Tag Archives: learning to write

April 17, 2015 · 12:21 pm

Best First LInes of Novels, Part 2

This is the second in my series of attempts to understand what makes the first lines of novels compelling. Post your own favorites!

Earlier, I wrote on Daphne du Maurier’s My Cousin Rachel. Today:

In the spring of that year an epidemic of rabies broke out in Ether County, Georgia.–Paris Trout by Pete Dexter

I don’t remember as much about this novel as I should, but ever since I’ve remembered this stunning first line.

The heart-stopping word, obviously, is “rabies.”

What does “rabies” conjure? Easy: madness. And that’s “trouble” with a capital M. It’s a special kind of madness, a diseased madness. The diseased among us, against whom we must lock our doors. I find myself reminded of that scene in To Kill a Mockingbird, both the book and the movie, when Atticus shoots the mad dog. That’s another element of the word’s force: something benign that moves freely through our lives suddenly begins to foam at the mouth and attack. Its eyes go flat and malevolent as it staggers toward us. We lock the door, but we cluster behind it, meeting those blank eyes.

And not just an isolated dog in the street. Dozens of them. Epidemics get everyone. Us.

So this is going to be a book about madness. And men in the street with shotguns. In the hot sun. The hot, bright sun that goes with the word “rabies” itself is part of the horror. This madness does not have to creep about at night. It can get us, make us part of the horror, in the least moment of inattention. It can reel toward us right in the middle of hanging out the wash.

The sentence tells us it’s spring, true, not hot summer. But “spring” becomes an ironic juxtaposition. The gasping heat of that dog in the sun intrudes implacably. Right in the glorious springtime, when we’re out picking dandelions.

A smaller component for which my interpretation may be a stretch: the verb “broke out.” Its metaphorical weight is arguably several-fold. We “break out” in boils—a pestilential visitation with Biblical undertones. But also, something that “breaks out” has been among us all along, inadequately (it turns out) contained. It has let itself loose upon us. Get the shotgun.

In support of this reading of the verb “broke out,” I posit how different this line would have read had it stated, “The people of Ether County, Georgia, experienced an occurrence of rabies that spring.”

Similarly, “In the spring of that year,” two anapests, themselves have a Biblical rhythm. An “old” rhythm, potentially mythic. Not the way you write on Facebook. Somebody wants to take you to a strange land.

Finally, to me, the choice of “Ether County” for a location also opens up images of those dangerous creeping-madness streets. “Georgia,” of course, calls up “hot sun.” I have special associations with rural Georgia that may be my own: tall grass in vacant lots alongside dirt roads past ancient sagging barns where wasps hum. Not everyone will experience quite these same connotations. But “ether”: ether is what they use when they want to dim your mind. Do things to you. Ether is dizzy and queasy. Under its influence, you will lose your way.

So the book will take us to a strange land that is superficially familiar, but where things we thought we’d contained can come at us. Where we will wander out into sunlight only to find it full of dark things.

All in one sentence. Sixteen words. A whole book is set up.

Leave a comment

Filed under Learning to write

Tagged as , , ,

April 1, 2015 · 3:25 pm

First Lines of Novels: What Works?

They used to hang men at Four Turnings in the old days.–My Cousin Rachel by Daphne du Maurier

In the spring of that year an epidemic of rabies broke out in Ether County, Georgia.–Paris Trout by Pete Dexter

We slept in what had once been the gymnasium.–The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood

It began the usual way, in the bathroom of the Lassimo Hotel.–A Visit from the Good Squad by Jennifer Egan

I’m collecting first line of novels that I think provide particularly good models and possibly rules of thumb for those of us hoping for just that one read. Why are these so important? I can’t help remembering my trip to the Backspace Conference in New York, sitting around a table for a “two-pages-two-minutes” critique with editors and agents. Reader after reader got stopped before getting past one-minute-one-page, or in some cases, thirty-seconds-one-paragraph. “This is too familiar,” said the agent. “I’ve heard this a million times before,” said the editor.

That experience impressed on me something my own experience as a browser in bookstores confirms: yes, the language of your whole book has to sing, but if you want people to pay the price of the concert, the first line has to be so high and clear and pure it blasts through their earphones as they’re passing on the street.

I thought I’d spend a few posts thinking about why these are examples of first lines that did that for me, in hopes of deriving some ideas as to how it’s done. I’d love it if readers would post their own favorites, with some speculation as to what makes the lines work. Be specific! Don’t just tell us “I like this” or “It works for me.” Why does it work? How does it work? So we can see whether we’re hitting your criteria in our own efforts.

