. Whenever we spoke on the phone, my father wanted to know what my weather was and would tell me his. I don't suppose we should be surprised that people are interested in the weather. It is what surrounds us as we walk or drive through our days. Our senses are in constant contact with the atmosphere: tropical dampness leaves your skin sticky; beautiful weather lifts spirits; thunder storms make the air thrill with ozone.

What does this mean to us as writers? First, for a memoir writer or a realistic fiction writer, there are the facts to deal with: when you remember or create some important event in your life or in your characters' lives, verisimilitude is increased by telling what the weather was like. Weather can also start you off on new projects or get you jump-started if you're stuck:

As a way of advancing a memoir or fiction, or of looking for new material, close your eyes, perhaps lying back on a couch, and trying to reconstruct this same day of the week a week ago. What was the weather? Did you have to take an umbrella with you? Do the same thing for a year ago. Now think back to some important event that happened to you. Can you come in with what season it was? Do you remember if you were wearing a coat or jacket? Or were you perhaps covered with sweat?

This also works well for grounded or deepening a piece of fiction. In fiction, in my first drafts, I usually write the story rapidly, concentrating on the conflicts and the dialogue and what happens– without regard to what time of year or sometimes even what year it was. I generally write fairly realistically, so as I go into a second and third draft, one of the ways I organize my material is to work out a chronology and to enrich the settings for the various scenes, sometimes with hints of what was going on in the world, and often with the weather. The weather helps organize a lot of things for you--whether people are wearing boots or sandals, for instance. In these middle drafts, I work on "continuity"– a movie term for the job of making sure that the various parts of a single scene, filmed at different times, match up– that there isn't a goldfish bowl on the coffee table at the beginning of the scene, then no goldfish bowl, then the goldfish back again. In writing, two of the most useful techniques for this stage of enriching the prose and intensifying the mood are (1) deciding on your chronology, including perhaps what year it is set in and (2) deciding on the weather.

There is a passage in George Eliot's Adam Bede  in which she starts with the weather, and puts an interpretation on it that feeds into the coming events:

 

 

In this case, the weather has a kind unsettling unpleasantness. And even though there are some unpleasant events coming (the rich young man whose birthday is being celebrated will seduce a young woman of a lower class), yet this is not a case of the pathetic fallacy (in which the weather and setting are made arbitrarily to match the mood of the story), because the weather could have been different, and the story would have been the same, but also because the fine weather and the celebration actually contribute to the seduction. It is also a setting, rural England of the first half of the nineteenth century, when people pay very close attention to the weather. Further, the scene is not generic, but closely observed, perhaps too closely for twenty-first century tastes (it runs MUCH longer than this sampe). Finally, it works also because people do, in fact, put meaning into everything, including the weather.

 

 

Places

In the training film the flight deck was a grand piece of gray geometry, perilous, to be sure, but an amazing abstract shape as one looks down upon it on the screen. And yet once the newcomer’s two feet were on it...Geometry– my God, man, this is a...skillet! It heaved, it moved up and down, it rolled to port (this great beast rolled!) And it rolled to starboard, as the ship moved into the wind and, therefore, into the waves, and the wind kept sweeping across sixty feet up in the air out in the open sea, and there were no railings whatsoever. This was a skillet!– a frying pan! A short-order grill!– not gray but black, smeared with skid marks from one end to the other glistening with pools of hydraulic fluid and the occasional jet-fuel slick, all of it still hot, sticky, greasy, runny, virulent from God knows what traumas–still ablaze!–consumed in detonations, explosions, flames, combustion, roars, shrieks, whines, blasts, horrible shudders, fracturing impacts, as little men in screaming red and yellow and purple and green shirts with black Mickey Mouse helmets over their ears skittered about on the surface as if for their very lives (you’ve said it now!), hooking fighter planes onto the catapult shuttles so that they can explode their afterburners and be slung off the desk in a red-mad fury with a kaboom! That pounds through the entire deck– a procedure that seems absolutely controlled, orderly, sublime, however, compared to what he is about to watch as aircraft return to the ship for what is known in the engineering stoicisms of the military as “recovery and arrest.”

                                                  Tom Wolfe, in The Right Stuff

 

 

 


In the evening they came out upon a mesa that overlooked all the country to the north. The sun to the west lay in a holocaust where there rose a steady column of small desert bats and to the north along the trembling perimeter of the world dust was blowing down the void like the smoke of distant armies. The crumpled butcherpaper mountains lay in sharp shadowfold under the long blue dusk and in the middle distance the glazed bed of a dry lake lay shimmering like the mare imbrium and herds of deer were moving north in the last of the twilight, harried over the plain by wolves who were themselves the color of the desert floor.

