Keeping Promises: a writer's manipulation of reader expectations

My next step in this interminable Writing project I've taken on is to take a piece of writing--an actual, published story--and tear it to bits and put it back together again in the way I've been trying to describe. For the sake of copyright I have chosen something in the public domain, and for the sake of your eyes and brains I've chosen something beautiful. I hope you like it as much as I do:

The Lady With the Dog, by Anton Chekhov

The edition I read in print years ago was called "The Lady With the Little Dog." Such are the dangers of translation. In either case, this is a story of a ... well, I don't want to spoil it for you. It's a lovely, clear, seemingly simple story with a raging subtext and a lot of unanswered questions. Read it today and I'll start hacking it to bits in my next post. (Nicely. This won't be like english class, I promise. It will be useful.)

(I say that knowing that some of you spend your lives, presumably happy, in english classrooms. Still.)

I recommend printing it off and reading it on paper if you possibly can. It's not that long and you'll get more out of it if you're not combating eye strain.

Before I get started on that I am going to say a bit about reader expectations, because the entire business of writing for an audience has to do with successfully raising and satisfying reader expectations. Every other aspect of writing is a tool meant to accomplish the one goal. Popular fiction does this in a straightforward fashion (I'm going to tell you a rip-roaring adventure story!), as does mainstream non-fiction (I'm going to give you information you need to know about breast cancer/the third trimester/the leaders of our political parties). In both cases, the author makes a promise, implicit or explicit, towards the beginning of the piece--and then they'd damn well better keep it, or their readers will be angry.

In more literary, seemingly less "clear" works, both the raising and satisfaction of expectations are more subtle, but still present. This isn't a hard and fast rule; for instance, the narrator of Life of Pi promises us "a story to make us believe in God, which is about as unsubtle as you can get. In that case, it's the working out of that expectation that takes patience and subtlety.

The only exception to the rule I can think of is that variety of meta-fiction where the point of the piece is to make you aware of the manipulation.

And yes, blogs do this too, regardless of the form or content. Subject blogs (parenting, politics, food, fashion, what have you) are the most straightforward: "I'm going to give you information you can use about x." But expectations are raised in personal blogs as well, although it might be something as subtle as "I'm going to tell you what it's like to be a middle-class married Canadian mother of two small children."

Let's look at a few well-known fiction examples to see how this works:

Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol:

"Marley was dead, to begin with." Following this first sentence is a page of description meant to cement this in the reader's mind. Marley's dead. Marley's really, really dead. Why? "There is no doubt that Marley was dead. This must be distinctly understood, or nothing wonderful can come of the story I am going to relate. If we were not perfectly convinced that Hamlet's father died before the play began, there would be nothing more remakrable in his taking a stroll at night, in an easterly wind, upon his own ramparts, than there would be in any other middle-aged gentleman rashly turning out after dark in a breezy spot...." Charles Dickens has now promised us a ghost story.

After establishing that Marley is really, truly, actually dead but will appear as a ghost at some point in the novel, Dickens turns his attention to Scrooge's character: "Oh! but he was a tightfisted hand at the grindstone, Scrooge! a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner! ... He carried his own low temperature always about with him; he iced his office in the dog days; and didn't thaw it one degree at Christmas." And there, by page 3 in my edition, we have the other two promises, bang-bang: This story will have something to do with Scrooge's selfish character and the season of Christmas. The first promise--"I'm going to give you a ghost!"--is the hook that gets the readers to go along with the second one for long enough to care about Scrooge and the other people in his life, so that Dickens has the reader's patience in working out what is essentially a story about redemption. But it's all there on the first three pages.

Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale:

"We slept in what had once been the gymnasium." This opening invites the reader to ask questions: who are we, why are we sleeping in a school, and why isn't it a gymnasium anymore? The primary function of such an opening is to get the reader curious enough about the answers to keep reading until the rest of the plot has hooked them--in this case, will she get out? will she get away?--but the answers to the questions raised by the first sentence are also central to the themes of the novel. (I'm hoping that the books I chose are well-enough known that I don't need to describe what those themes are; if not, feel free to ask.)

There are other hints in the first chapter, total 1 1/2 pages long. All the women sleeping in what used to be the gymnasium are women; their immediate guards are also women, with cattle-prods; the blankets "still" say U.S. on them, insinuating that the U.S. is no more; the school had been turned into a jail for these women, who were being kept there against their will. The cumulative effect of all of these drips of information is to promise the reader: "I am going to tell you how this happened." The second set of drips relates to the nascent resistance of the women kept captive: even under these conditions, they "touch each other's hands across the space. We learned to lip-read, our heads flat on the beds, turned sideways, watching each other's mouths. In this way, we exchanged names, from bed to bed." Atwood's promise here is: "I will tell you about how they resisted, how they survived, or tried to." Everything is there in the first 1 1/2 pages, the themes and the plot of the whole book.

And last, Anton Checkhov, The Lady with the Dog:

"IT was said that a new person had appeared on the sea-front: a lady with a little dog. Dmitri Dmitritch Gurov, who had by then been a fortnight at Yalta, and so was fairly at home there, had begun to take an interest in new arrivals."

You have already determined that the story has to do with this new lady and Dmitri.

"...by now his [Dmitri's] wife seemed half as old again as he. She was a tall, erect woman with dark eyebrows, staid and dignified, and, as she said of herself, intellectual. She read a great deal, used phonetic spelling, called her husband, not Dmitri, but Dimitri, and he secretly considered her unintelligent, narrow, inelegant, was afraid of her, and did not like to be at home. He had begun being unfaithful to her long ago -- had been unfaithful to her often, and, probably on that account, almost always spoke ill of women, and when they were talked about in his presence, used to call them 'the lower race.'"

And by now Checkhov has made his promise to you: this is a story about this man who is unfaithful to his wife and doesn't like women, and he's going to pursue this new lady with the dog; and whatever happens next is going to have an effect on his character, or at the very least on his impression of women. You might not have been conscious of this, but if you keep reading it's because this story is one that you are interested in. If Checkhov then went off and started telling you about the pomeranian and you never saw the lady again, you would consider the story a waste of your time.

Even the classic opening, "Once upon a time, there was a beautiful princess," tells you that something is going to happen to that princess. If it doesn't, you'll feel cheated. The writer raised your expectations and then didn't satisfy them.

This is a very broad, very general introduction. In longer works especially the raising and satisfying of expectations is constantly being worked out through subplots, scenes and even sentences. If you pick up a favourite novel or story you will see that the story the author promised you in the first few pages is the one they delivered, and that the author continued to make and keep promises all throughout the work.

I believe this is a writer's central responsibility to the reader: not to waste their time. Keep the promises you make. It's useful, then, to ask yourself when you are writing something: What have I promised? and Have I delivered it? This leaves a tangential but closely related question unexamined: Why should they care? or What are the stakes? If you'd like, you can try analyzing how the authors of these three pieces get people to care, how they raise the stakes so that the fake lives of fake people resonate with them enough that they're willing to put real life on hold to find out about it.

Posted by Andrea at 10:29 AM | Comments (3)

I

There are times when you start writing or thinking about something, and the Universe conspires to throw materials into your lap. The latest coincidence: an essay titled "The Guilty I" by Ander Monson in the September 2008 issue of The Believer magazine, about first-person narratives. I pulled a few quotes for the blog, not that I'm counting on any of you having a response:

"Asserting the primacy of I suggests that we should care about it because it is an I, because it has incurred slights at the hands of others, of the world. And we should care. Sure, I agree with that: everyone is special, deserving of attention and examination. And inhabiting their experience allows us to share it, know it. (This is called collective knowing.) But I still don't want to read what most people have to say about themselves if it's just to tell their story. I want it to be art, meaning that I want it transformed, juxtaposed, collaged--worked on like metal sculpture, each sentence hammered, gleaming, honed. For me, the sentence is where it's at--the way the story's told--not simply the story behind the language. The action of telling is fine: kudos for you and your confession, your therapy, your bravery in releasing your story to the public. But telling is performing, even if it seems effortless. And writing that story and selling it to a publisher makes it product, packaged and edited and marketed. With years of reflection on that story and how it can be shaped as prose (and how its shape changes from our shaping it, reflecting on it), given audience and agents and editors, rhetoric and workshop and rewriting for maximum emotional punch--give the endless possibilities of the sentence on the page, I expect to see a little fucking craft. I guess I want awareness, a sense that the writer has reckoned with the self, the material, as well as what it means to reveal it, and how secrets are revealed, how stories are told, that it's not just being simply told. In short it must make something of itself."

Of course he's writing here about published memoirs, but I think the application of this to blogs is interesting, and he goes on to discuss the first-person internet:

"But the memoirified superreal live-blogging culture in which we live has suggested to us--readers made writers, we are all potential content creatrors, even if we no longer have the time or inclination to actually read--that we should ourselves, unmodulated, automatically matter to strangers."

Which is a good point, and a nice summary of the most frequent argument against personal blogging: its narcissism. He then goes on to discuss a few possible solutions, for want of a better word:

"Perhaps the answer is in research, in taking notes. It's finding, creating, or uncovering another subject--something else to rely on and parse beyond the self. ... most manuscripts, while momentarily lovely, finally prove to be minor in one way or another: recountings of divorce, family strife, death, varieties of sexual encounters, childhood traumas that extend to adult life, references to Montaigne, resonances everywhere, epiphanies coming about once a chapter or so like white noise.... I don't object to the use of I (how could I?), but to its simple, unexamined use, particularly in nonfiction where we don't assume the I is a character, inherently unstable, self-serving, possibly unreliable. I object to our unthinking cultural embrace of the I phenomenon, to our readerly desire to unmediated Is, for confession booths, for more reality in everything we see, including our fiction."

I've come across a couple of unreliable narrators on blogs--people who tell what they believe or want to believe is the truth of their story, which turns out to be false, and not false in simple ways, either. More like, either your father was overmedicated for your entire childhood because a relative nefariously kept him oversupplied with medication he didn't need and thus unable to function, or he was desperately in need of medication he never got because no doctors would ever take his symptoms seriously and prescribe him antipsychotics, but he can't be both. Or, either your sister ran away from home at 13 and wasn't seen again until she turned up dead from a drug overdose at twenty, or she tormented you mercilessly before your junior prom when she was sixteen and ruined the night for you, but it can't be both. I got the feeling in both cases that the bloggers in question chose whichever version was most convenient for the particular point in a particular post. In fiction, we would catch on to these, note them as instances of unreliability and change our opinion of their story and its truthfulness as a result; but on blogs, maybe because they are written by real people, real Is, we don't. We don't look for unreliable narrators on blogs, but surely they're everywhere. They'd have to be. These are human beings we're talking about, with notoriously unreliable memories and a real propensity for editing the narratives of our lives to make us star and victim both.

I can remember one time when I got to witness an off-blog fight between two bloggers, one of whom behaved not particularly maturely. A few days later this blogger posted a confessional to her own blog about how she's not a very good friend and struggles with apologizing. Dozens of comments about how she's a wonderful person and how the commenters were sure she didn't need to apologize for whatever it was soon followed. Blog-readers, I think, tend to develop a relationship with bloggers that's based as much on fantasy as fact; in any case, I don't think those commenters did that blogger any favours.