Obviously, it’s not that the first line carries the book. The paragraphs that follow have to bear out the promise. But I do think that one strength of these lines is that they do make a promise. We read on to see if that promise is going to be kept.

Okay, the Daphne du Maurier line: what promise does it make?

It’s actually fairly simple at first glance–this is a haunted place. Only something bad can be set in motion here.

That promise resonates for me because I’m a firm believer in the truism that in narrative, only trouble is interesting. Promise your readers upcoming trouble in twelve simple words and they will at least finish the paragraph.

There’s more going on, though, I submit. This, like Rebecca, is to a great extent a Gothic novel, and “the old days” conjure the fatally romantic past that, in Gothic novels, no one will escape. The old days aren’t gone; they’re hovering in the shadow cast by this nameless “they” whose memory just won’t be expunged. The whole atmosphere of the book emerges: something looming. Its shadow is that of the noose.

I hear the rhythm of the sentence as well:

They used to HANG men /at Four TURNings /in the OLD days

It breaks into three parts, like a poetic stanza, with an accent on the next to last syllable of each phrase. We almost have three anapests, with a falling syllable after each. There’s all kinds of literary and neuro-cognitive speculation as to why rhythm captures us as it does; suffice it to note here that the accented moments are the central moments that almost deliver a message in themselves: HANG, TURN, OLD. Something old is going to turn on us and deliver us to that noose.

I’m going to finish the series before I try to generalize some rules from this example. I’m curious whether I’ll see the same things in all four.

4 Comments

Filed under Finding literary agents for writers, Learning to write, Working with literary editors, Writing and teaching writing

Tagged as , , , , , ,

March 26, 2015 · 1:06 pm

The Answer is 42

Having had the benefit of a nice road trip during which I was able to contemplate the issue I’ve been exploring in the last few posts—the virtues or lack thereof of letting learners figure things out for themselves—I’ve arrived at an unexpected conclusion. The answer to the question of whether this is the ideal pedagogical method, for teaching writing or many other things, is—drum roll—42!

No, seriously, the definitive answer is yes and no. Or, put differently, it depends. Or: on one hand, on the other. Or possibly: sometimes.

A quick recap: I’ve always wanted to learn programming. Told that Python was useful and accessible, I bought a $35 book. Within hours, I was just barely resisting the urge to hurl the book at the stupidly blinking computer screen. The author adopted the “throw them in and they’ll teach themselves to swim (or not)” school at its most extreme. He provided readers with code they were to dutifully copy, producing a simple game called “Find the Wumpus.” I copied, I played, I found the Wumpus. But throughout, I had to puzzle out for myself what different commands meant—for that matter, even how to write and run a command, which was one of the numerous things this author assumed I already knew how to do!

I showed this book to a mathematician friend adept at programming. He told me to go to Louisville and throw it off the Big 4 Bridge. “This is completely wrong. The way to teach programming is to provide short bits of code that illustrate specific commands and functions. Get another book.”

I already had, being a Very Smart Girl. I bought two on my Kindle. I perused the first one. Within just a few screens, I knew what operators were, and what some major ones did. I knew what functions were. (I already pretty much knew what variables were.) I knew the difference between a number and a string! (It’s just a matter of punctuation. If it’s inside quote marks, it’s “text” and it’s a “string,” Ain’t that cool?)

And yet.

I learned how to tell the computer to add 2 and 3 and get 5. I learned how to convert the price of an Apple computer into euros using functions. I learned how many spaces I could insert before a decimal.

No doubt there are people out there who need to do these things. Who want to do them. It was unclear to me why I would want to do them.

Here’s the upshot. The Find-the-Wumpus game, maddening though it was, Continue reading →

Leave a comment

Filed under College writing, Learning to write, Teaching writing, Writers' groups, Writing and teaching writing

Tagged as , , , , , , , ,

March 11, 2015 · 1:03 pm

Maybe Just a Tiny Bit More Rant. . . .

And some thoughts on what it means for writing.

Last time, I wrote about the tendency of the author of my beginning Python book (computer programming) to leave out what seemed to me simple yet rather foundational instructions for the beginners he was supposedly addressing, my implication being that he failed to understand his readers’ needs, thus undercutting the effectiveness of his text. I wanted to take the experience of trying to follow his directions toward a discussion of why (in my experience) many writers, including writers of fiction, seem to actively resent being asked to explain themselves to readers.