                                              Cormac McCarthy in Blood Meridian

 

 

 

Our house is the last house in the City. It is so far out in the marshes that it's like you aren't in a city at all. Well, it's not like the country either, because you can see overpasses, electrical towers, old warehouses, and a canal. But we like living there, especially since it's our first house since my mother and dad got back together....To get to our house by car, you have to drive around an abandoned factory building, but us kids have a short cut path that goes along the nasty oily canal through weeds that are higher than your head. We have to be careful when we go that way, because it's muddy, and also it goes near the house of a man named Neighbor who drinks alcohol and sets traps to catch rats. Neighbor's house is half on stilts in the canal, and he built it himself. He caught us spying on him once and made us sit on his porch while he made sort of a speech about how we should never waste our time while we're young, and his son was almost a professional baseball player but lost his chance and now works downtown in a Comic books and Collectibles store. There was more, but it got very confusing. We were polite and listened to him talk, and he ended by giving us his old rowboat. We keep it hidden on the canal near my house for spying, and even though we're sort of friends with Neighbor now, we still spy on him when we feel like it.

Some people would probably say our house is even weirder than Neighbor's. Our house is painted two colors of blue: aqua and robin's egg. It sits at the very end of the road with marshes behind it and a highway bridge almost over top of it. But in spite of the bridge, it is private. We like the privacy, and also houses on Fish House Lane are very cheap.....


                             Meredith Sue Willis, in Billie of Fish House Lane

 

 

 

Dreams

Dreams can also be used as a short hand to replace references to literature or mythology. In my novels, I often make up dreams as a way into the psyche of a character. It's a way of letting the character explore herself or himself– and letting me explore the character. I also frequently give dreams to characters as a way of having them learn or express something for themselves. In my novella Dwight's House, for example, a woman gets involved with a destitute family and has mixed feelings about it, at best. At the end of one of the chapters following her point of view, I give her a dream that is meant to be her mental processes working on this problem– it isn't some big Symbol with a capital S, but rather something she is working on in her own mysterious way.

 

That night Elaine had a dream in which the Hurlburtons broke her windows. Or rather, she broke the windows, but it was because of the Hurlburtons. It was the windows of her apartment on West End Avenue, and the Hurlburtons were suspended in midair outside the windows five stories above the street. Elaine was floating, too: she was an enormous Thanksgiving Day Parade balloon squeezed inside the apartment, confined and itching. In the dream, she began to shout and strike out, and her thrashing broke the windows. The dream ended with Elaine floating away, high above New York, only New York was the lake now, and the hills were summer green. She liked the view, even of the Hurlburtons far below.

 

Again, this is meant to be significant, but within Elaine's own world view, not as a way of explaining Elaine or the novel's "meaning."

 

 

 

 

Plot

What Do We Need To Know About Plot?
 
Here is a site on the web with some notes: http://artsedge.kennedy-center.org/content/2230/

KNOWING isn’t the point as much as setting out a theory and testing it, then changing it to fit new ideas. Alwyas be ready to change plot ideas and story line as you write and new paths open up. Here are some exercises and notes about exploring your plot:

 

1. Write an outline, not necessarily a Roman Number I., II., III., type but some visual or graphic representation of the story so far– and how you imagine it. When you write the outline, do go from beginning to end, however sketchy the end is.

2. Try the archipelago method. Write five high points– and then actually flesh out those scenes.

3. Pretend you have to pitch your plot to a movie mogul. Set a kitchen timer for 45 seconds, and that's all you have. This is sometimes called “The Elevator Pitch.” Listen to yourself and you may discover at least what is most outstanding in your mind about your story at the present time.

4. In writing, tell the story in 25 words or less. Again, this has to do with finding what's most important in it.

5.Write your novel as a Freitag’s pyramid: 1) Nouement (rising action or “knotting up.”); 2) Climax (high point); 3) Dénouement (falling action or unraveling.)

6. Write a version of your novel as a stream. Where do you launch your boat? What are the rapids of the story? Where does the stream open out into the greater body of water?

7. Draw the dramatic arc of your story.

8. Perhaps your novel is not a “plotted” novel. It might fall into another fictional form: fiction biography (how a person grew up, lived, died); the reasons why something happened (a man kills himself: what led up to this?); what happened afterward (a group of strangers survives a bus plunge: what happens to each of them?); or even a picaresque novel (series of adventures only loosely connected).

 

 

 

Using Screenwriting and Playwriting to Learn How to Plot

One good source of plotting is books and classes about screenwriting and playwriting. (Resources below thanks to Joëlle Anthony in SCBWI September/October 2008)
Screenwriting by Syd Field – book
Very rigid and popular: screenplay is exactly 120 pp. long. The set-up is in pp 1 - 30; the confrontation in pp 30 - 90; the resolution in pp. 90 - 120.
http://www.sydfield.com/
The Dramatist’s Toolkit by Jeffrey Sweet -- book
Playwriting– especially “Exposition and Expectations.” Encourages people to read their work aloud; real beginning is at p. 10 not where you thought you began...
http://www.members.aol.com/DgSWEET/index.html
Backwards and Forward: A Technical Manual for Reading Plays by David Ball
About reading rather than writing.
Story by Robert McKee
Another screenwriting guru. Especially good on picking out scenes that don’t move the story along. He gives well-regarded workshops around the country.
http://www.mckeestory.com/homepage.html
Truby’s Great Screenwriting Course by John Truby– video series
Eight hours of presentations on heros, formats, with movie clips etc. Expensive, but good.
http://www.truby.com/index.html

 

 

 

Some Model Stories Online to read

 

Eudora Welty, "Why I Live at the P.O." For lots more, go to Literature Online.