I know that I fall into many of the categories of the trivial that Monson discusses, and I'm not sure what to think about that. Here's the reference for those of you who want to read the whole thing in print: Ander Morson, "The Guilty I: A Pronoun Goes on Trial," The Believer, vol. 6 no. 7, September 2008. There's also a snippet online, but I think The Believer is a magazine best read in print.

In other news, I'm participating in NaNoWriMo again this year. Last year I told all of you that I might need to disappear for the month, and you took me at my word and disappeared yourselves, and then there was hardly anyone left here reading. I won't repeat that mistake this year; instead, I will explicitly promise to keep posting regularly. In fact, I will even promise to post novel excerpts. So keep showing up. OK?

Posted by Andrea at 9:23 AM | Comments (14)

Authorial Agency

Before I delve into characterization again (because it's tricky and fascinating both, and something I can talk about endlessly without tiring) I want to touch on a few points that have come up in the comments so far.

First off, and most importantly, there is a vast difference between writing about reading and writing about writing. Writing about reading is fascinating and wonderful and necessary, but it's not, actually, helpful when it comes to writing about writing. The writer has an audience in her head as she writes. That audience may be a specific person (who she is trying to impress? or apologize to? or make understand her?) or a group of people (her family, her congregation, her second-period english class?) or an imaginary person or people (the biographer writing about her brilliance after she is dead?) or some combination of the above, but I take it as a given that there is some person she is imagining receiving her words on the other side of this process. Very likely she is targetting her choice of words and images and meanings and subjects to this person in an idealized state of perfect communion that will never be realized by flesh-and-blood, who will inevitably bring their own biases and preconceptions to the work thus fucking the whole thing up. (Just kidding. Breathe.) But regardless, her job at the moment of composition is not to engage in direct communication with this idealized audience--that comes later--but to engage with the blank screen and make a series of choices. Writing about writing is about those choices. What the reader makes of it, later on, is a separate question and in a very real sense not really the writer's business. (Until they are using that information to evaluate their choices in order to make better choices for the next piece.)

The writer's business is to put her butt into the chair and make a series of choices about black marks on a white screen (or page). That's it. And the question becomes: why these marks, in this order? Is this the best choice that can be made or are there better ones? Do these marks in this order allow the writer to fulfill her purpose?

I take it as axiomatic that no one ever endures the tiresome business of putting anything into writing without some reason that appears sufficiently important at the time. A paycheque, revenge, a burning need to save the world, a deep conviction that everyone needs to know what it is like specifically to ride a trolley-bus in 19th century London, whatever. Writers have meanings and intentions because otherwise they wouldn't bother writing; they would spend their time more profitably by playing parcheesi or scrubbing the toilets. So: the bare fact that someone wrote something means that that someone had a reason to write that something, in other words, a meaning and an intention that they felt would best be served by black marks arranged in a particular order.

I really don't see how you can get around this. At the moment of composition, no one is trying to compose a text that will generate near-infinite meanings and interpretations. They are trying to say something. That something may be a question with near-infinite answers, or it may be a subject so complex that it will inevitably lead to near-infinite interpretations, but no one ever sat down and said (except facetiously, or egotistically) "I am going to write something, and spend two years on it, so that it can be debated in english departments and generate near-infinite meanings to keep a whole cadre of graduate students gainfully employed for as long as possible."

I don't mean to hammer the point home too much, but I think this is based on the difference between analyzing the ACT of writing vs. analyzing the PRODUCT of writing. In the act of writing, an author may be many things. They may be black, white, brown, old, young, sick, poor, rich, male, female, transgender, straight, bisexual, gay, blind, an amputee, deaf, able to communicate only by blinking or by hitting a key with a stick held between the teeth, even illiterate; the one thing an author cannot be in the act of composition is dead.

When it comes to the PRODUCT of writing, of course, you can kill the author off in as many gruesome ways as you can imagine. Eviscerate the bastard. Accuse Shakespeare of making half his characters gay as a statement on social conformism. Parse each and every syllable Blake ever wrote to determine the subtextual references to his economic class. Debate the innate feminism of Jane Austen's comedies of manners and the innumerable ways they elucidate the inevitable struggles women have with the social and political constraints of their roles. Tell poor Timothy Findley that whatever he meant to write didn't matter and now that you've got the book in your grubby hands you can tell him what he really meant and he can go stuff himself; once that book is in your hands, you are right.

But I am writing about what happens between the author's mind and the production of that finished text; the choice of which black mark to put where and why.

There was an anecdote in the Margaret Laurence biography, which might be apocryphal since I've seen it attributed to a number of writers: Margaret Laurence was talking to a neurosurgeon at a cocktail party. On learning that she is a novelist, he says to her, "I'm planning to write a novel when I retire." "Really?" she says to him, "I'm planning on taking up brain surgery when I retire."

(By the way, I put together a list of most of the writing books I have and have read on facebook under visual bookshelf, if any of you are interested in looking into this a little more. There are about thirty books on there right now and I'll add more as I get the time. This is nowhere near all of them. Also, since I know most of you are not on facebook, I'll put it on my library thing account as well, as soon as I can remember my password.)

For a long time, I resisted reading novels, stories and articles in this way: I thought it would ruin the experience of reading to be simultaneously decoding it for writing strategies and techniques. And it did, a little. But by now I can't help it: I read on three tracks. Track one: Oh no, what next for poor Susie Q? Track two: What an interesting commentary on the ways that women negotiated their identities in 1950s Pakistan. Track three: I like the way the author slowed the action down and intensified the emotional response by spending half a page describing the lightbulb and the tree outside the window. All quite separate. These days, I know I'm reading a good book when Track One drags me off and I forget about Tracks Two and Three for even fifteen minutes (then go back and immediately reread it to see how the author made me forget myself); and these days, similarly, a book can be riveting and enjoyable and have deep and meaningful insights and symbols, and if I can tell that the author was careless or sloppy, I still hate the book. I can remember for example a well-regarded fantasy series that I quite liked until I realized that the author's attributions (or speech tags--the "he said"s and "she yelled"s and "the child wondered"s of fiction, that tell you who is speaking) stunk. Derivative, flabby, cliched garbage; and now I can't read the books anymore, because I can't stand his attributions.

So there's that risk.

On the other hand, at the very least you'll write more consciously, if not considerably better.

Make no mistake: you are already doing this whenever you sit down to write anything. You may not be aware of it, but it is happening under the surface. How could it be otherwise? The black marks wouldn't be getting themselves down onto the screen in that order without you--without your choices. No one can promise that anyone will be a brilliant writer by following a particular strategy, but I can promise that if you are conscious of your writing strategies, your writing will be more effective.

It's like looking at houses. I'm confident that you've been in a number of houses. Some of them you liked, and some of them you didn't, and maybe you knew why or maybe not. Possibly you eventually went to school and learned how to discuss houses and analyze your reactions and describe a house's style, antecedents, context; the uses to which a house could be put, the number of people who could live there, and what the architecture of the house says about the roles of the people who live in it. All interesting and valuable things.

Now we're going to go inside a few houses and rip the drywall off so we can see where the studs are, what's holding the thing up, where the pipes and wires were laid, if there's any rot. Every stud, every beam, every pipe, every wire, every outlet, every fixture, every door, every window, every joist, every nail was placed where it is for a reason. Every bit of it is the result of human agency and choice.

It's the difference between appreciating houses (or texts) and building them.

Posted by Andrea at 8:26 AM | Comments (4)

A Real Character

I've read with gratification of several recent studies showing that, contrary to stereotype, fiction readers have better social skills and more friends than fiction non-readers. "Their years of research - summed up in the current issue of New Scientist magazine - has shown readers of narrative fiction scored higher on tests of empathy and social acumen than those who read non-fiction texts," says a representative article in the Globe and Mail. "And follow-up research showed that reading fiction may help fine-tune these skills: People assigned to read a New Yorker short story did better on social reasoning tests than those who read an essay from the same magazine." Fiction, as it turns out, expands empathy (and thereby social skills), because empathy is the central means by which fiction works. And as in fiction, so in memoir; a memoir works (if it works at all) by engaging your sympathies with the protagonist so throughly that you experience what they do.

You don't have to take my word for it. You can pick up any primer on writing fiction and it will tell you the same. Your characters can be as flat as a tv-screen but they must be sympathetic or the whole thing will fail. Better is the classic well-rounded three-dimensional believable character--the one who makes you cry when she dies or get into a blistering rage when her two-timing boyfriend dumps her.

There are entire books in the fiction-writing departments of major chain bookstores that are nothing but collections of character traits. Others that are collections of checklists like the quizes in women's magazines to figure out what kind of person a character is, how they eat and what their favourite subject was in school and whether they are the kind of person who would wear a tan trench or a yellow rain slicker or forget her raincoat again. Entire books about how to name a character. If you don't think character is a very big deal even to fiction writers who do potboilers and plot-driven thriller novels, you are mistaken. Every fiction writer is obsessed with character. Janet Frame said, 'I suppose the fact is that to be interested in writing novels, you have to have a passion for reading people and their behaviour and their lives."

And I suppose, if you write a personal blog, you have a passion for yourself and the lives of the people close to you, for figuring out these perplexing characters who populate the story of your own life. Why would my mother say such a thing? Who will my son grow up to be? What do I want to do when I grow up?

Rule 1 for personal blog-writing, as in fiction writing: Have interesting, well-rounded, believable and sympathetic characters. Not angels, not villains. Somewhere in between. That includes you.

These people are already real so you won't need to agonize over a list of potential character traits while you try to determine if your daughter should be the kind of person who prefers horses or fairies or construction sets. This is all given to you. But that doesn't mean you have no work to do: because these people are real to you, you may fail to convey them in sufficient detail to your readers. Philip Lopate in his essay "The Personal Essay and the First-Person Character" argues that you need to make yourself into a character that a reader might want to get to know: "You must be able to pick yourself apart."

"The first step is to acquire some distance from yourself. If you are panicked by any examination of your flaws, you will not get very far in the writing of personal essays. You need to be able to see yourself from the ceiling, know you you are coming across in social situations, and accurately assess when you charm and when you seem pushy, mousy or ridiculous. You must begin to take inventory of yourself so that you can present that self to the reader as a specific, legible character."

Not that I have seen, in my own blog-reading experience, any evidence that a truly realistic warts-and-all portrayal will increase readership. Readers seem to appreciate a slightly-imperfect rumpled heroine with a few interesting quirks. You can work with this (by minimizing your own flaws) or against it (by refusing to minimize them), but the one thing you must do is create yourself as a character. (The infamous Blogger's Persona.)

Since your characters are already created, and assuming that you are able to be objective enough about yourself and your loved ones to portray them as real people instead of angels or types, how do you portray characters?