But I have a new gripe after working through Chapter 2. (I suppose I’ll have to take a vow not to collapse into a rant after every chapter! I do plan to buy another book to supplement this one, so if you were thinking of suggesting that. . . .)

In this chapter he gives you lots of steps. He gives you whole programs to copy into your text editor (characteristically without explaining that it’s in the text editor that you’ll find that rather essential “run” command!).

But along with these whole-cloth programs, does he tell you what you just did, why you did it, and how it worked?

You have probably intuited that no, he does not.

Nor does he define terms as consistently as he would have you believe. “Because the player enters a string instead of a number—” Excuse me. I most certainly entered a number. I assume he doesn’t mean we’re doing some version of string theory here.

He implies—actually more than implies—that he’s operating under the theory that readers will learn best by doing and then by figuring out the “grammar” of this language on their own as they go along. I think he’ll eventually tell me some of the stuff I want so much to know. In the Find-the-Wumpus game he has me coding, in “raw­_input(“>”),” what in the world is that little caret for? In “for i in cave_numbers” when you’re setting up caves that the player can see from a given cave, where did that “i” come from? Is it some arbitrary identifier? I could pick “s” or “m” just as easily? Maybe I should try the substitution and see what happens. But why not tell me instead of just dropping an unexplained item into the program for me to copy? Am I really better off figuring such things out on my own? Continue reading →

Leave a comment

Filed under College writing, Learning to write, Teaching writing, Writers' groups, Writing and teaching writing

Tagged as , , , , , , ,

March 2, 2015 · 9:03 pm

Bad Writing: A Very Small Rant

Very small.

Steven Pinker can get away with ranting about bad writing, but it remains to be seen whether I can. But since my rant more or less illustrates Pinker’s on a smaller canvas, possibly I may be indulged.

And I can only do so with a qualification: this particular aspect of bad writing is inherent—perhaps even inevitable—in one of the most difficult genres known to writers: explaining how to do something to someone who comes to the lesson relatively or even completely ignorant of the topic.

I’ve run into this aspect of bad writing a lot recently because I’ve been teaching myself new stuff. Like GIMP. Like Python. It’s the particular Python experience I now rant about. And I do so, believe it or not, with sympathy for the challenges faced by anyone who dares explain virtually anything involving a computer.

The book cost $35.00. It has lots of sweet little cartoons. But its writer lacks that single magic ingredient of good writing. He can’t imagine his readers’ minds.

Now, no one can ever completely enter and know another’s mind. If we could, we’d be each other. It’s the growing knowledge of difference that makes the existence of an “I” possible. (I didn’t make this up. I got it, in roundabout ways, from Emmanual Levinas.) But like it or not, writing for others, writing to be read, demands at some point some tangents of contact between the writer’s mind and the reader’s. Otherwise, we have gibberish. True, between some minds there never is such contact, and between those writers and readers there is gibberish. (I submit that the intersection, when it can be created, is where what is called “rhetoric” takes place.) But on to my rant.

Having downloaded and installed the program and having read in the introduction how welcoming a beginner like me would find Python, I proceeded to follow the directions for setting up the program on my Mac. Never mind that there were pages and pages of instructions for PC users and only a couple of paragraphs on Macs that instructed me to go back and read the pages on Linux. I eventually did find the screens that showed up in the figures, although the screen that came up when I dutifully clicked “Update Shell Profile” was supposed to “run” and as far as I could tell it just sat there, no matter what keys I plunked. At this point, I was already starting to seethe.

He kept telling me to “run” things in a “terminal.” He kept talking about “running” programs from the “command line.”

Well, I got the word “terminal” to show up in the menu line (still not sure how I managed it or whether I can do it again), so I assumed that the box that opened, with various references to my name and the date in plain text, was the “terminal.” But nowhere was there any apparent command I could click to “run” anything. And a “command line”? I looked in vain for the blinking cursor I remember from my short experience with Basic (and of course Wordstar) from 30 years ago. At the end of the text in the “terminal” was a little box that sat immobile no matter what I did.

I can hear you out there, your derisive mocking howls. But you’re the problem! You really do not want people like me to learn your secrets. You want to protect your arcane universe from the uninitiated (cf. Pinker).

But I foxed you.

After some forty-five minutes of reading and rereading the chapter, looking in vain for some definitions or some moment when he said, “In order to run a program, you do this and then this,” I conjured from somewhere some basic intuition born of those 30+ years of mud-wrestling with computers, often armed with nothing but my instincts and willingness to push buttons at random. I thought, I wonder if that little box is the “command” icon. What happens if I try to type there? And then, with the lines of the little demo program waiting, inert but there, I did what intuition sweetly whispered: I hit return.