 

 

Some Types of Discourse
(Speech, spoken or thought) in Narrative

Here are some typical ways that writers of prose narrative vary how they present characters’ speech, both spoken and thought. Some authors, of course, favor one type almost entirely. Varying the discourse can allow you to move closer or farther from a character– that is, to have more or less perspective. Some types of discourse work best for a character musing in solitude, others for fully developed scenes. Some types tend to move faster, and are thus efficient and appropriate for summarizing or action, while others are more useful for expressing strong emotion. The point is to be able to use what you need.
1. Narratized or summarized discourse

The narrator summarizes what a character says in the course of the narration–it does not use the character’s own words or thoughts. This is usually the quickest, most efficient, and least expressive way to do it: Oedipus expressed how distraught he was over having killed his father.

2. Indirect discourse, especially “tagged” indirect discourse
The narrator tells what the character said within a sentence of narrative, giving at least a hint of how the character said or thought it, thus becoming a little more expressive: Oedipus shouted that he had killed his father. A trivial grammatical variation would be Oedipus shouted he had killed his father.
3. Free indirect discourse

The narrator tells what the character said or thought within the narrative sentence, and includes even more of the character’s expression and exact words– still without quotation marks, however. This is usually a mix of the character’s words and the narrator’s words: Oedipus was beginning to realize what he had done: It was murder! He had done the unthinkable and killed his own father. (Here “It was murder!” would be Oedipus’s own speech.

4. Free direct discourse

Here, the narrator gives the character’s own words at more length, presumably exactly what the character would say or think (but still without quotation marks): Oedipus paced back and forth as the realization hit him. I’ve murdered my own father! Could anything possibly be worse? But wait, what about the rest of the prophecy? What if.....? Gradually he realized that indeed something could be worse. (If this goes on long enough, it may become internal monologue).

5. Tagged direct discourse or reported discourse

The narrator quotes the character’s words said aloud using quotation marks. This moves the narration toward dramatic form, with something like stage instructions and often several people included in the scene: Oedipus paced back and forth. Suddenly he struck his own chest with his fist and turned to the Chorus. He cried out, “I’ve murdered my own father! Could anything be worse?”

 

 

Some Tricks for Writers of Creative Narrative

 

  • Handling a crowd scene:   Only identify two or three individuals. Say “The twenty two members of the Ridgewood Bobcats walked into the dressing room with their faces long,” but then only give names and quoted lines to perhaps three of them.
  • If creating a strong plot is your concern, use the hypothetical method. That is, make up a hypothetical-- a test plot. Write down a beginning middle and end. Write as if that were your plot, but be ready at any moment to change it. This gives you a structure to work with (especially an end point) but gives preference to changes that your imagination might come up with.
  • Clarifying the logistics of physical action. Write from a fixed point of view. If you have a problem describing physical action– a fight, a chase scene, or simply a party or a bar, try visualizing it as it would be seen by a single, fixed camera.  This often means imagining how it is perceived by one character. Thus, even if you have a multiple viewpoint story, write your action from one point of view.
  • Dealing with stories that have many characters. Conflate. If you are writing fiction based on your own large real family, for example, conflate two little brothers into one. It strays from the facts, but allows the creation of one fuller character and simultaneously eases your logistics.
  • Getting a grip on a minor character # 1 . Use the acting student’s trick of writing a backstory for the character.
  • Getting a grip on a minor character # 2. Write an interior monologue for the difficult minor character. Try making it in the form of a “confession,” that is, one’s own plea for oneself.
  • Getting a grip on a minor character # 3 . Write a monologue for the difficult minor character in the form of the character telling his or her story to another character aloud, in a relaxed dialogue, as people often do, over coffee or drinks.
  • The Long Haul. One trick for keeping your story going for the long haul-- which for a book writer can be years, is to have a loose large plan, but to work in small units. That is, give your energy this summer just to Part II, which consists of, say, Chapters 8 through 11.

 

Description of Characters

 

 

Dave Rivers

Our group met in the basement lounge, a sort of island of donated couches and easy chairs in the middle of an expanse of vinyl tile and painted cinderblock. It was an uneasy place, always like sitting in a spotlight on a stage, and that night I positioned myself in the shadows, on a folding chair behind the couch. I was keeping my distance, wondering if the speaker would notice me, or if he would pass his eyes over me as just another teenage girl with shiny hair and no obvious birth defects. At first, though, he didn't look at any of us. In fact, he broke every rule of public speaking my mother had ever drummed into me. He stood in front of us saying nothing for a long time, shifting his weight from foot to foot, clearing his throat, getting out a handkerchief and cleaning his glasses. There was an embarrassment among us, a shifting in our seats. I was glad I wasn't in the front row. I could raise an eyebrow, stare at the lack of coordination between his plaid flannel shirt and plaid sports jacket. He was wearing boots too, yellow leather lace-ups--clodhoppers! I had never seen a man wear a sports jacket with work boots, and it was those boots combined with the ginger-brown beard that gave me pause, made me think he might be worth listening to.