Through actions, primarily. Thoughts, feelings and words are interesting and necessary but do not convey nearly as much. A character who speaks for a page about the importance of his family and how much he loves his children can be undermined (intentionally, in fiction) by a decision to stay late at work when he clearly doesn't have to. A character who ruminates endlessly about her longing for a real loving relationship will not be believed if she never leaves her bedroom. And frankly if you never get outside of the words and mental state of a character, they will remain flat; we learn who characters are in our everyday lives by watching them. We measure people's words and intentions against their actions.

Snow Crash is a science fiction novel about mafia-run pizza delivery joints and working conditions in near-future government offices, among other things. Y.T. (which stands for Yours Truly) is one of my favourite adolescent heroines ever, and this scene might tell you why. She has just been arrested for violating the boundaries of a burb-clave (you'll just have to read it).

"Y.T. is taken downstairs into the basement. ...

"'Better take her uniform--all that gear,' the second MetaCop suggests, not unlewdly. ...

"Y.T. shrugs, trying to think of something unnerving and wacky. At this point, she is supposed to squeal and shrink, wriggle and whine, swoon and beg. They are threatening to take her clothes. How awful. But she does not get upset because she knows that they are expecting her to.

"A Kourier has to establish space on the pavement. Predictable law-abiding behaviour lulls drivers. They mentally assign you to a little box in the lane, assume you will stay there, can't handle it when you leave that little box.

"Y.T. is not fond of boxes. Y.T. establishes her space on the pavement by zagging mightily from lane to lane, establishing a precedent of scary randomness. ...

"She unzips her coverall all the way down below her navel. Underneath is naught but billowing pale flesh."

There is a balance here between what she is thinking and what she is doing. Her thoughts alone would not establish her character; it would be open to question and doubt. She says she's tough; what's the proof? Her actions alone would not provide the context; we wouldn't know why she is unzipping her coverall. Put them together and you know what you need to: Y.T. is someone who refers to herself in the third person, a persona in her own mind. (Not to mention her choice of acronym--what do you suspect about her once you know that she thinks of herself as "Yours Truly"?) She thinks of herself as tough and wants to prove it to other people. She does so by acting boldly (a trait that carries through the novel).

Your style of blog-writing may not seem much like a novel to you. On the one hand, you might want to consider it; novels are terrifically effective ways of drawing people into a story. On the other, even if it's not, I strongly suspect that personal blogs "work" as narratives primarily on the strength of the Blogger's Persona, what in fiction would be called the protagonist, or the memoir's narrator. I suspect this is true even moreso of blogs that have more of a pillow-book or email/epistolary style than those that are memoirish; because the pillow-book or epistolary style does not allow for a conventional narrative arc (i.e. plot), it is even more important to draw readers in through well-drawn, believable, fully-rounded characters. Starting with you.

You might guess from this that I've finally finished putting together my (thirty-two pages of handwritten) study notes. You'd be right. So, up next: Sister C. After that I'm guessing I'll come back to character for another post before I start digging into reader expectations, narrative arcs and plot and, just because I know most of you are not as taken with writing as I am, the joys of explaining kinesiology to an almost-five-year-old.

Posted by Andrea at 5:23 PM | Comments (6)

part vi: memoirs, pillow books and blogs

The problem with blogs is that they don't know what they are yet. They're less a genre than a form, like books. You can't talk about how to write books without talking about what kind of book you're trying to write. Blogs can be about fashion, politics, science, academic subjects, fart jokes, getting in shape, or your grade eight camping vacation in Algonquin park. As with any other type of writing, the meaning and intention drive the choices. Or they should.

Let's pretend we're restricting ourselves to the 60-80% of blogs which are loosely called personal blogs--blogs about the writer's life. This immediately catapults into another problem: What is the meaning? That is, what is the writer trying to say? And why are they trying to say it--what is their intention?

Most blogs aren't really memoir.

I went into the bookstore last week (after Mad's question) and had a look over the memoirs on offer. There are memoirs about having a facial disfigurement, memoirs about travelling in France, memoirs about growing up in a cult, memoirs about being famous; they are told in first-person prose, as a graphic novel, as a series of short essays or stories. In fact the only thing that they have in common is that they are about something. The memoirist has a story they want to share. A story. One.

Some blogs fall into this category; but even most blogs that begin this way eventually become a place where the blogger can (and does) talk about whatever comes into their head.

Also, memoirs are events told from enough distance that an underlying story can be discerned and a shape brought to the material. In The Art of Time in Memoir: Then, Again, Sven Birkets argues that the distinguishing feature of the memoir is the layering of present and past, the past seen through the clarifying lens of the present. The past interpreted and shaped by the knowledge and wisdom gained since. This, obviously, is difficult when the past in question is this morning over breakfast. One could argue that blogs aspiring to be memoirs are in the process of becoming, distilling events into the meaningful experiences used to shape a memoir.

A number of years ago I came across a tantalizing reference to "The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon" in a craft book on art journaling: "Sei Shonagon began writing her journal in an informal notebook style that is known as makura no soshi, or pillow book style. Yet even her informal writing was done in such a pure form of prose that it is considered a model of good style. Although she began her journal in private, it was soon ciruclated at court because of its elegant style and witty, beautifully written contents. Once her book became well known, Shonagon began writing in a more self-conscious manner, with an awareness that her pillow book would be read by the public. She was an excellent and detached observer of her own culture." (I've since managed to find the pillow book online.)

Sound familiar?

My perspective is that the personal blog is usually a modern-day pillow book, or a diary written for an extended audience. The structure of a pillow book allows for a series of short entries on disparate topics, the only common thread in which is the person who wrote them. Anyone therefore who believes that this idea of writing a diary for the public is some kind of twisted new-fangled narcisissistic practice that heralds the decline of western civilization or possibly the end of the world as we know it is, quite simply, wrong.

That said:

1. Meaning, intention and function still apply. What are you trying to say in a post, why are you trying to say it, and what is the best way to do so?

2. Structurally, stylistically and functionally, memoirs are indistinguishable from fiction.

Characters are engaged in a struggle to get something they want, which culminates in a climax, following which comes some sort of insight (not all fiction does this, but it does seem to be a requirement of memoir--if not for the protagonist, then at least for the reader). Memoir works the same way fiction works; by creating an empathetic bond between the main character and the reader so that the reader can understand the protagonist's experience and, through that, the underlying meaning.

Memoir introduces important ethical considerations not present in fiction (how close to stick to the truth? How much right do you have to share someone else's story? How reliable is memory?): but none of those change the underlying structure or function, or the means used to achieve them (dialogue, scene-setting, narrative arc, etc.).

3. Pillow books are a lost art-form in the west. We have public diaries--Anne Frank, Henry James's sister, etc.--but they weren't intended to be public. This gives bloggers very few models to build on.

All of this assumes that the meanings and intentions of personal blogs and blog posts are restricted essentially to pillow book vs. memoir; of course that's not true. Just off the top of my head I can think of some personal blogs that function more like email, even phonecalls. And as commenters have already pointed out, there are some blogs where the entire apparent function is to build a cult of personality around the blogger, to unite in a shared appreciation of something underground (eg. Will Wheaton), in which case literature doesn't come into it--what would the equivalent of that be? Reality TV? The Rocky Horror Picture Show?

But let's keep this simple. Simpler. Let's keep this to territory I know something about (though if someone else wants to tackle the other genres, either here or on their own blogs, that would be great) and look at the pillow book diarists and memoirists of personal blogging. Another day.

Posted by Andrea at 9:31 AM | Comments (7)

levity

After this week's posts, I couldn't resist posting the new cover of Now (especially for those of you not in Toronto). Click through for the full version but you'll have to read fast.

Enjoy, and happy Thanksgiving to the Canadians.

Posted by Andrea at 6:24 PM | Comments (3)

Sidebar: trash-out

Word Spy is my favourite word geek blog; every few days it posts a newly minted word, complete with definition and examples of usage from the popular media. They're all words actually in use, though goodness only knows how long they'll last; still, it gives it a bit more relevance than those end-of-year make-up-a-word lists that never go anywhere.

Anyway. Trash-out. A new word with a tragic provenance: what happens when a mortgage is foreclosed and the people in it move out with only what they can carry, leaving most of their belongings behind to be, well, trashed. Thrown out. What I like in particular in this post is that it includes two examples of recent usage, both from newspapers, yet with startlingly different effects. The first is from Margaret Wente, a columnist at Canada's national newspaper, the Globe and Mail:

"They didn't have the money to get a moving van, so they took what they could throw in the car and took off," says a local man, whose business — clearing out abandoned houses — is booming. "We don't even know where they went."

Clearing out a house is called a trashout. But people leave behind much more than trash. They leave computers, printers, flat-screen TVs, new furniture, children's toys — all the stuff that used to be so easy to buy on credit. Charities don't want it, and so it all goes in the dumpster.

The second is from Brian Feagans at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution:

They left family photos scattered across a bed, next to a Bible and a toddler's floppy-eared hat. Their marriage license rests on a dresser. And a diploma from Duluth High is tucked unceremoniously into a closet still stocked with clothes.

Scott Johnson tries not to wonder what went wrong inside this three-bedroom home near Lawrenceville. His job is to landfill everything, from the leather couches to the "What Color Is It?" baby book.

He's the "trash out" man.

That's the common term — banks use the more polite "property preservation" — for clearing out and cleaning up foreclosed homes.

Wente's bit is general, while Feagans's is specific. Wente catalogues the items left behind but you don't get to imagine them in a particular setting, and so the emotional effect is blunted; my own reaction was a startled, "People are doing this? How awful!"

Now look at Feagans's: it has a specific setting. There are family photos on the bed, a bible, a hat. A marriage license and diploma--surely a family wouldn't have wanted to leave those behind, if they'd had any choice. Out of what must have been dozens or over a hundred items left behind in this specific house, he chose a handful to include in the article, yet notice the emotional impact of his choices. A family with a young child. What would have happened to them, to force them to leave all this behind? Wente's article shocked me; this one broke my heart.

One of the central rules of effective writing is the use of telling details: you carefully select the one or two details that communicate the most, have the most impact. Pay attention, too, to what you see in your mind with those very few details. Do you see the bedspread? I did; it had flowers. The one you saw might not have. Was that bed in a room with a specific colour of paint on the walls? Were there carpets? What were the photos of? Wedding pictures, pictures of a baby learning to walk, pictures from the hospital of a new mom all bleary-eyed with a red-faced alien in her arms? Your head invents the general setting not supplied by the piece, it fills it all in, so the few carefully chosen details become a full setting. The writer then can ignore the wallpaper and curtains and dustbunnies, and pick up only on those items he knew would tell you that this family is going through a tragedy. A page full of general description would not have the oomph of that one floppy-eared hat.

Posted by Andrea at 8:36 AM | Comments (2)

part V: categories of failures, and what mistakes say

This whole series has INTJ written all over it. By the way, after I get the boring pedantic part out of the way, I spend some time in this one talking about what we can learn from Sarah Palin's vice-presidential debate, so keep reading.

So far, my pet theory of writing (of any kind, including shopping lists) goes like this:

There is a writer.

The writer has something they want to communicate: a theory, belief, idea, fact, opinion, character, event, experience, feeling, whatever. This is the meaning.