Now I ask you, what would it have cost to tell me those two things?

Let me quote from the back cover: “Even if you’ve never written a line of code before, you’ll be writing real Python apps in just an hour or two.”

Sure.

Another, very quick, related example: my first Adobe Connect session. No one conducting the session seems to have even considered the possibility that some in the audience had never been in that environment before. I missed the first twenty minutes of the presentation trying to figure out the basic layout, which proved to be accessible and useful with just the slightest bit of orientation.

There. I’ve said it. Done.

Except that this struggle to sense and foresee our readers’ needs is so fundamental to writing to be read that we ignore it at our peril. But why is ignoring it (or at least not recognizing it) so tempting, such a common phenomenon? I have a completely unprovable theory, which I’ll explain (with numbered steps) next time.

 

Leave a comment

Filed under Learning to write, Writing and teaching writing

Tagged as , ,

February 19, 2015 · 11:33 am

Writing the Synopsis: Or, What Took Me So Long?

I’ve been away for a few days, and if you’ve been watching the weather reports, you know what I spent much of the day before yesterday dealing with–yes, it’s a four-letter word beginning with “S.”

I’ve also been dealing with an eight-letter word beginning with “S”: “Synopsis.” I’ve never met a writer yet who liked dealing with synopses. I’ve always believed I couldn’t write them–just didn’t get it. I’d tell what I thought was the story I’d told, only to have readers respond, “I’m totally confused.”

I faced the need to confront the demon synopsis because I’m trying to get my out-of-print suspense novels up as e-books, and I need covers. I had some ideas of my own, but my excellent and candid volunteer critics (or should I say “impressed” critics in the sense that sailors off merchant ships were once impressed into the British navy) generally agreed that I should solicit ideas from actual designers. At my university, we have students who do superb work. But could I ask students to read two fairly hefty novels between class assignments? Uh, no, not if I want to get the books up any time soon. Hence, synopses.

My first efforts were on a par with my earlier efforts. A masochistic colleague whose opinion I value actually volunteered to read the books and write the things for me. I spared him: read two hefty books between grading assignments in four (yes, four!) writing classes?!!! So he read the synopses I produced. I reproduce here the bare bones of this experience, because it was a eureka experience. For the first time, I was like, “Oh!” It’s what can happen when you have a truly good reader who is willing to tell you the truth and you are ready to listen–a crucial component, but I was desperate. They always want a synopsis. Who wants two pages to be the death of a three-hundred-page gem?

Here is the heart of what my colleague Tom O’Neal wrote for me:

Continue reading →

3 Comments

Filed under Finding literary agents for writers, Learning to write, Self-publishing, Teaching writing, Working with literary editors, Writing and teaching writing

Tagged as , , , , , , , , , , ,

February 5, 2015 · 4:23 pm

I’m in Like Flint

I’ve just been reading Becky Lerner’s The Forest for the Trees: An Editor’s Advice to Writers. At least in the first few chapters, Lerner, a poet-turned-editor-turned-agent (and I gather still all of these things), offers advice at one end of a continuum I’ve noticed. Hers is what I would call a “soft” book for writers: strong on inspiration, on the emotional landscape of writing, on how you’ll know if you’re really meant to write and how to persevere through the cold winter of a writer’s disenchantment. At the other end of the continuum: books like Michael Larson’s book on non-fiction proposals, which I downloaded for help writing my proposal for Survive College Writing (a future bestseller currently interred in a massive data dump of all the things I want to say to the students I saw struggle so hard). Larson is in the “how-to” school; this is what you do and this is what it should look like, down to how long paragraphs should be. Quit yer belly-achin’ and just get going. What’s so damn hard?

In the middle I’d place Susan Rabiner’s Thinking Like Your Editor: How to Write Great Serious Nonfiction and Get It Published. This claims to be a how-to, but there’s a good amount of inspiration here–for example, she maintains that if you’re passionate about your topic, your heart will beat through your prose. But there’s also some of that hard-headed get-on-with=it spirit: All the passion in the world won’t help if you don’t do these X or Y Most Important Things.

Reading Lerner, I find myself thinking about the many conferences I’ve attended over the years. Lerner tells ms, forget about writing the next X or Y; forget about “Marley and Me meets ET.” Write what you’re obsessive about, what haunts you. Write the book that’s your book. Thus far, the implication is that if anything is going to sell and hit, that’s the book that will.