He finally finished cleaning his glasses and cleared his throat one last time, wiped his nose with the handkerchief he'd been using on the glasses, put it away and the glasses on. And then his eyes came at me. Magnified by the lenses, appearing perfectly round and rimmed with flamelike lashes, they seemed to be the source of the sudden flow of words, low and urgent.

 

                                     Meredith Sue Willis, Only Great Changes

 



Alice

 

Alice, tall like a man, with soft wooly hair spread out in tangles like a feathered hat and her face oily and her legs ashy, whose beauty I never quite believed because she valued it so little but was real. Real like wild flowers and uncut grass, real like the knotty sky-reach of a dead tree. Beauty of warm brown eyes in a round dark face and of teeth somehow always white and clean and of lips moist and open, out of which rolled the voice and the laughter, deep and breathless, rolling out the strong and secret beauty of her soul.

Alice of the streets. Gentle walking on long legs. Close-kneed. Careful. Stopping sometimes at our house on her way to unknown places and other people. She came wearing loose flowered dresses and she sat in our chairs rubbing her too-big knees that sometimes hurt, and we gathered, Momma, my sisters and I, to hear the beautiful bad-woman talk and feel the rolling laughter, always sure that she left more than she came for. I accepted the tender touch of her hands on my hair or my face or my arms like favors I never returned. I clung to the sounds of her words and the light of her smiles like stolen fruit.

Paulette Childress White from a story called "Alice"

 

 

 

Mr. Slope, a Clergyman by Anthony Trollope in Barchester Towers

 

Mr. Slope is tall and not ill-made. His feet and hands are large, as has ever been the case with all his family,but he has a broad chest and wide shoulders to carry off these excrescences, and on the whole his figure is good. His countenance, however, is not specially prepossessing. His hair is lank and of a dull pale reddish hue. It is always formed into three straight, lumpy masses, each brushed with admirable precision and cemented with much grease; two of them adhere closely to the sides of his face, and the other lies at right angles above them. He wears no whiskers and is always punctiliously shaven. His face is nearly of the same colour as his hair, though perhaps a little redder: it is not unlike beef– beef, however, one would say, of a bad quality. His forehead is capacious and high, but square and heavy and unpleasantly shining. His mouth is large though his lips are thin and bloodless, and his big, prominent, pale-brown eyes inspire anything but confidence. His nose, however, is his redeeming feature: it is pronounced, straight and well-formed; though I myself should have liked it better did it not possess a somewhat spongy, porous appearance, as thought it had been cleverly formed out of a red-colored cork.

I never could endure to shake hands with Mr. Slope. A cold clammy perspiration always exudes from him, the small drops are ever to be seen standing on his brown, and his friendly grasp is unpleasant.

 

P. 37, Signet Classic edition.

 

 

 

 

Opening of BRIGHT LIGHTS, BIG CITY by Jay McInerney

You are not the kind of guy who would be at a place like this at this time of the morning. But here you are, and you cannot say that the terrain is entirely unfamiliar, although the details are fuzzy. You are at a nightclub talking to a girl with a shaved head. The club is either Heartbreak or the Lizard Lounge. All might come clear if you could just slip int the bathroom and do a little more Bolivian MArching Powder. Then again, it might not. A small voice inside you insists that this epidemic lack of clarity is a result of too much of that already. The night has already turned on that imperceptible pivot where two a.m. changes to six a.m. You know this moment has come and gone, but you are not yet wiling to concede that you have crossed the line beyond which all is gratuitous damage and the palsy of unraveled nerve endings. Somewhere back there you could have cut your losses, but you rode past that moment on a comet trail of white powder and now you are trying to hang on to the rush. Your brain at this moment is composed of brigades of tiny Bolivian solders. They are tired and muddy from their long march through the night. There are holes in their boots and they are hungry. They need to be fed. They need the Bolivian Marching Powder.

A vaguely tribal flavor to this scene--pendulous jewelry, face paint, ceremonial headgear and hair styles. You feel that there is also a certain Latin theme--something more than the piranhas cruising your bloodstream and the fading buzz of marimbas in your brain.

You are leaning back against a post that may or may not be structural with regard to the building, but which feels essential to your own maintenance of an upright position. the bald girl is saying this used to be a good place to come before the assholes discovered it. You don't want to be talking to this bald girl, or even listening to her, which is all you are doing, but just now you do not want to test the powers of speech or locomotion.

 

From THE MILL ON THE FLOSS by George Eliot (Modern Library, p. 765)

All people of broad, strong sense have an instinctive repugnance to the men of maxims; because such people early discern that the mysterious complexity of our life is not to be embraced by maxims, and that to lace ourselves up in formulas of that sort is to repress all the divine promptings and inspirations that spring from growing insight and sympathy. And the man of maxims is the popular representative of the minds that are guided in their moral judgment solely by general rules, thinking that these will lead them to justice by a ready-made patent method, without the trouble of exerting patience, discrimination, impartiality--without any care to assure themselves whether they have the insight that comes from a hardly-earned estimate of temptation, or from a life vivid and intense enough to have created a wide fellow-feeling with all that is human.