The writer wants you/us to know this meaning for a particular reason: this is their intention.

The writer chooses to create a communication.

In doing so, she makes several choices about length, sentence patterns, word choice, grammar, sound, cadence, abstraction vs. immediacy, figurative language, imagery, etc. These choices are made to allow the communication to fulfill the writer's intention and communicate her meaning. All of this together is the function.

If the audience understands the meaning and the intention, the communication was successful.

If the audience does not, it fails.

All of this is beside literary quality, which can be thought of as how well or poorly the writer in question uses their chosen devices. You can have a metaphor that is both clear and clunky, in which case it's a piece of successful yet ugly writing. Different questions.

For a piece of writing to succeed, the meaning, intention and function all need to work together. It succeeds as a whole.

But a piece of writing can fail, I'd argue, on three grounds:

It can fail because the function of the piece fails. That is, the writer had a clear meaning and intention, but their choices were poor and the audience is not able to understand them. For instance, a person writing for the National Post in German. Writing for eight-year-olds in pollysyllabic words or twenty-word sentences. Or more subtly, allowing lengthy digressions that don't serve the meaning or intention, metaphors that relate neither to the intention nor the meaning, and so on. These kinds of failures I think of as simple mistakes. Rookie errors. They are made in good faith.

It can also fail, and this is more questionable, on the grounds of the meaning or intention itself. It can fail if the meaning or intention is inherently disrespectful to the audience, for instance; if the meaning is "Women suck" and the intention is "I want you to hate women too," then the function doesn't really matter. A lot of people would disagree with me. You might be one of them. I suppose I think that the meaning and intention have to be worth the reader's time, that it is an expression of a writer's respect for a reader that they don't clutter up their hours and days with drivel or offensive nonsense. Of course this is terribly subjective. These kinds of failures could be called bad intentions.

It can also fail if the function belies or contradicts the stated meaning or intention: If I open a piece by saying that I want to write about my mother, and instead I write about my begonias, it will not have succeeded. If I say I am going to write about how much I love my daughter and I take three paragraphs out of the middle of a ten-paragraph piece to digress about my extensive education in biophysics, it will not have succeeded. If I say I'm going to write a review of a play, but say nothing about its plot or characters or arc and instead write 500 words of metaphors and simile on what it felt like to sit in that theatre chair, it will not have succeeded. This is ego-driven frippery-laden writing. One gets the sense that the stated meaning or intention is only there to draw you in, that the writer has an unspoken agenda--that they are lying to you.

That journalist who used hermeneutics when talking about the Harper campaign either honestly believed that everyone would understand hermeneutics (simple mistake) or knew that they wouldn't and wants to show off (ego-driven). It's usually possible to tell which it is by analysing the mistake.

Here is something fun (finally! say the readers):

Let's analyse one of Palin's debate speeches.

"Say it ain't so, Joe, there you go again pointing backwards again. You preferenced your whole comment with the Bush administration. Now doggone it, let's look ahead and tell Americans what we have to plan to do for them in the future. You mentioned education and I'm glad you did. I know education you are passionate about with your wife being a teacher for 30 years, and god bless her. Her reward is in heaven, right? I say, too, with education, America needs to be putting a lot more focus on that and our schools have got to be really ramped up in terms of the funding that they are deserving. Teachers needed to be paid more. I come from a house full of school teachers. My grandma was, my dad who is in the audience today, he's a schoolteacher, had been for many years. My brother, who I think is the best schoolteacher in the year, and here's a shout-out to all those third graders at Gladys Wood Elementary School, you get extra credit for watching the debate.

"Education credit in American has been in some sense in some of our states just accepted to be a little bit lax and we have got to increase the standards. No Child Left Behind was implemented. It's not doing the job though. We need flexibility in No Child Left Behind. We need to put more of an emphasis on the profession of teaching. We need to make sure that education in either one of our agendas, I think, absolute top of the line. My kids as public school participants right now, it's near and dear to my heart. I'm very, very concerned about where we're going with education and we have got to ramp it up and put more attention in that arena."

What does she mean? (I think she means that education is important, not performing well, and funding is insufficient.)

What is her intention? (To convince the American public that she understands how important education is and that schools are struggling and need more funds.)

What is the function of whatever this is? (Palin does love looking folksy, doesn't she? I'd say she's trying to make the "common folk" believe she's just like them through her word choice and sentence patterns. It's a dialect, as we went into in the comments section of the first function of writing post. What's the point of talking about the teachers in her family? Her kids? Besides the dialect function, the handshake function, of her colloquialisms, do they do anything? She's got a lot of very short sentences and a couple of very long ones--do you see any difference between them in terms of subject matter or tone? What do the short sentences do? What do the long sentences do?)

Does it succeed or fail? (Grammatically it's gibberish and often descends into complete incoherence. But does it work? Do you think her dialect made her seem like a friend to the ordinary American, for instance?)

And what can you learn about Sarah Palin from her considerable mistakes in this speech? (Don't you think it's interesting that she becomes incoherent whenever she talks about funding?)

I'm really hoping that people will disagree with me at least a little bit and comment on this one, because discussions are where topics like this get fun.

(Yes, this is fun for me. I'm in a writing programme, remember?)

Posted by Andrea at 9:42 AM | Comments (14)

part IV: The function of fiction

Now I'm doing this just because I enjoy it. See? I told you not to get me started.

Mainstream Fiction: Fiction is amazingly complicated. A writer is trying to communicate so many things simultaneously that it invariably becomes much longer than either a poem or a non-fiction treatise would be. There is the central question ("this is what it's like to be a single 20-something woman living in New York City") and all of its related subquestions ("this is what my character is like, this is why, this is what her family is like, this is what happened when she went to work one morning, these are the kinds of men she has dated, this is her job, this is how she feels about all of it, this is how she loves her mother but kind of hates her too" and so on). A piece of mainstream fiction can combine history, knowledge, facts (especially in genres such as science fiction), feeling, belief, opinion, perspective, ideas, issues, etc. Each of these functions will require different techniques and devices to make the meaning clear. Some of these methods will be figurative language, and let's not assume that mainstream fiction is plain as a loafer. There are all kinds of figurative language and decorative frills, but generally they require less work from the reader.

(Aside: Steven Pinker in The Stuff of Thought makes the case that all words are metaphors so old and cliched that we no longer think of them as metaphors. The book as a whole I found kind of iffy but this particular discussion is worth picking it up for, if you're interested in this kind of thing.)

Contact by Carl Sagan is mainstream (science) fiction that is intelligent, clear, successful--and which has a fair number of metaphors, similes and decorative bits, all of which serve the text and clarify its meaning, and none of which are difficult: "[Ellie] was a wonder junkie. In her mind, she was a hill tribesman standing slack-jawed before the real Ishtar Gate of ancient Babylon; Dorothy catching her first glimpse of the vaulted spires of the Emerald City of Oz; a small boy from darkest Brooklyn plunked down in the Corridor of Nations of the 1939 World's Fair.... Her heart sang in anticipation. She would discover, she was sure, what else is possible, what could be accomplished by other beings, great beings--beings who had, it seemed likely, been voyaging between the stars when the ancestors of humans were still brachiating from branch to branch in the dappled sunlight of the forest canopy."

(What follows is what happens when you regularly pull novels apart to figure out, not just what they mean, but how they were written.)

"[Ellie] was a wonder junkie. [metaphor] In her mind, she was a hill tribesman standing slack-jawed [alliteration] before the real Ishtar Gate of ancient Babylon; [metaphor] Dorothy catching her first glimpse of the vaulted spires [decorative] of the Emerald City of Oz; [metaphor, cadence, repetitive use of sss sound] a small boy from darkest Brooklyn [decorative] plunked down in the Corridor of Nations of the 1939 World's Fair... [metaphor]. Her heart sang in anticipation. [figurative] She would discover, she was sure, what else is possible, what could be accomplished by other beings, great beings--beings who had, [purposeful repetition] it seemed likely, been voyaging between the stars when the ancestors of humans were still brachiating from branch to branch [alliteration--the only justification for using "brachiating" here rather than, say, swinging is that it fits the cadence and begins with b] in the dappled sunlight [decorative] of the forest canopy. [repetitive use of sss sound, cadence, both throughout]"

Each of those bracketed techniques serve a purpose. Most obviously, all of them combined give the reader a sense of Ellie's wonder and delight which less decorative language would not do, and Sagan is trying to communicate not just what is happening but how Ellie feels about it. A strict telling of the fictive facts would not have been able to do this, and so, in this section, the decorative writing makes the piece clearer and helps it to succeed. Read it out loud and listen to the rhythm of the sentences: DOrothy CAtching her FIRST GLIMpse of the VAUlted SPIRes of the EMerald CIty of OZ. It's incantatory, which perfectly serves the emotional effect the passage intends.

The Speed of Dark by Elizabeth Moon is a science fiction novel with an autistic first-person protagonist. The writing appears less clear, but that serves a purpose: in addition to communicating the events of the story (the search for a cure for autism) she is also trying to communicate the experience of autism. Otherwise she would have chosen a third-person narrator. I'm not personally familiar enough with autism to know how successful she was (she has a son with autism, so presumably has expertise there) but it is clearly her intention.

Mainstream fiction is easy fiction; which doesn't mean stupid or worthless. You just don't have to work for the meaning the same way you do with literary fiction, which is coming up next.

Literary Fiction makes you work. It assumes readers who have read enough and know enough to follow more complicated allusions and references, and who want to be challenged. But it can't be difficult just for the sake of being difficult; it still has to mean something.

Example 1: The Gathering by Anne Enright: "There were eleven months between me and Liam. We came out of her on each other's tails; one after the other, as fast as a gang-bang, as fast as an infidelity. Sometimes I think we overlapped in there, he just left early, to wait outside." The Gathering is full of the imagery of sex and death. All of the images of sex are negative--coercive and loveless and sometimes degrading. This is the first such, and since I don't want to spoil it in case you are planning on reading it, I won't say why--but there is a reason. It all foreshadows the central events of the novel. However, it needs a reader who is paying close attention. Later: "She knows because she is my Granny, and when she put her hand on my cheek I felt the nearness of death and was comforted by it. There is nothing as tentative as an old woman's touch; as loving or as horrible."

I was going to find my copy of Blindness by Jose Saramago because it was one of the most difficult books I've ever encountered, but it's gone missing and now I'm heartbroken because I love it. Anyway. In Blindness, Saramago does away with quotation marks and most speech tags ("he said"). He combines the speech of several characters into a single sentence, each set off only with a comma and a capital letter. The dialogue is enormously difficult to read. It's hard to know who is saying what. But in a book where every character but one is blind, it is an effective way to communicate something of the experience of blindness. You, as the reader, have to work really hard to know what is going on--just as someone who has suddenly gone blind would.

