Archives for November 2015

Talking Is Not Writing! Got That?

November 23, 2015 By howtobeabetterwriter_dhystk

Ran across a self-help article advising the best way to improve “a slow writing process” is to begin by dictating your content and “begin the writing phase with the transcription.” The first thing, according to the article’s author, is to ask yourself whether you’re a “talker or a writer.” If you tend to be a talker just dictate your story, the author advises.

The better advice, I submit, is that if you are a talker and not a writer, don’t waste time trying to be a writer. Go into radio or television.

Talking IS NOT writing. It’s an effective way for a writer to capture a brainstorm and ideas, and maybe some details of a potentially powerful dialogue on the fly (so as to not forget it before you reach a keyboard or pen and paper), but the advice ignores the fundamental difference between the two forms of communication. Talking tends to be casual and less precise; writing generally demands greater precision. You can see it. It sits there on the paper or screen looking at you and with its imprecisions highly visible.

Talking is sloppier. Recording it preserves that sloppiness and thus requires greater investment of time to make necessary revisions and to clean it up to be presentable, i.e., readable. There’s no mental weakness at play; it’s how the brain works. As a lawyer, I would dictate interrogatories and even legal briefs, but there I relied on a structure and a sort of fill-in-the-blanks process. Creative writing is more akin to working with clay. You have to knead it to make it soft then form it into a rough shape of your idea. Details come at the very end, slowly and with effort. Details require smoothing and shaping to transform a general idea into the specifics of sentences and paragraphs. That can be a messy process and in constant need of revision. In the end, the process inevitably impacts and alters the original idea. This means a writer must be flexible and disciplined at the same time.

There’s a lot going on as you take an idea from brain to paper. Quality is not an element you add to the process; it is the goal of the effort. The more contemplative the process, the more likely the quality of the end product will be improved. There is nothing wrong with sitting down and writing stream of consciousness; it can be exciting and fruitful, but expect to invest a great deal more effort to turn the result into a polished story or essay. To be a writer, you must be a worker, and a detailed one at that.

Transcribe verbatim your dictation and compare it to the product generated when you sit down and compose something on the keyboard. I’ve done that enough times to realize I’m much more efficient when I work directly with the keys. I’ve reached that point where I can no longer take pen to paper and write prose but use them to take or write notes or poetry. I’ve taken to collecting keyboards in the ongoing search for ones with the “perfect” touch.

My chosen technique to write rather than dictate has also to do with my abhorrence with the philosophy to write with speed and fix (i.e., edit) with contemplation. I much rather write with contemplation and incrementally get each draft a bit closer to the final-version quality I desire. Great writers don’t go happily from sloppy to good any more than great thinkers enjoy going from random to precise. They endeavor to make each new first step a little closer to their desired style and quality—to constantly endeavor to improve their efforts as well as their content.

Talking, whether to yourself or to or with others, tends to be a casual process. If you take a course in extemporaneous speaking, part of what you learn is to overcome the informality of conversation and apply a more disciplined structure into your presentation. Informality tends to be our default initial mode when you speak or key the mike on your recorder and start to ramble, probably because your internal editor doesn’t work as well as when it can see words on screen or paper.

The author of the above-mentioned article describes dictating your story as a “different way of creating your written manuscript.” No it’s not. It’s a way of injecting an additional process to get ideas into words that tell story. It has the appearance of adding efficiency and speed, but speed is not a friend to the contemplative element of creating a well-crafted story, and busywork certainly is not. Speed can be invaluable to capture a fleeting thought, but won’t likely produce a contemplative and polished sentence. Such sentences are crafted from effort.

Speed is not the panacea to become a better writer (deadline journalist being perhaps the exception), or anything for that matter, except perhaps, a quick-draw gunfighter. Contemplation is. Speed might let you finish your novel in a fortnight, but it probably won’t contain much literary value.

Back to the article. It lists five ways to “speak your book into existence”:

1) Have your book’s outline pinned down before you begin. If you are that far along, you’re ready to write! So start writing. Don’t put off the inevitable first necessary step.

2) Get ready with a recording device of your choice. Good luck with trying to find something that magically converts the content of your dictation into words on a page. A recording device is handy, but you have transcribe what you dictate into a readable format. That can add a lot more time and effort to your efforts. But is has an interesting impact. Listening to your own words during the transcription process lets you hear the “stuff” that is contrary to a good flow. It’s worth the investment in an inexpensive recording device—Olympus makes a few that are writer-friendly—to see if this process works for you. You might find it helpful, but if you don’t, don’t worry about it. There’s nothing wrong with you, your brain is letting you know its preferences.