 

 

 

From Chapter Six, Trespassers:

 

 

"I walked in there the first day, and they were all grinning and sitting on their desks saying, ‘Hey Teach,' so I sat on my desk too, and pretty soon they were turning over desks, so I turned over a desk too to show I was on their wavelength-"

"Are you making this up?"

"No, this happened. I turned over a desk too, and we were all sitting on the undersides of the desks using the legs for controls and pretending they were cars. Then one of the boys starts pretending to shoot at the others, and I tried to explain that we were having friendly races instead of a war, and meanwhile the girls got bored and decided to stand on the window sills and pretend to be back-up singers in a band, and then the principal walked in. This was my first day."

"The principal!"

"Yeah. The principal walks in. This lady, my principal, is about six feet tall and built like a fullback--and she says 'Boys and Girls, we will all turn our seats right side up now and sit down like ladies and gentlemen.' And they scurry around, and I was about to explain the educational aspect of this activity—"

I said, "You were just trying to speak their language--"

"Right. And the only intelligent thing I did was change my mind and not explain to the principal. I just let her get everything in order. And when all the desks were right side up, and all the kids were at their seats, then she started laying into them. 'Boys and Girls,' she said, 'Let us wipe those smiles off our faces--'"

"She sounds awful."

"She's a genius. She said, 'Wipe off those smiles, and let me see no more smiles today, because you have not shown Mr. Labin that we know the meaning of respect.' And then she put a spelling lesson on the board and told them to copy it down word for word, and then she told me not to forget our little meeting at lunch hour. I figured I was going to be fired."

"But it was your first day! She hadn't given you a chance."

"I almost walked out without waiting to get fired. Maybe I should have. But I thought about the giant mosquitoes in the jungle in Vietnam, so I stood there for the rest of the morning telling the kids no they couldn't go to the bathroom until the first kid came back, and meanwhile keep copying those words."

"But she didn't fire you?"

"No, she just handed me a manila folder full of rexograph masters and told me to make enough copies for those kids to be busy every minute of every day until I figured out something better to do with them."


     – Meredith Sue Willis, Trespassers (Hamilton Stone Editions, 1997), pp. 62 - 63.

 

 

 

 

From Chapter One, Susan

....Lately she had begun to forget what she was reading. She knew the book in her hands was not a classic, and she was pretty sure it wasn't a biography, because she could remember being sad when she finished the stack of biographies: Marilyn Monroe and Judy Garland and Eleanor of Aquitaine. The book was not a romance either, because she had let Dwight and Fern throw those away when they moved back to western Massachusetts. She could feel herself getting closer: tracking down the title. She remembered her conviction that the woman in the story was about to be killed. It wasn't anything in the plot that told her this, just reading so many books. The woman was about to be discovered in a pool of blood with a small red bullet hole in her forehead, or maybe her throat slashed like a second mouth. So it was a book with violence in it.

Susan's eyes fell on the rug: chocolate-green, it had been there since she was a little girl and her father had bought this cottage at Three Mile Lake. Pressed into the rug were fragments of potato chips, paper curls from spiral notebooks, chips of plastic from stepped-on toys. Her mother would never have stayed out here without a vacuum cleaner. Her mother would have refused. Even in the summer, her mother would never sleep over. They would come for a cook-out, and her dad would stay over so he could get up and fish in the dawn, and once or twice Susan got to sleep over, but her mother never did.

And if she had—thought Susan. If her mother had been stuck out here in winter, with no vacuum cleaner, there would not have been potato chips in the rug anyhow. Her mother had been large and thick, her hair white as long as Susan had known her, with an old-fashioned weak heart, but her mother would have been on her knees panting, huffing and puffing, picking at the bits of dirt. The kitchen sink would have been clear of dirty dishes and the drainer emptied.

This cottage, thought Susan. This cottage is a crime—

Elmore Leonard.

It came to her now. The book was an Elmore Leonard crime novel. There had been a stack of Elmore Leonards at the Paperback Exchange, and she had bought them for their titles. She liked them at first, especially the ones set in Miami, but after awhile it had begun to bother her, the throbbing certainty that the decent people were doomed. She wished for something not grim and not squalid.

She wished for her romances back. They were like bags of miniature chocolate bars that you ate till you felt sick, but she could read the same one over a month later and get the same pleasure from it. They were dependable friends. She wished very much for a friend. She felt vaguely that cleaning up the cottage would be possible if she had a friend. She still had her best books, Jane Eyre and Gone With the Wind, but they weren't the kind of friends who encourage you to clean the house.


 From Dwight's House and Other Stories, Meredith Sue Willis



Scene from Henry James, Portrait of a Lady

 

For full text see: [http://eserver.org/fiction/portrait.html
 
From The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James 1881. This edition is based upon the public-domain Virginia Tech etext.]
 