Last example: Life of Pi by Yann Martel. You read the book, think you know what is going on, it's kind of confusing and there are hints that all is not as it seems, then you finish it and figure out the whole freaking thing was an analogy and you're going to have to go back to the beginning and read it again. But this, too, is intentional and serves the meaning of the book. Martel's stated purpose in writing it, the meaning or intention of the piece, was the metaphorical nature of religion and truth, that the "good story" is just as true and valuable as the "factual story," and a whole bunch else besides. Writing the novel as the "good story" instead of the "factual story" becomes, then, the point: Pi, the Japanese merchants and the narrator have all chosen to believe in the "good story," the metaphor.

You might not like these examples. In fact you might hate them. But the devices weren't chosen to confuse but to elucidate; they contribute to the meaning and intention; you just have to read very carefully, reread a lot, be patient and go slowly. They're not empty, just there to make the author look smart and the readers feel stupid. You might have to think about it for a while. It might be intended for an audience that knows more than you do, or has a different niche interest. You might not enjoy the way it was carried out. But whether a certain passage or technique is an example of successful or failed writing depends on whether it contributed to the meaning or detracted from it.

Last journey through the jungles of fiction:

Metafiction: Metafiction is fiction where the entire point is to comment on fiction as a genre. This means they break many of the conventions of the fiction most of us read: authorial intrusions are common, as are patently impossible events masquerading as realism and jarring stylistic changes.

John Gardner has a section in his The Art of Fiction called "Metafiction, Deconstruction and Jazzing Around," which I'll admit is almost my sole experience with the genre. Metafiction is not my thing. But this is a matter of personal taste; I wouldn't call metafiction "failed writing."

The author of a piece of metafiction is trying to communicate something very specific; their intention is to make clear the artificiality or dangers of the conventions of fiction. To do this they write something that looks sort of like a story but deviates from it in important ways. In a piece of regular fiction, the deviations would be fatal; a reader would not be able to maintain a willing suspension of disbelief. In a piece of metafiction these failures are purposeful and contribute to the intention of the writing. (Gardner's entire book is worth reading if you can stomach the occasional bit of dated gender bias.)

Anyway, the point is: even what would be considered failed writing in one context can be successful in another if it contributes to the author's meaning or intention. Imagine a novel where you find out at the end that none of the events were as you thought just because the author felt like screwing you around--or a story in which every image of sex is one of decay just because--or even a more straightforward incantatory cadence in prose fiction when the story is about buying shoes or a funny piece about a PTA. They would be utter failures. The techniques of metafiction would be unbearable and unreadable in straightforward prose storytelling. But in metafiction they work. The difference is in what the author is trying to say. And that is the only difference.

It's not that some techniques or devices are good and others are bad. It's that any technique that is chosen ought to be there because it serves the piece.

Posted by Andrea at 9:56 AM | Comments (11)

The function of writing (part III)

See, get me started on writing and you are in serious danger of never getting me to shut up again.

I think a big problem with Glass is my attempt at what I think of as the function of a piece of writing.

A writer can try to communicate many different things; facts are only one possibility. A writer might try to communicate opinion, feeling, mood, perspective, belief, a state of mind, an experience, a character, knowledge, a history--or any one of many other things, or any one of their infinite combinations. Are you trying to make your reader sad? Teach them about accordians? Convince them that Republicans are evil? Let them experience an abortion? Make them understand Cindy Lou Who, who was no more than two? Make them laugh? Effective, successful and clear communication will vary depending on the function of the piece of writing, which is a combination of the writer's meaning or intention plus their chosen techniques or devices.

Some examples may clarify this a bit more.

Academic writing: The primary purpose of academic writing is, "look at this research I did; it is important and you should know what my results were." To get the audience to pay attention, the writer also needs to establish, "you can trust me because I am an expert."

Jargon has two purposes: inclusion and exclusion. In an academic context, it is inclusive: it establishes the author as an insider to the field in question, and therefore her credibility and authority ("I know what hermeneutics means, just like you!"). In non-academic contexts its use is generally exclusionary ("I know what hermeneutics means, and you don't!"). What jargon says to an academic audience is "I have the qualifications to provide you with an informed and trustworthy opinion"; so in academic writing, jargon aids in clarity because it fulfills the function of the piece, which is to get an academic audience to take it seriously.

In non-academic contexts, jargon is nearly always failed writing; it makes the audience feel talked-down-to, so makes readers both less able and less willing to understand it. (For example, if a journalist used hermeneutics in an article on the Harper election campaign, how do you imagine the audience would respond?)

I'm putting this first because jargon is typically used as an example of poor communication, as a way of confusing the audience. In most cases this will be true, but as with everything, it depends on the purpose or function of the writing, and even jargon has its place.

The function of academic writing, therefore, is both to communicate the facts (or findings or beliefs or theories) in question as well as the expertise and authority of the author. It should be possible for any given audience member (and the audience of academic writing is very specific) to grasp both of these from the piece--both to understand what the writer is trying to say and why the writer is qualified to say it.

Poetry: Poetry is the most condensed form of literature in english; it combines not only the dictionary meanings of words, but also their sound and cadence plus figurative language such as metaphor, simile and symbol to form the meaning. You can say in ten words in poetry what would take a hundred or more in prose.

Poetry is clear, but that doesn't mean it is simple. The audience might have to work to understand poetry; but with a successful poem, understanding is possible if you have done the work.

Example, Emily Dickinson's #1659:

Fame is a fickle food
Upon a shifting plate
Whose table once a
Guest but not
The second time is set
Whose crumbs the crows inspect
and with ironic claw
Flap past it to the
Farmers Corn
Men eat of it and die

In poetry--as in any other form of writing, but it's more obvious here--figurative and symbolic language serves the meaning or intention of the piece. You're not in any doubt about what she thinks about fame, are you? It's 43 words.

Even when poetry seems to be saying nothing in terms of dictionary meanings, some part of its intention ought to be clear by reading it aloud to hear the way the words sound. If we have a words-as-art artform, poetry is it; but even here, successful poems use the artiness of words to make the meaning more clear, not less. Note that the metaphor Dickinson uses serves multiple purposes: you understand not only what she means but also how she feels about it and get a strong visual image. Note the short words and repetitive hard-c sounds, creating harshness, also contributing to the mood as the words contribute to the idea. Here we have not only clarity but economy, critical to poetry.

A poet's meaning or intention can be enormously various, but generally includes: to communicate an experience, a feeling, a mood, a belief, an idea, some combination of the above. Poetry does not typically communicate fact (except to serve one of the other purposes). A poem's function is to use language in a highly condensed and lyrical way, including metaphor, image, sound repetitions, and so on, to achieve the poet's intention--to make you understand.

The function of a piece of writing isn't the same thing as the point, which is just a thesis statement; the function is a consideration both of what the writer intends plus the literary techniques they use to achieve it and their effect. Dickinson's intention or meaning is to make you understand what she thinks and feels and believes about fame (and possibly why she was so retiring). The function of 1659 is to communicate a bleak, dark view of fame in a strong visual image through metaphor and the sounds of the words. The function achieves the intention, so the poem is successful.

You might think of the function of a piece of writing as how it works.

Does this get us away from the question of clear language=solely realistic or representative? Because that's not what I'm saying. Or have I only muddied it further?

Since this is already long enough, I'll put fiction in another post if I need to.

Posted by Andrea at 1:51 PM | Comments (17)

fixing my own failed writing, part 1

The first thing I obviously should have done in my post about writing is define my terms. So, a day late:

Communication: It's no coincidence that 'communication' and 'communicable' have the same root. Think of successful communication as taking something out of your head and putting it into someone else's with as few alterations as possible. There are three roles: the communicator, the audience (either active or passive), the communication.

Clear: Does not mean plain or factual; it means comprehensible. Clear communications allow the thing in your head to pass with few alterations to the audience's head, because your audience is able to grasp your intention or meaning. The world's floweriest metaphor can be as clear as winter air if it is comprehensible to its audience. (Note: the figurative language (as clear as winter air) in the last sentence, if it did its job, helped rather than obstructed understanding of my meaning; and was, therefore, clear. I hope.)

Bad Writing: While it's true that I don't like bad writing, it's not true that I consider bad all writing that I don't personally like. There's a lot of writing out there that I can appreciate on a craft or technical level that doesn't resonate with me; I wouldn't call it bad writing. Bad writing is, to me, failed writing; that is, writing which has not successfully communicated whatever it was in the writer's head. For the sake of greater clarity, from now on I'll use the phrase "failed writing." It's possible for a piece of writing to be successful (in its transmission) but poor (in its execution); it is possible for a piece of writing to be lovely (in its execution) but a failure (in its transmission).

Failed writing can also mean writing which has succeeded in its unstated but true aim of putting the writer on a pedestal. It's successful in that the thing in the writer's head ("I'm great!") has been successfully transferred with few alterations into the audience. In this case, it is bad (or failed) writing because the stated aim, the reason the audience read the piece to begin with ("let me tell you about my mother..."), was a deception and hasn't been fulfilled.

Hopefully this will get around all of those questions of personal taste. For instance, Hemingway is not my thing, but I know full well he's a good writer--he successfully communicates his meaning and intention. I just don't like the way he does it.

The function of writing needs a post on its own. And it will get one. Lucky you.

The problem of the art critic: (I haven't used this one yet, but I will.) This is what happens when someone really loves some art form, reads/watches/views/listens to thousands of them, loses the ability to enjoy the poorer examples of the form, and tries to write about them for a living. Often they'll be criticized as being "elitist" for no longer being able to enjoy, say, Hollywood action flicks or formula fantasy novels or top-40 pop music; alternatively, mass tastes are criticized as being "low" or whatever. But really the issue is one of exposure. Someone who has seen only ten action flicks will almost inevitably have a wholly different reaction to one than someone who has seen 500, and there's no way around that.

Posted by Andrea at 5:55 PM | Comments (9)

Glass

Writing about writing always makes me feel like a pretentious self-important idiot, because really: one story published, a column, a handful of essays accepted for anthologies and a month in a writing programme do not make me any kind of expert on literary craft. So on what basis should my own opinions be privileged? None at all. Unless you count the several thousand books I've read, including a few dozen on writing, which might not have made me an expert but has certainly given me a number of very strong opinions.

Good writing is a clear glass window. It's invisible.

Writing that is decorative or flowery achieves this only when the flourishes serve the subject matter of the piece. For example: if you are writing for a highly-educated audience that likes to congratulate itself on being superior to the hoi poloi, you may very well be more successful if you use the fancy-pants $10 words and allusions to Shakespeare and Milton if only because, subconsciously, the audience's egos will be fluffed and they'll be more receptive to your ideas. But fancy-pants $10 words and allusions to Shakespeare aren't going to make you a more effective communicator with most audiences, who will only feel excluded and talked-down-to.

I'll choose as an example a blogger I'm 99.999% sure doesn't read me, and I won't name him anyway. But he's a well-known daddyblogger with a large following and a nutty pseudonym, and his blog title references female anatomy, and now I think I've been sufficiently unclear that he'll never google this but clear enough that anyone who reads him will know exactly who I'm talking about. (But this sentence is a pretty good example of bad writing: "references female anatomy" is, in this case, necessary precisely because it's unclear; in most contexts I'd be better off just spitting it out.) I read one post of his; in it, a mean man yelled at his son, and his son "shattered."