3) Speak your content. The author is simply telling you to dictate your story. Great stand-alone advice. But, why interject another process—dictation and transcription—in between you and your first draft? Admittedly, however, that extra stage might work to improve the final result.

4) Get your recordings transcribed. Hire someone to do that, says the author, which means NO editing will take place between dictation and transcription and you lose the value mentioned above in number 2. It also means you will inevitably spend time trying to figure out just what it was you were saying as you try to translate your transcriber’s translation of your dictation. It might be just as useful to find software that translates spoken words into written ones. Ha! The real drawback, however, is that you’re trying to remove an intimate interaction between you and your words in the name of efficiency. A typewriter adds efficiency and still maintains an intimate interaction between you and your words.

5) Refine your content. In English, that means “edit and rewrite” what you have written. So it does makes sense to draft and edit in the first place. Gee, why not just say that? Because there is always a tendency for writers of do-it-yourself pieces to make it sound no more difficult than baking oatmeal cookies.

It’s important for the writer to not confuse busywork with substance. I’ve written before of the importance for you to find, or create, a process that best works for you. This usually requires borrowing, modifying, experimenting—and frustration—before settling on a process and procedure that works for you. Moving to Key West and hammering your stories out on a portable manual typewriter won’t make you Hemingway, and you don’t want to be Hemingway in the first place—we’ve already got one.

Scour the countryside and you’ll find dead horses everywhere. But occasionally, there’s need to beat on one to get a point across: There ARE NO short cuts to becoming a better writer. Improvement comes incrementally and usually in frustratingly small increments.  If you approach every effort of writing not just as some piece of individual content but an opportunity to learn and hone your skills, you will likely enjoy, and savor, the incremental improvements.

Of course, if you want to write better, write more. Write contemplatively. A recorder is a handy tool to capture ideas. They—your ideas not the recorder–slip easily free of your grasp and into oblivion if you don’t capture them. In the end, the important thing is to have your story or essay come to life through words. To paraphrase a favorite Simon and Garfunkel song: “Slow down, move to fast. Gotta make the story last . . .” That is what will make you feel groovy!

Elemental Elements

November 10, 2015 By howtobeabetterwriter_dhystk

Do you suppose there is some guy “out there” stuck with the actual moniker Walter Mitty, the hapless character created by James Thurber for a New Yorker piece back in 1939? Unwitting parents sometimes tag their newborns with names that later prove a burdensome brunt of jokes. Walter Mitty would be a classic misnomer. In the “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty,” Mr. Mitty daydreams a series of situations in which he’s suddenly thrust into some crisis that forces him to take heroic action. Most of his heroism is nipped in the bud before fruition by the interjection of reality.

Thurber’s literary talent certainly produced much laughter among the magazine’s readers, but his story also employed the key elements needed to make any story successful. Yes, you do need a plot and compelling characters, but without these key elements, your story will assuredly break down and quickly crumble into nothingness.

The elements are:
•   Tension
•   Desire
•   Crisis
•   Escalation
•   Struggle
•   Discovery
•   Transformation

Tension, of course, is another word for conflict. Two guys sitting at a table arguing about who deserves to marry the heroine might make an interesting discussion, but likely not for long. But an argument that becomes heated and escalates from threats to a shootout in the middle of the street. Bingo! There you have it. Story! All the elements are present. Discovery and transformation might be more mental than depicted by physical action, but they are there. In the end, one of the characters discovers something about him or herself or the other—that maybe the woman wasn’t worth it, after all—and the action transforms him or her in some positive or negative way. Typically a lesson is involved for one or both characters and certainly for the reader.

Discovery and transformation as such are usually less direct and subtler and may play out over the length of the story or serve as the critical ingredients of the climax or resolution. In fact, to be effective, a story needs to be impactful on its characters and thus its readers. Even though Mr. Mitty never achieves the ultimate result of his heroism because his daydreams inevitably collide prematurely with reality, they build tension and the climax is not so much what happens but what does not happen—he, the reader is cut short and thrown back into reality, depriving both of an heroic conclusion.

When it comes to tension, the writer creates it and the characters and readers are impacted by it. Tension is synonymous with conflict. Absent conflict you are absent story. What’s left is bland description—a table of guys playing poker. But the instant one accuses another of dealing from the bottom of the deck, story starts because conflict has been suddenly interjected and has no place to go but rise in intensity. Tension also needs to be sustaining. There may be a shoot out in the opening scenes, but the underlying tension—say that of the Clantons vs. the Youngers—feeds the ongoing story. A writer doesn’t pour water on a fire, but gasoline!