This is a fully dramatized, fairly typical early Henry James scene at the end of Chapter VII. Characters include Isabel Archer, a young American in England; her cousin Ralph Touchett; Lord Warburton, who appears to be falling in love with Isabel; old Mr. Touchett (he goes to bed); and Mrs. Touchett, who is eccentric but insistent on protecting Isabel's reputation.

 

Lord Warburton not only spent the night at Gardencourt, but he was persuaded to remain over the second day; and when the second day was ended he determined to postpone his departure till the morrow. During this period he addressed many of his remarks to Isabel, who accepted this evidence of his esteem with a very good grace. She found herself liking him extremely; the first impression he had made on her had had weight, but at the end of an evening spent in his society she scarce fell short of seeing him--though quite without luridity--as a hero of romance. She retired to rest with a sense of good fortune, with a quickened consciousness of possible felicities. "It's very nice to know two such charming people as those," she said, meaning by "those" her cousin and her cousin's friend. It must be added moreover that an incident had occurred which might have seemed to put her good-humour to the test. Mr. Touchett went to bed at half-past nine o'clock, but his wife remained in the drawing-room with the other members of the party. She prolonged her vigil for something less than an hour, and then, rising, observed to Isabel that it was time they should bid the gentlemen good-night. Isabel had as yet no desire to go to bed; the occasion wore, to her sense, a festive character, and feasts were not in the habit of terminating so early.

So, without further thought, she replied, very simply-

"Need I go, dear aunt? I'll come up in half an hour."

"It's impossible I should wait for you," Mrs. Touchett answered.

"Ah, you needn't wait! Ralph will light my candle," Isabel gaily engaged.

"I'll light your candle; do let me light your candle, Miss Archer!" Lord Warburton exclaimed. "Only I beg it shall not be before midnight."

Mrs. Touchett fixed her bright little eyes upon him a moment and transferred them coldly to her niece. "You can't stay alone with the gentlemen. You're not--you're not at your blest Albany, my dear."

Isabel rose, blushing. "I wish I were," she said.

"Oh, I say, mother!" Ralph broke out.

"My dear Mrs. Touchett!" Lord Warburton murmured.

"I didn't make your country, my lord," Mrs. Touchett said majestically. "I must take it as I find it."

"Can't I stay with my own cousin?" Isabel enquired.

"I'm not aware that Lord Warburton is your cousin."

"Perhaps I had better go to bed!" the visitor suggested. "That will arrange it."

Mrs. Touchett gave a little look of despair and sat down again. "Oh, if it's necessary I'll stay up till midnight."

Ralph meanwhile handed Isabel her candlestick. He had been watching her; it had seemed to him her temper was involved--an accident that might be interesting. But if he had expected anything of a flare he was disappointed, for the girl simply laughed a little, nodded good-night and withdrew accompanied by her aunt. For himself he was annoyed at his mother, though he thought she was right. Above-stairs the two ladies separated at Mrs. Touchett's door. Isabel had said nothing on her way up.

"Of course you're vexed at my interfering with you," said Mrs. Touchett.

Isabel considered. "I'm not vexed, but I'm surprised--and a good deal mystified. Wasn't it proper I should remain in the drawing-room?"

"Not in the least. Young girls here--in decent houses--don't sit alone with the gentlemen late at night."

"You were very right to tell me then," said Isabel. "I don't understand it, but I'm very glad to know it."

"I shall always tell you," her aunt answered, "whenever I see you taking what seems to me too much liberty."

 "Pray do; but I don't say I shall always think your remonstrance just."

"Very likely not. You're too fond of your own ways."

"Yes, I think I'm very fond of them. But I always want to know the things one shouldn't do."

"So as to do them?" asked her aunt.

"So as to choose," said Isabel.


Note the longish, slow narrative set-up; the scene itself is mostly dramatized in near-real time with dialogue. It ends with a pointed exchange of dialogue. There is also a little big of gesture described and a flash into Ralph Touchett's consciousness. This passage is nineteenth century omniscient point of view.

 

 

 

Ideas for Structural Strategies for Novels and Other Creative Narrative

-- The Hero's Journey as story structure: http://www.thewritersjourney.com/hero%27s_journey.htm#Memo

 

-- The hypothetical method for creating a plot: Make up a hypothetical or test plot. Write down a beginning, middle, and end. Write as if that made-up plot were your plot, but be ready at any moment to change it. This gives you a structure to work with (especially an end point) but gives preference to changes that your imagination might come up with.

 

-- Structural Strategies for Multi-plot novels:

 

 

Structural Strategies for the Multiple-Plot Novel

Adapted from Debbie Lee Wesselmann

 

These notes on multiple-plot novels are excerpted and summarized from “Structural Strategies for the Multiple-Plot Novel” by Debbie Lee Wesselmann, The Writers’ Chronicle, Volume 38, Number 5.

 

Why do some novelists veer from the Freitag’s Pyramid pattern of structure in which there is a single rising action, climax, and falling action? What unites such writers, says Wesselmann, is “ambition: the desire to tell a story that encompasses a broader world.” This kind of novel “skips from plot to plot and ...contains multiple conflicts, essentially creating a collage of narrative.” If there is no compelling connection, of course– which might be a super-plot connecting the lesser plots, or an architectonic connection– then the multiple plots become mere parallel stories and not a novel at all. “In the absence of a sole driving conflict, the novel must rely more heavily on its structure and the urgency of its characterizations.”