The real question is, where’s that line between “what we’ve seen before” and “we don’t know what the heck it is”? Lerner will presumably tell me if I’ve just gone too far, according to one of the Amazon reviews. I will await the event.

If I were in the inspiration queue–I’m not exactly; I know I’ll always write–I would find some solace in sentences like these from Lerner:

“It takes a certain kind of person to understand and cope with rejection as an appraisal instead of a judgment.” (See this post for another take on criticism of our work.)

“[T]he degree of one’s perseverance is the best predictor of success.”

I value information about what’s not working more than ever, and God knows, I persevere.

 

Leave a comment

Filed under Finding literary agents for writers, Learning to write, looking for literary editors and publishers, Myths and Truths for writers, Working with literary editors, Writers' conferences

Tagged as , , , , , , , , ,

January 16, 2015 · 2:55 pm

Writers’ Conference Saga: Pre-Coda

My abortive meeting with my assigned editor took place on the penultimate afternoon of the conference. The next morning we were to finish up in a group summary meeting with Our Leader.

For some reason I can’t recall, I was eager to meet with him one more time. I made my way to the conference site before daylight in order to be at the front of the line. Along with a woman with whom I had been friendly, I managed to get a slot at the table as we ate breakfast in a crowded coffee shop. What in the world did I want from him at that point? To salvage something from the ruins of my experience (“Is it time travel? Reincarnation? Oh, wait, he must be already dead!”)? To pitch my other book? Who knows.

I do remember that he rewrote my friend’s pitch, ad hoc, in one breath, and that, were I a fan of such topics, I would have found his version immeasurably better. She still had her meeting ahead of her. So she faced the day armed with his words.

I remember as well talking about my other book, my “Sarah” book. He began excitedly weaving a resolution to the deep personal crisis Sarah faces, one that in my formulation would carry her through three books, each with its own sub-crisis and plot. I said, “That sounds like something to consider for the third book.”

“Oh, no,” he responded. “That’s the first book!”

I have already written the first book. I said, “I write my own books, thanks.”

I don’t recall that he took offense at this. Perhaps he secretly did.

Our final meeting consisted of congratulations for all those (most) who had been invited to submit manuscripts to major New York houses. This fortunate group included my friend, who was now supposed to write the book she had been given. I think he generously pretended that I had been given permission to send along my Sarah book. Then he said something I didn’t expect.

“I worry,” he said, “that you’ll all send in your stuff before it’s ready. Don’t do that. Make sure it’s ready.”

My perhaps ungenerous translation: “My business is running these workshops. I have to be able to say that publications come out of them. Most of you have no manuscripts, just ideas. Most of you have never produced anything like a book-length manuscript. You don’t actually know what you’re getting into. Please, some of you, take the time to write something that won’t waste these editors’ time.”

I find myself thinking about several things, remembering this comment. We were apparently selected to attend, to have the chance to meet with REAL EDITORS, on the basis of a one-page synopsis and a bio. Such application materials gave us the chance to make a preliminary pitch and gave the conference planners a chance to verify that we could actually construct reasonable English prose. But I wonder: is that enough? Are you really ready to write a book if you can sell an idea?

I have learned enough about my writing process to know, that for me, the answer is an emphatic NO. For me, there is nothing so demoralizing as knowing that the book isn’t working but that I must deliver. Write a draft. Share the draft with a conscientious critique group. Yes, it takes more time, with no more guarantees of eventual attention from an agent or publisher than if I had simply mailed off the first chapter and a treatment. But it makes the process rewarding. I can write a book that has a chance of working. Not being a genius, and not having a formula, for me, that is feat enough.

Leave a comment

Filed under Learning to write, Myths and Truths for writers, Writers' conferences

Tagged as , , , , , , , , , ,

December 5, 2014 · 4:12 pm

Digression Again: Struggling with Writing

I’ve been researching how people learn to write and what can stand in their way. My interest in this topic stems, first, from my own experiences as a college writing teacher (with a PhD in “composition studies”), and second, a book project I’m working on for college students facing their first college writing class, whether as recent high-school graduates or returning adults.

A lot of research indicates that, as with many other cognitive functions, early experiences matter. This seems to be particularly true for writing. After all, writing is not “natural.” No one is “hard-wired” to do it, as we all seem to be for speech. Neuroscientist Stanislaus Dehaene explains current theory suggesting that our brains must redirect neural pathways “designed” for other functions into the unnatural and unevolved task of connecting visual images with the sounds that then translate into the words we’re familiar with. The earlier we recognize that these visual stimuli are important components of our environments and have meaning, the more likely this process will occur when our brains are most plastic, most ready to manage this redirection. Intuitively it makes sense that people who had the richest literacy experiences from the earliest ages will have the most time to hone this use of their brains.