Desire is everywhere in story. It’s not necessarily that between the hero and distressed maiden. It might be the wimpy benchwarmer who dreams of making the winning touchdown, or the quiet son of a local mechanic who secretly works on a stock car he hopes to enter at the last minute in the county fair stock car race and take home the trophy to impress some girl.

Desire serves as the motivator to the actions of key characters. It’s at the heart of conflict and tension. The protagonist may want something really badly and the antagonist may want to keep him or her from obtaining it, or be in competition to acquire it. Maybe the young stock car driver is the son of the racer seriously injured in a collision with the winner of last year’s race. Maybe last year’s winner sabotaged the father’s car and tried a repeat that performance this year. Will he succeed?

Crisis is like salt and pepper. Without them, food may be good but bland. The central conflict of a story relies on various sorts of crises that confront each character. Careful, you can have too many, but you need enough to motivate or explain why certain characters behave the way they do. Crisis is what helps define the characters and the heart of the story.

No story can stand in place. If it’s not moving, something around it better be. The action can be mental, but it needs to be active. By that I mean something that moves the story forward, i.e., serves a substantive role. You can spend a lot of words describing a character’s traits, but those traits need to be displayed in action to have credibility and substance. A character’s memory of hitting his thumb with a hammer as a kid helping his father nail the address numbers on the house becomes so much more than a memory when he realizes thirty years later those numbers are the key to the bank safety deposit box in which his father stashed a fortune in diamonds.

Something small gets bigger. Something insignificant becomes critically important. Something thought to be meaningless becomes the heart of a solution or a threat. Something, or someone, dismissed should not have been.

Thus crisis must also grow—escalate from something first forgotten to something critical to the solution the heroine is in search of. The inordinately quiet child slowly emerges as the main suspect in a murder case. The bumbling kid shows up as the star quarterback on the out-of-town team.

Struggle is another key spice of story. It too is everywhere. The hero may be struggling with some internal conflict that threatens his success or is on the verge of destroying his relationship with his one true love, or threatens the capture of his potential mimesis. Story is the collection of all the challenges that must be overcome by someone or something added together to achieve a goal or prevent an event.

But in the end, there has to be a reward. That is where discovery and transformation come in. Sure, the prospector may ultimately discover the hidden goldmine of a legendary miner, but it’s important that during the process of doing so, he becomes a better person. Of course, it’s the writer’s job to decide what path his hero takes to redemption and how to create and deal with collateral damage along the way to reach some transformation, but the listed elements can be applied to each character and the story as a whole. Otherwise the readers will end up where they started from, and there is no story in that, unless every road out of your fictional town takes the main character to the same place.

“Hey, Mom,” said the boy to his mother (as they passed a road sign for “Elements – 5 miles)—“what say we stop there and look for a place to have lunch?”

Who knows. They might find Walter Mitty there, looking for a good place to have lunch.

Moonbeam Point of View 

November 3, 2015 By howtobeabetterwriter_dhystk

Halloween provides a good segue into the important secondary meaning of the literary term “point of view.” Traditionally, point of view comes in three flavors: first, second, and third person, and refers to the perspective from which a story or novel is told. There is, however, another facet of the term—that of the author’s fundamental point of view as s/he originally wrote the story. This point of view is reflected by the characters that populate the tale.

It has only been in the last few centuries that we scare ourselves “for fun and profit,” according to Danny Lewis in Smithsonian.com. Says Lewis, “When you get scared, your body is flooded with chemicals like dopamine, adrenaline and endorphins, all of which can help you survive a life-threatening situation. Luckily, the brain can quickly sense whether the environment poses a real threat, which lets you enjoy a heightened experience without actually fearing for your life.”

Of course, the goal of the modern moviemaker is to make the hairs stand up on your neck and chills run up and down your spine. It’s the visual attributes of movies than can enhance those effects. But, before movies, the fright and the visceral responses generated depended exclusively on words printed on paper. Your reader’s imagination had to create the sights and sounds and give them sufficient reality to be replicated in the mind’s eye.

I’m sure in the modern boardroom, horror moviemakers chuckle their way through scenes as they plan a fright-night movie script. Likely the long-ago horror writers did not. I cannot picture Edgar Allen Poe sitting down in a droll mood and chuckling away as he penned “The Raven.” (I can’t picture Poe chuckling, ever, for that matter.) But, to write darkly, thought it may not require a dark personality, the writer must be able to conjure a scary place and go into it to capture its flavor and bleakness and horrors to share with and ensnare readers. It’s like the distinction between a newspaper article that tells you what happened—as frightening as the events transcribed might be—and the teller of a tale that pulls you in to live the scene and literally feel its impact on your five senses.