Wesselmann discusses several examples of multi-plot novels, and uses metaphors to describe the several types. Her first type is the braid “where three separate narratives are neatly and regularly alternated so the effect is a tight wrapping of story. A fine example of this structural strategy can be found in The Hours by Michael Cunningham. The pattern becomes immediately apparent as one pages through the chapter titles following the prologue: ‘Mrs. Dalloway,’ ‘Mrs. Woolf,’ Mrs. Brown,’‘Mrs. Dalloway,’ ‘Mrs. Woolf,’ Mrs. Brown,’ etc.” It is Wesselmann’s contention that the braiding technique elevates this novel from three stories into a single larger, more powerful story, even though the explicit connections between the three plot threads are not especially close because the stories are widely separated in time and space.

Her second type of multi-plot novel is the whirlpool that funnels toward a single scene that unites everything. Her example here is Richard Russo’s Empire Falls, in which the several plots seem to unfold at a leisurely, even quiet pace. Everything is, however, sucked together at the end in an act of violence. It is also important to note here that there is considerable unity of time and place in the novel. She includes Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections as one of these whirlpool/funnel plots, which, “unlike the braided narrative, which switches frequently and regularly between stories...invests more space to each story, and thus relies on internal conflict and development to give [the] novel its sense of urgency.” This technique, she says, gives the reader a sense of predestination as it points “not toward what happened before but toward the future.”

The hourglass is a structure in which two apparently separate plots come together and then diverge again, as in Jeanette Winterson’s The Passion. The coming together and going apart can become a theme as well as a structure.

She next presents a multi-plot structure that imitates a bicycle wheel. First, she describes many spokes centering around a fixed hub that is a single anchor of place and time from which the characters and their stories radiate into the past. Her example here is Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient. A bicycle wheel in motion is Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon, with the spokes sometimes pointing into the future as well as into the past, and the hub being not a place as in The English Patient, but an individual human being. Her final type of multi-plot novel is nesting dolls, in which various voices and frame stories enclose other voices and other stories.

Says Wesselmann: “Writers wishing to explore a few points-of-view while maintaining more traditional plot and thematic development will find the braided form attractive, while those wanting to create the shock of a single moment might consider the hour glass or the funnel architecture.” The bicycle wheel and nesting dolls might work best for a heavily conceptual novel. “Above all, the structure should allow the reader a clearer path to understanding the writer’s vision, and, in doing so, should create a fictional world that resonates beyond the capability of a single plot.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

Free Indirect Speech

 

For readers who may not be familiar with this term, let me give a very simple example. “Is that the clock striking twelve?” Cinderella exclaimed. “Dear me, I shall be late.” That is a combination of direct or quoted speech and a narrator’s description. “Cinderella enquired if the clock was striking twelve and expressed a fear that she would be late” is reported or indirect speech, in which the same information is conveyed but the individuality of the characters’ voice is suppressed by the narrator’s. “Was that the clock striking twelve? She would be late” is free indirect speech. Cinderella’s concern is now a silent, private thought, expressed in her own words, to which we are given access without the overt mediation of a narrator. Grammatically it requires a narrator’s tag, such as “she asked herself,” “she told herself,” but we take this as understood. Hence it is termed “free.” The effect is to locate the narative in Cinderella’s consciousness.

                                           David Lodge, CONSCIOUSNESS AND THE NOVEL, page 37.

 

 

 

 

 

Flashback sample

 

In this sample from Binnie Kirshenbaum's Pure Poetry, a character is telling about how she calls her father every Tuesday and the conversation goes just the same. As soon as she has summarized this typical conversation, she goes into detailed quotations of a remembered conversation with her therapist when she found out her mother was dying:

     

 

 

         – Binnie Kirshenbaum Pure Poetry (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000), p.83-84

 

 

 

 

     


Three Monologues

 

I am twenty-six inches tall, shapely and well proportioned, my head perhaps a trifle too large. My hair is not black like the others, but reddish, very stiff and thick, drawn back from my temples and the broad but not especially lofty brow. My face is beardless, but otherwise just like that of other men. My eyebrows meet. My bodily strength is considerable, particularly if I am annoyed. When the wrestling match was arranged between Jehosophat and myself I forced him onto his back after twenty minutes and strangled him. Since then I have been the only dwarf in this court.

-- Par Lagerkvist, The Dwarf

.

 

I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids--and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as thought I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they se only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination--indeed, everything and anything except me.

-- Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

.

 

"Who will it hit--Mikhaylov or me? Or both of us? And if me, whereabouts? If it's the head then I'm done for; but if it's the leg, they'll cut it off, and I'll certainly ask for chloroform and I may survive. But maybe only Mikhaylov will be hit, then I'll be able to tell how we were walking side by side, and he was killed and I was splashed with blood. No, it's nearer me... it'll be me." Then he remembered the twelve roubles he owed Mikhaylov, remembered also a debt in Petersburg which should have been paid long ago; a gypsy song he had sung the night before came into his head; the woman he loved appeared in his imagination wearing a bonnet with lilac ribbons; ...."But perhaps it won't explode," he thought, and with a desperate resolve tried to open his eyes. But at that moment a red fire pierced his eyes through his still closed eyelids....