It’s also clear that writing makes huge demands on our cognitive resources. I’m reading research that indicates that even such tasks as typing, when they’re not largely automatic, steal working memory and cognitive energy from the higher-order processes that go into more complex writing tasks. And when we’re dealing with multiple tasks with high cognitive load, like accessing new, complex material, something has to give.

So my conundrum: Do I tell potential readers of my book on college writing that if they missed out in those early years, they’re doomed?

Continue reading →

Leave a comment

Filed under College writing, Learning to write, Teaching writing, Writing and teaching writing

Tagged as , , , ,

November 23, 2014 · 8:37 pm

Digression: In Praise of My Writing Group

A good writing group keeps you honest. Good readers remind you that you can’t fall back on your genius. I guess if I were a genius, I wouldn’t need readers. From my keyboard to the mind of God.

No, a good group reminds you that you have to work at this stuff. It’s like riding my horse. I keep slipping back into old habits (right knee locking into the saddle, heel slipping up; taking back without realizing it in front of fences). My trainer’s “You’re doing it again” is the only way to create new mind/body memories and make them stick. Little by little I think they do.

So I go to my writing group with major revisions of The Drowned Man (the ms. I took to the conference I’ve been writing about—I’ll get back to that shortly). I decided that one tack would be to veer more toward the “literary.” Now, one thing I’ve learned is that I fall just a few pixels short of literary most of the time. But genre clearly doesn’t cut it. The answer to the “But what is it?” question confounds editors and agents every time. (Well, yes, it’s a sort of mystery, but no, it doesn’t have a knitting shop in it. Not that kind of mystery. Well, not that kind either. Darn.)

Anyway, I thought that even if I didn’t slip across the literary line, I could at least bump up the suspense with some piquant foreshadowing if I changed the point-of-view character. The POV character now telling the story knows what happened in the end, so he can drop some titillating portents here and there. I like the way this works. Problem: as my group told me, I liked his voice a little too much.

They said:

Get rid of the floating talking head. Move the action up front. (Remember, writing fiction depends on the ability to write scenes, not exposition, no matter how piquant.

Did I know this? Yes. Did I do it? Now I am.

Don’t dump a lot of names on us all at once. Get your readers invested in one or two main characters right away. Bring the others on stage when you can give them the stage time they need.

Did I know this? Yes. Did I do it? Now, yes.

Locate your opening scenes in place and time. Let your readers walk into a landscape or a room and meet a flesh-and-blood being (even if he does have to be a vampire). There’s a fine line between being mysterious for the sake of suspense (“I’m confident that that question is going to get answered”) and for the sake of being mysterious (“Who the hell is this person I’m having to listen to? Is there a reason I’m here getting vertigo in this mind fog? Help!”)

Did I know this? See above.

Let readers know early whose story it is. Okay, in someone else’s story told by a narrator (Nick Carraway, for example), readers may have to figure this out. But they should figure it out, IMHO, as they interpret the relationship between the narrator and the other characters. Who embarks on the major trajectory may change with events (and it can even be the reader, IMveryHO). And it quite often is the apparently peripheral character whose trajectory is the most interesting. But starting out in a text, you haven’t won the willingness of readers to do that kind of interpretative work. They want to get started on a road, in somebody’s tracks, before the feral pigs start jumping out of the woods at them (I ended up taking the feral pigs out of my book: see “Deleted Scenes”).

Did I know this? Ditto.

Give readers a sense of something at stake. Okay, they may not get to know right away just how much is at stake. But they need to know somebody’s in trouble, and why. I may still need to work on this. Bellweather knows Michael’s in trouble from Page One and why. He’s telling readers so. But readers have to get a sense of this by themselves. I hope when I take my revisions to readers who weren’t there last time that I get a sense of whether I’ve met this mandate.

Did I know this? Well, yes, but it’s the hardest, least concrete of missions. What makes readers care? Well, someone in trouble. Yes. I want to think about that in tomorrow’s revisions. How do readers know Michael’s in trouble?

You really have to work at this stuff.

1 Comment

Filed under Learning to write, Teaching writing, Writers' groups, Writing and teaching writing

Tagged as , , , , , , , ,