It was very, very pretty, the description of the blogger going out to "sweep" the shards of his son into a dustpan and take him home to glue him back together again. But as writing it sucked, because after reading it you have no fucking clue what happened. Seriously. Did his son cry, fall down, have a seizure, yell, slump his shoulders, shake? Did the father go out and give him a hug, a slap on the shoulder, a pat on the head, a kleenex? Does he glue his son back together by taking him out for ice cream, watching a movie curled up on the couch, leaving him alone in his room with a book, play-wrestling in the backyard, snorting cocaine? Can you picture it? Of course not, because he doesn't describe it.

After you've read it, you have no idea what happened except that a mean man said something awful to a little boy, who didn't like it, and so his dad took him home to make him feel better. You haven't learned anything about the people involved, as you might have if you knew that the boy "shatters" when he cries or throws up or shakes a middle finger at the mean man or that he is comforted when his dad bakes him chocolate chip cookies or when they flip through a few porn mags together.

I think of this kind of writing as being a stained-glass window. You can't see through it at all. Everything on the other side--the ideas or events or theories or personalities that are supposed to be the subject of the writing--is completely obscured. You have no idea what happened or what the writer is going on about. But it doesn't matter because the point of such writing isn't to communicate anything, it's to create a functionless piece of writing that is pretty as an object and can be discussed as a pretty object.

Perfect writing is a window so clear that you can't see it at all. It doesn't draw any attention to itself whatsoever. All you can see when you look at it are the ideas, people, events on the other side. It facilitates understanding, which is after all the point of communication. If there are metaphors, similes, allusions, fancy-pants $10 words, fifty-word sentences or academic theories in it, it's because they make the meaning of the writing clearer--because they are necessary--not because they serve the writer's ego.

Good writing is when the writer's ego gets out of the way so that the audience has a clear view of the subject of the writing. Unnecessary decorative frills are like the writer jumping out on stage to say, "Look at me being poetic! Look at me being smarter than you! Look at me being well-educated! Look at me being In The Know!" At which point the audience has no choice but to look at the writer because they can no longer see the performance; there's a writer in the way. In practice of course this is unavoidable some of the time, if only because we human beings tend to be very attached to our egos and we can't always see our own motivations clearly. But I do think that a writer who is trying to write in order to communicate is going to do this less often than a writer whose goal is to impress an audience with how fabulous or wonderful or clever or poetic they are.

Unfortunately (in my view anyway) the internet encourages ego-driven frippery-laden bad writing. There are no gatekeepers--no editors, no publishers, no fact-checkers--so there's no one to gently suggest to a writer that a certain passage is unnecessary or that they are talking down to their audience. The writer clicks "publish" and whatever flaws their own personality brings to the piece get carried into the final version (my own included) and, as much as the democratizing influence of self-publishing is wonderful, I do think this facet of it is kind of awful.

When it comes to my own writing I would much rather be able to communicate a complicated idea clearly than construct a beautifully-written object whose subject is so obscured behind pretty words and metaphors that no one has a bloody clue what I'm talking about. Pretty words and metaphors have their place, of course--serving the subject of the piece. And I think you'll find, if you go back over your own favourite print books and stories and articles, that those authors too got themselves out of the way of the writing most of the time; and when flowery, academic or symbol-laden language was used, it was used to a good purpose.

I'm willing to be convinced otherwise, though. What do you think? Is there a point to the fancy stuff? Does it serve a purpose on its own?

Posted by Andrea at 7:34 AM | Comments (17)

Bad Teenage Poetry Blogging: The "I can't believe I'm doing this" edition

Before I completely shame myself for all posterity and you lose all respect for me as a person and a writer (sigh), I'd like to point out to those of you on feedreaders that I've changed the header and would love any feedback you have, plus I think I finally fixed the sidebar for those of you viewing on the latest version of IE. I'm going to be making a few other fidgets and edits over the course of the next month or so. If any of them are particularly obnoxious or illegible, let me know and I'll do my best to fix it.

And now, the mortification portion:

These are from one of my old writing journals, which were nearly indistinguishable from my black books except that they were blue and almost everything in them was undated. All I can say for sure is that it started in 1989 (14) and wrapped up 2 or 3 years later. Bad teenage poetry does not get any worse than what is written between 14 and 17.

All right. I'll stop postponing this (Superlagirl, you're going to owe your internet friends a lot, you know?):

A Terrible Lie

[ed: I love my originality. A terrible lie! I'm sure no one has ever titled a poem that, ever.]

Why must they try to do this to my life?
Why all this heartless, endless, pointless strife?
Why must they try to tear my heart in two?
My only crime was ever not to love you.

[good god. This is awful. Also, I would like to lay all the blame for the atrocious rhyming couplets solidly at the feet of Emily Starr, because all of her poetry rhymed since that's what "real poetry" did, and I resolved at an early age to copy Ms. Starr at every possible turn. I was very disappointed in being so prosaic that I never had her visions or moments of being transported by artistic inspiration. All right, back to the abomination.]

Why must they try to hurt me with their lies?
Sit back in breathless wait for my demise?
Wy do they say the untrue things they say?
No soap will ever wash this hurt away.

Lies and rumours everywhere abound.
Now I know where my true friends are found.
One day I swear the truth will come to light,
But that will not restore my old delight.

[Murphy. The worst/most amusing part is I have absolutely no recollection of whatever trauma this poem is referring to, so clearly it was just a mite less everlasting than I supposed at the time.

Time for a geeky sci-fi reference: You know, the Vogons (Hitchhiker`s Guide) routinely threatened people with either a) being thrown out an airlock or b) having to listen to their poetry, and if I'm not mistaken, most of their victims went for the airlock.

I think A Terrible Lie is clearly in the Vogon school of poetry.]

I'm toying with the idea of including a piece of fantasy poetry, which apparently I did a lot of at that age. There's one here written by "a soldier" who lost some war but apparently managed to smuggle a badly-rhymed letter home describing the loss. Very entertaining. There's even an early polemic--I told you I came by my evangelism honestly. However I do have a few of the unrhymed outpouring-of-woe sorts sitting around in this book, and in the spirit of the occasion I will include one.

Joy and My Mind

[hahahahahahahahaha]

See how I run
[just like Jane! sorry]
And fake it
Drown the tears in laughter
See how I play
And break it-
Each fancy toy that holds no charm
[apparently I was in an anti-punctuation phase]
See how I smile
Or grimace
Whichever likes to mind
See how I lie
So sweetly
Never a lie more truthfully told
See how I crack
The caverns
Showing wide across my mask
See how I scream
[oh woe! woe is me! I am a great soul who suffers in torment!]
The echoes
Never heard but in my mind
See how I jump
[This is where an intruding parent might have called a suicide helpline...]
And splinter
Bones and tendons shoot apart
[see?]
Blood spurts

Death awaiting on a grassy plain
Joy of afterlife to blind the pain.
[back to the rhyming! Good god]
My torn and mangled soul--now see me fly!
Up to the waiting arms in heaven high.
[guess I was still christian at this point]

At least it has a happy ending?

Once again, I actually can't remember what brought this on. But I loved how I managed to combine tortured genius, the enlightenment of depression, AND a religious message in one poem. I wasn't just an extra-special smart girl who saw through the shallow materialism and thoughtless happiness of everyday life, oh no; I was going to heaven, too!

Except for the suicide part. Not sure how I was going to work that out.

I'd like you all to know that I'm feeling much, much better now.

Posted by Andrea at 8:56 AM | Comments (17)

Tuesday August 12 is Bad Teenage Poetry Blogging Day

So you think you're tough.

You've blogged about tricky political issues like bigotry or homelessness. You've bared your soul to the internet about your personal relationships or failures as a parent. You've admitted to liking bad tv shows, sloppy books, boy bands. You have let typos stand for the ages.

Now it's time for a real challenge.

Superlagirl has declared this Tuesday Bad Teenage Poetry Blogging Day.

That's right. Find the most horrendous, melodramatic, angst-ridden piece of quasi-poetry you can find and share it with the entire planet for all eternity.

(Note that this is BAD Teenage Poetry Blogging Day. If you have any good teenage poetry, you are expressly forbidden from posting it. You must dig up a piece of crap.)

My instincts are warning me away from it, but something atrocious will be here on Tuesday.

Missed the day? I'm sure Superlagirl won't mind if you participate after the fact. In other words: Wednesday is no excuse.

Now we'll finally separate the real bloggers from the pretenders.

Posted by Andrea at 8:56 AM | Comments (3)

Irony, plus self-promotion

I was giving Frances her bath yesterday when I looked behind me and there was, scuttling across the floor, an insect at least half an inch long, something like a grasshopper but black and with a larger body. (I find it amazing that only insects can scuttle, unless you're discussing a political act.) I have no philosophical quarrel with insects but, so far as I'm concerned, they're wild animals and as such do not belong in my house. I picked up the nearest printed material and thwacked it, then flushed the remains down the toilet.

It just so happens that the print material in question was the latest issue of Lapham's Quarterly, Book of Nature. My book of nature now has a wee bit of nature smeared on the back cover.

Blog-wise, that's all I have for you today, as Frances and I will be meeting up with friends at farms and buying too many butter tarts, and probably watching a movie--very likely The Sword in the Stone, which is the one we watched yesterday. But in the meantime, I have a guest column up at Literary Mama about the joys of mothering with type 1 diabetes. Enjoy. :)

Posted by Andrea at 8:42 AM | Comments (1)

How to Change Everything in a Year, more or less

Step One: Separate from your spouse. Get a new apartment, move. Set everything up. Sign your daughter up for junior kindergarten and get her a new daycare. The stress will make you lose a pile of weight, so buy some new clothes while you're at it.

Take your time, I'll wait....

Step Two: Stop scrapbooking, you don't have time. Stop doing crafts, you don't have time. Stop baking, you don't have time. Stop playing computer games, you don't have time. Stop (most of your) reading, you don't have time. Stop commenting on blogs, you don't have time. Stop spending more than thirty minutes with your daughter on weeknights, you don't have time. Stop responding to (most) emails, you don't have time. Stop taking photographs, you don't have time. Keep exercising because otherwise you'll explode, and no one wants to have to clean that mess off the kitchen floor. Keep writing because otherwise you don't know who you are.

Once you get through Step One, this takes no time at all.

Step Three: Realize that you've lost or dropped almost everything that used to give you joy in life. Be unable to move past the issues that led to the divorce. Hold your daughter whenever she has a nightmare that her Daddy came to get her, and then left. Realize that you no longer have the time to even do all of the necessary things. Become more sleep-deprived with every passing week despite having stopped doing almost everything. Wonder how, if or when it is ever going to get any better. Have a mental breakdown.

This, too, is a snap. You can drag it out to as much as a month, but it's also possible to wrap it up in an hour or so if you're dedicated.

Step Four: Attempt stop-gap measures. Buy a dishwasher, sweep less often, let the toys accumulate on the living room floor. Pay all of the bills autmoatically by credit card so that you don't need to worry about forgetting any. Realize this is not helping. Realize that housework is not the enemy.