-- Lev Tolstoy, in Sevastopol Sketches

.

.

One Self-Publishing Story

Writer Marion Cuba tells this story of how she chose a company to produce her book:

 

After doing research on self-publishing companies—almost going with one that clearly wasn’t going to give my book the time required—I read a book rating the various pod (print-on-demand) publishers. Booklocker was the one most highly recommended on value, quality, an advantageous contract, and its own website (considered an asset). I went with Booklocker.com and had—and continue to have—an excellent experience.

One thing that is different from other pod publishers is that Booklocker.com rejects about 90% of the writers who apply. They wish to take authors who fill certain requirements. Why? Because they wish to have writers who will sell a good amount of books. Other pod’s take anyone, thus making their money from volume with no investment in how many books an author will sell.

To be accepted at Booklocker, a writer DOES have to pledge to do a lot of work. And, it IS a lot of work.

First of all, your manuscript has to pass muster.

You must also indicate your plans to market the book; Booklocker doesn’t try to “upsell” you on their own marketing services as other pod’s do.

You never communicate with them by phone! Everything is done via e-mail—including payment, corrections, orders, questions. Even, using their template, the manuscript. I for one had to learn all of this—broke my head over it, actually—but I got the product I wanted.

They would have provided an individual cover at a price, or a template cover (oft-used) for a bit less. I happened to have located an art director whose work I admired and got him to do the cover. I therefore paid less to Booklocker.

My book was completely professional looking. And, unlike the other pod publishers, I did not have to use Booklocker’s name, thus identifying me at once as a self-publisher. I was free to use a name I chose.

I was able to obtain many reviews, book readings, blurbs, and pr for my novel, Shanghai Legacy. I do believe this was due to my hard work of marketing, outreach, and my subsequent website, www.shanghailegacy.com. But I am sure the production quality of the book and of Booklocker’s constant advice, support, and suggestions was a huge part of my success. 

 

Marion Cuba

Author of Shanghai Legacy

www.shanghailegacy.com

Bert Murray on Working with CreateSpace:

 

"Createspace...was a very good experience. They let you call them on the phone. You are assigned a team to work with and you can call a hundred times until all your questions are answered. They are polite, friendly and have an answer for all your questions. I've worked for a few fortune 500 publishing companies selling academic books to schools and public libraries during my business career. I guess I was expecting a self publishing company to be difficult to work with. I was wrong. Createspace is easy to work with and they do a great job helping you make your book. In my opinion, they are an option anyone who is considering self publishing should consider."

 

 

 

Grammar Hints for Fiction & Memoir Writers

Here are a few grammar issues that come up for writers of fiction, memoir, and other forms of prose narrative. Most of them are about tense and dialogue.
1. Drop “had” once the past perfect tense is established in a flashback:

He walked into Chico’s Pulqueria. He had last walked in there some twenty years ago, which was also the last time he saw Miranda. That night she was wearing a tight red dress and singing “Cielito Lindo.”

 

It would be also correct grammatically, of course to say:

 

He walked into Chico’s Pulqueria. He had last walked in there some twenty years ago, which had also been the last time he saw Miranda. That night she had been wearing a tight red dress and singing “Cielito Lindo.”

 

The choice is the writer’s, but since the point in fiction is story telling, it is usually enough to establish that we’ve gone back in time and then tell the story there. (For those who really LIKE grammar, you can learn more about the use of the past perfect tense online at http://www.englishpage.com/verbpage/pastperfect.html as well as elsewhere on the web. It is my opinion, however, that for purposes of writing fiction and personal narrative and memoir, it is only necessary occasionally).

 

2. Try to use less formal grammar within quotation marks, as in people’s actual quoted speech. In natural speech, for example, English speakers rarely say “I will be there.” They almost always use contractions like “I’ll be there!” An exception would be for strong emphasis: “I will be there come hell or high water!.” This is actually useful as an expression of emotion and intensity, so it's good to be able to make the distinction.
3. In passages of dialogue, by convention, each speaker gets a whole paragraph whether it is a single word or a half a page of combined action, thoughts, and dialogue, as below:

I watched my new friend Robby. He seemed to be in his own world, as if it was hard for him to come back from wherever he was.

He cleared his throat and said, "That's another wonderful coincidence."

"What is?"

"Jesus was Jewish too."

My God he's dumb, I thought. Unless he was on Thorazine. That was always possible. "Listen, Robby. You're a very nice young person, and I hope you have a happy birthday, but I don't want to mislead you. Religion is the last thing I'm interested in right now. Food, a job, maybe sex, but not religion. I have a deep debt to my once and future therapist and I've pretty much maxed out my Visa and MasterCards. Does Jesus do financial planning?" I've never had a lot of patience for Dumb.

 

 

 


 
 
 
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