Karinwritesdangerously

As a fiction writer you will often be working through ‘some observing consciousness.’ Yet when you… ask readers to step back and observe the observer — to look at rather than through the character — you start to tell-not-show and rip us briefly out of the scene.”
Janet Burroway, Writing Fiction

Skilled writers employ an artful combination of showing and telling to convey necessary information while keeping a reader engaged and turning the page. But as we strive to balance these two forms of story sharing, there’s a fine line between letting readers observe a character and letting them actually experience the scene through the character’s eyes. Consider these two examples:

1) She stood at the cracked open window and saw a cat dart under a picnic table. She noticed the way its tail swished, back and forth, back and forth. It reminded her of a pendulum.

2) She stood at the cracked open window. A cat darted under a picnic table. Its tail swished back and forth, back and forth, a pendulum.

In paragraph 1, the words “saw,” “noticed,” and “reminded,” all act as filters — barriers that create emotional distance. In paragraph 2, filter words are removed and we see the action through the character’s eyes, not by watching her watching the action.

Filter words are often used in nonfiction, such as biography, because it’s impossible to verify what a character might have seen or felt. In fiction, filter words can seem deceptively useful. It’s easy to let them creep into our prose, but excising them can make our stories tighter and emotionally more affecting.

Here’s a simple exercise: Take a few paragraphs of your work and circle any filter words you spot, including: “saw,” “heard,” “thought,” “watched,” “seemed,” “felt,” “noticed,” and “remembered.” Then read each sentence with the filters and without them and note the difference. If you do this consisently, you’ll become more and more attuned to when and how you use filters in your work. Write on!

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« I think so much of writing is about the courage to express ourselves, to be true to our own voice, to find our vision, our voice, and put it out there. Also, allow yourself to write badly in the beginning. That’s good tried and true advice. And then let it evolve as you rewrite. » Sue Monk Kidd 

Author of The Secret Life of Bees, her highly acclaimed debut novel set in the South in the 1960’s, Sue also penned a historical novel, The Invention of Wings, which is set in 19th century South Carolina and focuses on the lives of the Grimke sisters, legendary abolitionists. Here, she describes her writing process:

Incubating ideas: “An idea comes to me from the inside out, and I will play with it. If I play with it awhile and it really starts to sprout a story, then I know it’s a novel I can really write.” The Secret Life of Bees started with the image of a girl lying in bed and bees flying around the room. Her imagination took off and she “just played with it fro a long time, and it really started to create a story.”

Writing strategy: Sue likes to let her ideas simmer, but once she starts writing, a disciplined approach kicks in: “I keep banker’s hours. I work every day, immersed in the whole thing, really working with my craft in a disciplined way but allowing for spontaneous, mysterious inspiration to come.”

Inciting questions: “My novels usually start with two questions: ‘Who is my character?’ ‘What does my character want?’ The whole story will flow out of the answers I’m able to bring to those two questions.” 

Researching: Sue did about six months of research before she began writing The Invention of Wings — traveling to historic sites, reading primary sources and biographies. “In writing a historical novel, detail is everything. You want to create this authentic world where readers can feel like they can see it, feel it, hear it.”

Revision: I rewrite as I go. It’s a slower process, but somehow that works best for me. I allow myself to rewrite and rewrite and rewrite a chapter, and then I have a certain moment when I realize that yes, now, it’s exactly what I want it to be and I can go on.”

Finding the « courage to express ourselves, to find our vision, our voice » — that’s what writing dangerously is all about! And what a fascinating revision approach Sue has! Something to ponder and play with as we all write on!

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When you’ve been working on a major writing project — one that’s consumed significant amounts of time and energy — it’s very easy to shift into overdrive and begin overwriting. I know, because there have been several times during the revision of my children’s novel where I’ve come perilously close to doing this and a few instances where I stepped over the line. So how do you know when you’re really done with what seems to be a final revision? 

When is enough enough? A few hard-won tips from the frontlines:

STOP before your plot gets too unwieldy: I started my novel with a handful of characters and an inciting incident and basically wrote my way into a plot. Once I wrote my first draft, I realized that my plot was jerry-built. While it worked well in some places, it was cumbersome in others. In this latest revision, I’ve created a much stronger story arc. But as I wrapped up this latest round of changes, I began to tinker with a plot again — adding a twist here, and a twist there. While some of these worked, I recently realized that I was in danger of overcomplicating my story. So I stopped.

STOP before you create too many characters: As your story deepens and becomes richer, the temptation to add characters can be almost overwhelming. But if you give in to it, you can end up writing a new version of War and Peace, with so many characters and subplots that most of your readers won’t be able or even interested in keeping them all straight. Better to put your energy into building up your main characters than letting your bit players grow like Topsy. 

STOP before your theme is muddied or lost: If you write past the point when you should have stopped, you run the danger of obscuring or even losing the “big picture” — the overarching theme(s) of the story you set out to tell. I think this happens most often when we lose confidence in our original vision or simply lose sight of it because we’ve written past it because we’re in overdrive and can’t stop ourselves from wanting to make sure that everyone will absolutely know what we were trying to say. So instead of letting our story tell our story, we try to tell it — and can’t see the forest for the trees. 