That, actually, you don't mind the housework, now that the house is small and yours.

That getting rid of it isn't saving your time or your sanity.

Step Four takes a little longer than the last two. You need to wait long enough for that realization to really sink in. Could be a month or two.

Step Five: Finger the culprit: your job.

Be struck with the idea that you are sacrificing all of the important things in your life that give you actual happiness (time with your daughter, time to read, time to be creative, time to keep the apartment clean) to a job that does not engage any part of you, except that its theoretical end-point is sufficiently ethically feel-good. Except that you hardly ever get there, and spend most of your time banging your bloody scalp against a brick wall that's moved half an inch in ten years.

Hate your job.

This can be accomplished in as little as five minutes. I don't care how busy you are, you've got five minutes to find a real bone-deep antipathy towards your current working situation.

Then, call in sick.

Step Six: Question your hatred of your job. Question your belief that anything out there would really be any better for you, that you are capable of enjoying work, period. Forget that you spend most of your free time engaged in unpaid work of one kind or another and enjoying it. Question your desire not to spend fifty hours every week commuting to and performing a job that mostly bores you. Question whether you aren't pretty spoiled and privileged, actually, to be able to even consider such ephemeral questions as job-satisfaction and meaning-of-life. Second-guess yourself by obsessively filling out career questionnaires on the internet. Be shocked when they all tell you that writing and theoretical/abstract pursuits are tied at the top of your interests and abilities. Figure that level of consistency is probably significant. Consider that your current job and all of the related jobs which your current experience qualifies you for allow for neither writing nor theorizing/abstracting, and in fact engage the skills and interests which rank near the bottom of the list. Bang your head on the nearest desk. Make up an excuse for the coworkers who come to find out what the ruckus was all about. (Did I forget to mention it? Fill out the questionnaires at work, of course.)

Done properly, this step will take at least a few days.

Step Seven: Read a half-dozen books on happiness. Feel guilt at their unanimous insistence on the ability of anyone to feel happy in their current circumstances. Contemplate making another upheaval in your life to end up no happier than you are now. Imagine poor Frances trapped in a bare apartment with a bitter mother who gave up a stable, well-paying job because it wasn't fulfilling, faugh. Feel nauseous. Complete the strenths inventory in Authentic Happiness and realize that none of your top five strengths are given any play at work. Recall occasions when you have attempted to use them and found it frustrating and depressing because there were so many roadblocks. Contemplate disemboweling the author when you read his cheery, upbeat message that everyone can redesign their job to make better use of their strengths. Contemplate sending him a sternly-worded letter. Do neither.

This all depends on your reading speed. You can do this in a week, or it might take a few months. Go at your own pace.

Step Eight: Is there any reason you can't do both? Can't you write about theoretical/abstracty things? Don't you already do that plenty on the internet for free? Aren't there people who get paid to write about science and environmental issues and women's issues and psychology and all the other innumerable theoretical/abstract subjects that fill your miserly heart with such joy? Why can't you be one of them?

Sure, you're writing now; but it's not putting any meals on the table and it will be years, if ever, before you have enough time to seriously devote to it that income replacement would be a real option. There is only so much you can do with thirty minutes a day. Marketing, for instance, and querying, and studying markets, and developing new skills, are not going to happen on thirty minutes a day.

Whereas, on the other hand, if you were writing full-time for actual money, if it was freelance or not, you would be developing skills and learning about marketing and mapping the ins and outs of the business all the time as a matter of course.

I just gave you step eight. It'll take no time at all.

Step Nine: Investigate writing schools. Consider the evening option: dismiss it because of the difficulties with childcare, not to mention, you already miss your daughter. Consider the online option: dismiss it because it seems short on instruction and high on discussion. Consider the continuing-ed option: dismiss it because the instructors seem kind of iffy and you're not sure how far such a qualification could carry you. Investigate degree programs. Dither. Digress. Stall. Be anxious. Apply. Start biting your nails again. Procrastinate on the corporate Learning Plan prerogative. Be accepted. Dither some more. Get a stomach ache. Budget. Get a headache. Investigate how many credits you would need to graduate and how long that would take, and what the timing conflicts might be. Feel dizzy. Start telling people. Fight the urge to throw up. Attend the enrolment appoint. Make a deposit. Good god, you're really going to do this.

Question your sanity. Wonder if you really wouldn't be better off just trying to freelance for a while. Tell yourself you can do both, because school has never taken you forty hours a week, so you will have more time to write and will be studying writing at the same time.

Step Nine will take a few weeks, and they will be nauseous, anxious, unpleasant ones to boot. Do not schedule important appointments during this time period.

Step Ten: Understand that, for the first time in your life, as of September you are going to feel very old.

Posted by Andrea at 10:09 AM | Comments (16)

a life in six words

A friend was commenting the other day, as I shared yet another anecdote about the slow disintegration of my marriage, that I ought to write a book about it; and then, last week, the Goldfish wrote on her blog that I ought to write a book about my current dating adventures.

I agree with both of them; the trouble is that at the age of 33 I think I have the material for at least ten memoirs, and it's difficult to know which one to begin with. Here are the options, in no particular order:

1. The Diabetes Book. There are several good memoirs about living with type 1 diabetes out there right now but, given that it's an epidemic and all, there's almost certainly room for another one, especially if I can work in the pregnancy.

2. The Witch Book. How does a fundamentalist Baptist end up as a witch, anyway? It's a question I've been asked more than once. I think the answer could be a book.

3. The Other Woman Book.

4. The Marriage/Divorce/Legally-Nameless Reason for Divorce Book. Obviously I can't say much about that one here but I think it has a lot of potential, even if I'd have to write it under a pseudonym.

5. The Ugly Duckling Book.

6. The Growing Up Fundamentalist in a Secular Society Book. Not as much fun as it sounds.

7. The Dating Adventures Book. Past and present, a comparison of mores pre-internet and post, with a helping of "how to tell if the guy who's buying you a steak is actually a jerk." At the very least I ought to have enough outrageous stories to fill it up (like the guy who propositioned me after I accused him of stealing my wallet).

8. The Dwarfism Book. Aka, blog-on-paper.

9. The Single Motherhood Book. Still in the midst of figuring out what that one would be like; the one thing I do know is that it's not what I expected it to be.

10. The Combo Book. The Growing Up Fundamentalist in a Secular Society, Ugly Duckling, Converting to Wicca, Living with Diabetes, Coping with High-Risk Pregnancy Resulting in Rare Genetic Syndrome, Other Woman, Getting a Divorce for Legally-Nameless Reasons, Becoming a Single Mom, with Dating Adventures thrown in for leavening throughout, resulting in ... I don't know yet. I think, though, that it would be a pretty big book.

If you were me, which would you start with?

So you can see how this six-word memoir thing going around right now would propose certain challenges. Which memoir ought to be compressed into six words? I thought of a few:

Fifteen years, I still hate needles
I wanted you to choose me
Perfectionist (I like that one)

Ultimately they all leave too much out to be truly satisfying. The only one that works for me is:

My entire life is statistically improbable*

That * would be one hell of a footnote.

Posted by Andrea at 9:50 AM | Comments (10)

Frog, Meet B(l)og

I'm nobody! Who are you? Are you nobody, too? Then there's a pair of us — don't tell! They'd banish us, you know.

How dreary to be somebody!
How public, like a frog
To tell your name the livelong day
To an admiring b(l)og!

(Emily Dickinson, slightly modified)

Hi. My name is Andrea McDowell. It says so right up in the url. See?

It's funny. When I started blogging, I never bothered to be anonymous because I figured no one would ever read it.

When I found out people were reading it, the pseudonymity boat had sailed--I couldn't get into the habit of using handles, and couldn't go back through all the old entries to replace them. It's ok, I thought. Fifty million blogs on the internet, what are the chances? Andrea is a very common name. How likely is it that someone I know will stumble on my little hideaway?

Umm. Hi, everyone.

Having it brought home to me exactly how easy it is to find someone's blog on the internet--and then making it more public myself by putting my name in the url--has made the whole brutal honesty thing a bit more challenging. One of the first things I did when I bought the domain name was go back and unpublish a few hundred entries--because while I could fool myself once upon a time that no one would figure out who my parents are or my ex-husband, it's easy enough now. Since then I have hobbled my typing fingers many, many times to prevent myself from telling some story which is, I think, true and good and meaningful, but which could cause humiliation or upset to someone I care about if anyone were ever to figure out who they are or what I am talking about.

But I hate it. Not (only) because I'm a heartless bitch who wants to burn all her bridges behind her, but because I'm torn between what we as writers owe to the people in our lives vs. what we as writers owe in terms of honesty and truth to our readers, and also, if truth be told, what we as writers owe to ourselves (more on that in a minute).

No one, first of all, volunteers to be blog fodder.

Then again, no one volunteers to be the alcoholic abusive mother in a best-selling memoir, or the tragic childhood case of terminal cancer in a doctor's autobiography, or even the clueless and obtuse highschool guidance counselor who failed to see the biography subject's obvious innate brilliance and so tried to steer them down the path of frygirldom. And yet without such characters, if all people in all writing both fictive and not were presented in the best light and with the most charitable of intentions--no one would ever read a god damn thing. Besides being utterly boring, it would have nothing to offer us, because people are often ugly, petty, selfish, trivial and self-absorbed, and without showing that, writing has nothing to offer us.

This is the crux of it: if a writer shows consideration to the people in their lives despite what it costs their writing, then the writing itself will be flat, bland and meainingless. We need writers who are willing to extract blood from the people nearest and dearest to them to fuel the words on the page. That is what writers owe to their readers--the truth, the gory, messy, sloppy, inconceivable, sometimes glorious truth.

No, we can't use our blogs as kangaroo courts either.

But I don't think the answer is to paper over the faults of our loved ones (or unloved ones, as the case may be). I think the answer is to be as brutally honest about ourselves as we are about others. Find a way to accept fifty per cent of the blame wherever possible. Try to explain someone else's actions in terms other than "he's an asshole" or "she's a bitch" (even when it's true). Sometimes it's just a matter of timing, and there may be a story you need to sit on for a year or a decade before it can be told usefully (and in most cases, sitting on it for a year or a decade will only improve your ability to tell that story with honesty and insight, so it's not a bad thing).

But censoring ourselves to make the people around us look like heroes even when they're not so that we can maintain intact our public image of Nice Girls is not the answer. (Yes, I am blaming sexism for this--there is a fundamental incompatability with the feminine mandate of maintaining relationships and fostering intimacy with the writer's or artist's mandate of revealing Truth. You cannot do both.)

I'd rather be Brave than Nice.

And what about us? What do we owe to ourselves?

I can think of two aspects to this. There may be more.

One: If the cost of maintaining relationships is keeping secrets for those who have hurt us, so that we pay for the consequences of their actions, is that right?

I don't believe so. I believe that if someone has done wrong, then public exposure for that wrongdoing is not out of the realm of acceptability. It is not our job to swallow that bile. We don't have the right to inflate or inflame, to defame or harass them, but if what we are saying is the truth--if we have claimed our own part and not painted them as simply evil--then I do not believe that we have the responsibility to protect them.

Two: Doesn't it get boring?

Don't you get awfully bored trying to make every story about you so that you don't have to worry about walking over that line?

I do. I am so tremendously bored by myself some days I can't write anything at all. Who cares? Why are you here? Why am I here? Doesn't it ever make you feel like a croaking frog--"here I am! here I am! here I am!" So what?

I'd rather tell stories, whether fictitious or not. Stories involve more than one character. That's not just what makes them useful. It's also what makes them interesting.

I think it was in Stumbling on Happiness that I read that people generally see themselves as reacting to other people's actions, and other people as instigators. That is, they see the world as a the cause to which they are merely the reaction, and normally fail to realize the ways in which their own actions cause others to react. The way to be honest and fair to the others who appear in our writing (whether on blogs or elsewhere) is to be aware of this and fight it, analyze our own behaviour and motivations for the ways in which we too cause others to react. Work to accept fifty per cent of the blame wherever we can.

Posted by Andrea at 12:04 PM | Comments (24)

Monday Mission: Self-Effacing

I know I let these ones go ages ago (which was great--I was happy to see it find life elsewhere), and gods only know what they're up to in the blogosphere these days; so rather than lay claim to the original, I'm going to say that this is the original Monday Mission's fraternal twin. Not exactly the same, but very close.

One of the books on my to-be-read pile is a set of writing exercises called The 3 A.M. Epiphany. There are 200 of them, and I'd like to work my way through them without it stealing precious off-line time from my actual writing projects. So I thought I'd inflict it on you. I mean (ahem) share it with you. And maybe you'd like to participate, too.

Of course if you'd like you can just show up on Mondays and (kindly and constructively) trash what I've written. I'd be very grateful to you if you did. Or you can get your own copy of the book and play along. Or you can avoid the blog like the plague on Mondays because nothing sounds more tedious than reading someone else's writing exercises. It's up to you.

Without further ado, this week's mission is to write 600 words from the first-person point of view while using first-person pronouns (I, me, my) only twice. The author of the book intends this to be fiction, of course, but I don't see why this can't be a blog post--600 words of any scene or story, real or not, told from the first-person without the use of first-person pronouns.

~~~~~

Mom’s eyes were narrowed and looked like two black stones in her face. Her lips were pressed together between her front teeth. She hadn’t said anything for fifteen minutes. Dad was puttering around the kitchen like he always did, as if making food for someone would fix their problems. He was making an omelette, whisking eggs and chopping vegetables, shredding cheese. He hummed as he chopped, like everything had not just changed.

Mom was still staring, turning her coffee cup around in her hands without looking at it, though it was twenty minutes old now and cold. She hadn’t had any. Not a good sign. She hadn’t even added any milk or sugar. Around her the kitchen was dingy—the paint was grimy and needed redoing and the tiles were old and grey and she’d wanted to replace the counter for years and she never had and she was going to say why again. “Do you know what I’ve given up for you?” she said. “All the years I’ve worked and slaved and never had anything for myself, so we could save enough money for you to go to school. And what are you going to do?”

“Shhh, shhh,” said Dad, bringing the omelettes over. They sat in a platter in the middle of the table, cheerful and topped with melted cheese in just the way everyone liked, and no one touched them. He tsked and served it out. They looked rubbery and inedible that day.

“You’re going to throw it all away to be a whore and a stripper.” She said. She dropped her fork on the plate where it clanked like a metal door closing.

I shoved the omelette away; Dad came and pushed it back. “Fire dancer,” he said.

“Fire dancer,” she said, in a tone of exaggerated respect. “Whores and strippers who don’t even have enough sense to charge real money for what they do.”

Outside the window, two goldfinches chased each other through the branches of the dogwood tree. The male was turning yellow; it was spring, and their song and flight as they chased each other was as beautiful as it had been every other spring.

“Shh, Gunny, shh. You’re disappointed, I know—“

“Disappointed!”

“—but this is Kyrie’s choice to make.”

“Like fire it is! We’ve saved for sixteen years for her schooling!”

“HER schooling. Come on, Gunny. You don’t want to do this.”

“No, I don’t. I don’t want to do this. But I will if I have to.” She stood up quickly and her wooden chair croaked on the floor. “No daughter of mine would do such a thing.”

He stood still, holding the hot skillet in his oven-mittened hand. “What are you saying?” How sweet and yet perfectly ridiculous he seemed, stunned as always by the unkindness of anyone, even his sharp-angled selfish wife.

“You know what I’m saying.” Her voice was rising now, nearly hysterical. That wasn’t a good sign. Oh, gods. “But she’s not leaving me any choice. I saved for sixteen years on a clerk’s salary to send her to school! And she wants to be a fire dancer!”

“You know it’s not like that. It’s a calling. She can’t choose it any more than you can choose the shape of your head.” He shook his, baffled and weary and scared, and put the skillet in the sink. “Gunny. Please.”

“Please! Please! What have I been saying to her for two days now! Did it do any good?” Her voice was sharp and jagged now. She never forgave anyone for seeing her like this. She looked around and found her purse and grabbed it and put her jacket on. “I’m not having it, I won’t have it. If she goes through with this she’s no daughter of mine.”

“Gunny,” said Dad; but it didn’t do any good, it never did any good at this point. Out she went, slamming the door. My head fell to the kitchen table; the worn wood with its innumerable dents and scratches was cool. Dad stroked my hair. It felt good, relaxing, like he could make all these problems disappear just by loving everyone enough. “Don’t worry, sweetheart. Shh. I’ll talk her down. She won’t stick to it. She doesn’t mean it. I’ll pack your bag.”

He didn’t know her very well. Twenty-five years married and he didn’t know her at all.

~~~~~

OK, so it's 740 words and I used first-person pronouns 3 times. I cheated. But I cheated with good intentions? And it's not particularly good or well-written (the dialogue is over the top), but it was a challenge, and that's the important thing. The only pronoun I can think to get rid of would be the "my" in the last paragraph, but I don't think chopping that sentence would make it better, so I'll leave it in and cheat instead.

Posted by Andrea at 7:39 AM | Comments (11)

NaNoWriMo Lessons Learned

(As I write this, Frances is building a haunted house out of cereal boxes, stuffed toys, slippers, and paper bags. "It's very haunted, and it looks nice to me," she says. I see. "You should go inside," she says. Of course.)

1. I actually can write 2000 words a day.

2. But only if I drastically cut down the exercise, housework, and sleep.

3. So really, I can't.

4. But I can easily see how I could do 500-1000 without having to cut down drastically on the exercise, housework and sleep.

5. I might have a nervous breakdown, but that's a separate problem.

6. I can't write without an outline. I got to 18,000 words and then lost track of the subplots and had to sketch them out to see where I should go next.

7. On the other hand, the characters did some surprising things. None of them threw the main plot off course, thank goodness, although the motivations changed.

8. And I didn't need to have everything planned out. I got to 18,000, did a sketch, and kept going. So that's new.

(Frances is looking for a toy, Dora-style: "The Boots-maker is green. If you see something green, say green! Yay, we did it! Thanks for helping!")

9. The downside was seeing, when I was done, that I was going to have to go back and fill in a whole lot of background information.

10. Why am I telling you this?

11. So next on the list of Things To Do is: make a big list of all the stuff that needs to be fixed.

12. After January 1, start fixing it, in one-hour daily increments.

13. Repeat.

14. I'm hoping to have it in non-embarrassing shape around the middle of next June, because on the advice of a friend, I signed up for one of UofT's summer writing courses, and I'd like to have this ready for outside eyes so I can bring it along then.

The most important thing I learned is that, when I make writing a priority and give myself a deadline, it gets done; and I don't have to farm Frances out, quit my job, stop cooking, stop exercising, stop sleeping, or stop reading--although it's true I do a whole lot less of those things, and absolutely no hobbies whatsoever.

I'll keep plugging away. I'll finish it up, polish it, obsess over it for a while, and send it out. It will be rejected, but that's ok; I'll have learned something from this anyway.

Posted by Andrea at 6:38 AM | Comments (2)

clears throat, taps microphone, looks around, and in other ways tries to draw attention without looking like she is trying to draw attention, because that would be gauche

Hey! I actually wrote a novel this month.

OK, it's not a very good novel. But it's done. I'll need to redo it maybe four or five times before I can actually think of it as a novel without using mental air-quotes around the word, and even then, you know, publishing: not going to happen.

Still. I did it.

(You know you're a mother when you can't use that phrase without immediately picturing Dora and Boots wagging their butts on TV and singing "We did it! We did it! We did it! Yay!")

Now, I will sleep.

Posted by Andrea at 11:14 PM | Comments (19)

Structure(d)

One of my favourite things about the alchemy of writing is how forcing something into a rigid shape makes it more itself, not less. The container allows the energy of the work to build; the stronger the shape, the stronger the energy. There is little in life more passionate than a sonnet, though the words it contains are nearly empty of emotion. Don't believe me? Consider:

My love is as a fever, longing still
For that which longer nurseth the disease,
Feeding on that which doth preserve the ill,
The uncertain sickly appetite to please.

(Yes, I memorize poetry. Norman Doidge in The Brain that Changes Itself argues that memorizing poetry makes your brain stronger and improves IQ, which was a nice validation of a trait I previously considered to be something of an embarassing tic.)

Back to the poem:

The only word in that stanza which refers to an emotion is "love." The rest of it is an extended medical metaphor. As free verse, it would never work:

"I love you so much I feel like I'm sick, and I don't want to get well."

Doesn't have quite the same punch, does it?

The apparent formlessness of free verse is something of a trick, an illusion; the truth is that a really good free verse poem is highly structured, but the structure is unique to that poem, the poem dictates the structure that most suits it. Still, the best free verse rarely whips itself up to the frenzy of a really good sonnet. The form of a sonnet is a cast-iron pot that you can stick on the hottest fire, and keep the water boiling for hours. Most free verse is a plastic bag. Try boiling water in that.

(Note: I'm not arguing that all poetry should be this passionate, or that free verse is bad because it's not; only that the rigidity reinforces the passion, rather than killing it.)

This applies to blogging, too, I've noticed. My most successful posts (from the point of view of the quality of the writing) are very structured. The structures appear to be my own--or at least I'm not aware of anyone else blogging with them. (Bracketing experiences with quotes is one; I try to use one to set off the other, whether through reinforcement or contrast. It's fun, and it works. Many of the ones I get the most recognition for follow this structure. I'm experimenting with others but most of them are not as set yet.) This in fact is one of the main values of blogging for me right now; it's a chance to experiment and practice with different sorts of structures. What happens if I include five short scenes with consecutive quotes from a piece of popular fiction between them? What happens if I start at the beginning, go all the way to the end, and then back to the beginning again? It doesn't matter if I fall flat on my face here; if the pot isn't strong enough to contain the water and take the heat, it doesn't matter.

The same is true in fiction. Really good fiction is highly structured. There is the set-up, rising tension, climax, denouement; and the climax usually takes place about 90% of the way through the book. (Try it with your favourite novel.)