STOP before your tinkering damages instead of improves: This is a tough tendency to put the brakes on, because it’s so tempting. Believe me, I know the feeling! But after years of writing, I’ve learned to recognize when my puttering around is making things worse instead of better. When I see this happening, I force myself to stop because I know that the end result is going to be that I’ll waste a lot of time going back and restoring things that were actually better than what I ended up with because I couldn’t stop fussing. Avoid this! You are not helping yourself — or your story.

I hope some of this hard-won experiences proves helpful. If you have any warning signs that you’ve learned to heed on the road to wrapping up, I’d love to have you share them. Write on!

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A gathering of wisdom to spark our enjoyment and creativity! These words of wisdom come to us from Sarajane Giere, a cherished KWD reader and the award-winning author of “My Pilot,” a memoir:

“Aim at heaven and you get the earth thrown in. Aim at earth and you get neither.” C.C. Lewis

“We live not by things, but by the meanings of things. It is needful to transmit the passwords from generation to generation.” Antoine de St. Exupery

“With a child’s imagination, you can own half the world.” Neil Simon

“The greater the obstacle, the more glory in overcoming it.” Molders

“When friends failed or full palled or spirits flagged, there was my typewriter and there was my world, my oyster.” Edna Ferber

“Put your hero in a lake and every time he comes up for air, take your foot and shove him under again—wait until the end when you rescue him, unless it’s a tragedy, in which case, you hold him under for good.” Sinclair Lewis

“What takes place between reader and writer is ‘the exchange of dreams.’ A writer writes memories, dreams and lies. It makes no difference if it’s true—what matters most are the emotions.” Lois Lowry

“…characters, once conceived, have a willful habit of jumping the reservation and must be herded back into the boundaries of the story.” A.B. Guthrie

“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeing new landscapes, but in having new eyes.” Marcel Proust

“Style is the self, escaping into the pen.” E.B. White

Thank you, Sarajane! And now, inspired and emboldened, let’s all write on!

Drinking Alone Beneath the Moon

Li Po

Among the blossoms, a single jar of wine.
No one else here, I ladle it out myself.

Raising my cup, I toast the bright moon,
and facing my shadow makes friends three,

though moon has never understood wine,
and shadow only trails along behind me.

Kindred a moment with moon and shadow,
I’ve found a joy that must infuse spring:

I sing, and moon rocks back and forth;
I dance, and shadow tumbles into pieces.

Sober, we’re together and happy. Drunk,
we scatter away into our own directions.

Intimate forever, we’ll wander carefree
and meet again in Star River distances.

—Li Po, eighth century

Star River is the Milky Way

To find joy in work is to discover the fountain of youth.”
Pearl S. Buck

A cornucopia of writerly wisdom to brighten your day and inspire you! 

“Literature is my Utopia. Here I am not disenfranchised. No barrier of the senses shuts me out from the sweet, gracious discourse of my book-friends.” Helen Keller

“Write about winter in the summer. Describe Norway as Ibsen did, from a desk in Italy; describe Dublin as James Joyce did, from a desk in Paris. Willa Cather wrote her prairie novels in New York City, Mark Twain wrote Huckleberry Finn in Hartford, Connecticut. Recently, scholars have learned that Walt Whitman rarely left his room.”
Annie Dillard

“Just now I can feel that little quivering of the pen which has always foreshadowed the happy delivery of a good book.”
Emile Zola

“None of the writing is easy, but I no longer refuse to do it for fear that I’ll fail to get it right. It can never be right, I know; it can only be done.”
Nancy Mairs

“There are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before.”
Willa Cather

“A professional writer is an amateur who didn’t quit.”
Richard Bach

“The greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see something, and tell what he saw in a plain way.”
John Ruskin

“I still read everything aloud. I have a fundamental conviction that if a sentence cannot be read aloud with sincerity, conviction, and communicable emphasis, it’s not a good sentence. Good writing requires good rhythms and good words.”
Richard Marius

“The ear is the only true writer and the only true reader.”
Robert Frost

“I know you’ve heard it a thousand times before. But it’s true — hard work pays off. If you want to be good, you have to practice, practice, practice. If you don’t love something, then don’t do it.”
Ray Bradbury

May these words give our own words wings as we all write on!

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“To see what is in front of one’s nose requires a constant struggle.” George Orwell

Today, June 25, is George Orwell’s birthday. He was born in 1903. My dear friend Nancy Burke shares her June 25 birthday with him—what wonderful company to keep!

“Politics and the English Language,” George’s masterful essay on clear, compelling prose, is well worth reading whatever type of writing you aspire to. In concise, crystal-clear words, he identifies a number of ills that pepper poor writing. Here’s an overview:

Dying metaphors: Vivid metaphors assist thought, says George, “by evoking a visual image.” Worn-out metaphors, however, such as “no axe to grind” or “swan song,” are so overused that they’ve lost their evocative power.

Verbal false limbs: These are created when writers abandon clear, simple verbs such as “break,” or “stop” in favor of phrases, which consist of a noun or adjective “tacked onto a general-purpose verb.” The result? Filler phrases like: “have the effect of,” “play a leading part in,” or “serve the purpose of.”

Pretentious words: George was a stickler for clarity and he disliked two-bit words. Some of those he nominated in this category are: phenomenon, constitute, utilize, effective, virtual. In his view, these types of words are “used to dress up simple statements and give an air of scientific impartiality to biased judgments.”

Meaningless words: To George’s mind, many writers dilute the power of their prose by liberally sprinkling it with words so broad and abstract that they have little true meaning for the reader. Examples: values, natural, sentimental.

As a model of fresh, appealing language, George quotes a verse from Ecclesiastes: 

“I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favor to men of skill, but time and chance happeneth to them all.” 

This passage, George notes, contains “49 words but only 60 syllables.” It uses simple, everyday words, expresses six vivid images, and has only one phrase (“time and chance”) that could be viewed as vague.

What beautiful imagery and economy of style! May it inspire us all!

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On my walks around my hometown, I often think about whatever I’m writing. So it seems perfectly natural to me that I should attract not only ideas and fragments of phrases or poems, but also the means to set them down on paper, including pens and pencils, which I often find just waiting for me to rescue them.

Just as material stuff seems to expand to fill the space allotted to it, so it is with our writing life. The more mental space we devote to the pursuit of writing — the more we signal our commitment to writing to the universe through word and deed — the more ideas and relevant books and articles, and inspiring encounters we’ll begin to have.

Here’s an amazingly simple technique that my friend and mentor Rob Gilbert once suggested on his Success Hotline (973.743.4690): If you have the seed of an idea for a short story or play or novel that intrigues you, you can nurture it along by getting an everyday manila folder and carrying it around with you. Almost magically, you’ll find yourself attracting nuggets of information, glimmers of inspiration, snippets of conversation, and all manner of useful tidbits to stoke and sustain you. 

I’ve used this technique more than once and it’s always worked for me. Like many writers, I’m always awed and heartened by the way I seem to draw just what I need when I need it, or how some seemingly unrelated artistic endeavor supplies me with the missing link to a project I’m working on. These moments of synchronicity are not only to be cherished, but to be courted. So give your work the chance to thrive by focusing on it intently and you’ll be surprised at what you attract. Gifts frm the Universe are everywhere, just waiting for us. Write on!

Writing is mentally taxing and sometimes, your brain — or my brain, at least — doesn’t want to kick in and meet the demands I want to make of it. It craves a day off.

What to do, what to do?

I’ve learned a few things that might prove helpful if you (or someone you know) encounters this kind of setback:

Let go of your frustration: Getting frustrated doesn’t help. You can’t bully yourself into accomplishing something you consider productive, The more frustrated you become, the longer it takes to get past this kind of hurdle. So as my mentor and friend Dr. Rob Gilbert* says, Don’t get frustrated, get fascinated! Find the silver lining by slowing down.

Let go of your agenda: Once it becomes clear that, for whatever reason, you are on a different path. let your agenda go. Clinging to it will be counterproductive, so release it.

Go for a less-ambitious goal: Come up with a simpler goal and work toward it. If there’s small research project you need to finish as part of your revision, focus on getting it done. It’s probably straightforward and may involve surfing the ‘net, which is a pretty low-energy activity, Just find a reasonably productive activity and give your mind a break.

Get some rest: It’s more than likely that a slow day can be traced to a restless night, so hit the hay earlier tonight and see if a good night’s sleep will rev you up tomorrow.

Slow days don’t have to be “low” days. Just ride them out and write on!

* Check out Dr. Rob Gilbert’s fabulous Success Hotline: 973-743-4690!

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« The practice of any art has certain general requirements,
quite regardless of whether we deal with the art of carpentry,
medicine, or the art of love. » Erich Fromm

Or the art of writing. At first blush, The Art of Loving may seem like an odd guide to draw on for writing advice, yet it’s surprisingly apt. In the last chapter of this classic, Fromm lays out the ingredients for achieving excellence in any artistic endeavor. What a gift to us as we hone our craft! Reading the chapter is like attending a master class in mastery. Here are Fromm’s five keys to mastery:

Discipline: “I shall never be good at anything if I do not do it in a disciplined way; anything I do only ‘if I am in the mood’ may be a nice or amusing hobby, but I shall never become a master in that art.”

Concentration: “The activity at this very moment must be the only thing that matters, to which one is fully given. If one is concentrated, it matters little what one is doing; the important, as well as the unimportant things assume a new dimension of reality, because they have one’s full attention.”

Patience: “If one is after quick results, one never learns an art. Yet, for modern man, patience is as difficult to practice as discipline and concentration. Our whole industrial system fosters exactly the opposite: quickness.”

Supreme concern: “If the art is not something of supreme importance, the apprentice will never learn it. He will remain, at best, a good dilettante, but will never become a master.”

Devotion: “If one wants to become a master in any art, one’s whole life must be devoted to it, or at least related to it. One’s own person becomes an instrument in the practice of the art, and must be kept fit…”

Discipline. Concentration. Patience. Supreme concern. Devotion.

What a fabulous recipe for mastering our craft as we all write on!

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