The point of view of a scary story relies chiefly on what I call the “attitude” of the tale itself. This attitude is dependent on the intimate relationship between its characters and their ability to pull the reader into the story. The key elements that make this possible are details and description. Details are the products of observations (real or imagined); the latter, the descriptions, relate to how well the observations are subsequently described. Think about Jack the Ripper—the never-caught slasher of Nineteenth Century London. Typically told in third person, consider the impact the story might have if told from the point of view of the Ripper—his (or her!) thoughts, the planning and preparation, victim selection, and ultimate stalking and execution of the selected victim. What about the perspective of the victim, who starts her trek home innocently at dusk, then realizes she is being followed as darkness settles over her. Shift the point of view between the pursued and the pursuer. Both endure a building of excitement—but one is based on horror, the other on the growing anticipation of the kill.

It’s the innocent activities of the innocent victim on the way to his or her impending date with death that enhances—spices—the growing tension of the story as the inevitability steadily mounts, but only if the details of description effectively reach out and grab, not merely touch, the reader’s senses. The reader, alone in her own dark corner, finds herself screaming a warning just as the Ripper’s blade captures the blurred reflection of the street lamp and slices through clothing and skin as the cry of agony rises with a splattering of blood.

But there’s an important boundary the writer, especially the teller of a scary tale, must discover and honor. It’s the boundary between description that paints a picture for a passive reader and imagery that pricks and feeds the reader’s now amped-up and over-active imagination. The latter changes the status of the reader from passive observer to emotionally active participaant.

We’ve all read stories that have truly frightened us, but think about it. It was the writer’s words of description that prompted our imagination to generate horrible images and the resulting emotional response, even if limited to simple gasp.

My next-door neighbor Tom Risa and I loved to watch “Fright Night” movies in our small town, single-screen theater and then walk home in the darkness through dimly-lit neighborhoods, and along the railroad tracks and finally across the darkened switchyard web of rails near the abandoned roundhouse with its dark eyes watching as we skirted the ominous shapes created by the dilapidated and textured outbuildings on our walk home. By the time we arrived there we barely had sufficient courage to remain outside to sit in the darkness at the picnic table and relive the scary and/or gory scenes of the movie and how its evil, cold-blooded monster might have magically climbed down from the dark movie screen to follow us through the dark neighborhoods and home and lurk just on the other side of the clotheslines in the black shadows of the garden and fence beyond as it plotted when to make its presence known and stage its bloody attack.
And, you haven’t lived until you’ve sat around a real campfire in the dark woods on a moonless night sharing horror stories as the fire flicks scary shadows up and on the canopy of black leaves as the wind whispers threats through creaking limbs and branches. No one had the courage to risk looking up. I recall, too, how scared we got as we walked home in the dark after viewing the late, Saturday night showing of “Tarantula.”

“What was that?!”
“What was what?!

Really, a giant tarantula was about to march up James Street and into our driveway looking for children in the backyard!? Absolutely. All things were possible to us and our hyperactive imaginations.

We loved the fright, perhaps because we knew we would survive. The slimmest of possibilities that something real—or unreal—was actually lurking out there kept our spines a tingle. Those slimmest of possibilities were frequently the underlying themes of the stories we shared. We loved being scared and scaring each other. Proof of success was the chills generated along our spines.

Of course, now we laugh at the memories of those childhood fright nights. But still, sit in the dark outside—ideally in a non-urban setting sans any urban glow—and a little fear from childhood will likely revisit and creep about in the darkness. Maybe . . . just maybe there is something . . . or someone . . . lurking there . . . inside the neighbor’s abandoned chicken coop in the back corner of the lot . . . partially hidden in the shadows . . . the breeze (it was the breeze, wasn’t it?!) causing the nearby old wooden fence to creak just a little bit . . . or was that a groan . . . fences don’t groan . . . do they?

That’s the point of view the writer needs to think about—the point of view generated by mere verbal descriptions on a page in the reader’s mind—the emotional, visceral reactions to a scene painted in words. To achieve that sort of response requires descriptive details that reach in and touch the very heart of the five senses. If you read those writers good at doing that, you will notice that they paint with a very light touch.

Remember, however, the distinction between scare and frighten. The former is a passing experience—something that might startle but quickly allows the reader to return to the safety of reality. The other kind—the frightening kind—pulls you in and that chill that might otherwise run up or down your spine lingers and its cold and slimy touch goes clear into the marrow of your bones. It causes you to pause and peer into the darkness of your own bedroom and see things not there or hear things in the silence. If your writing can do that to your readers, you will have earned your bona fides as a horror writer.

It’s only in the last few hundred years that “scaring ourselves for fun (and profit) has become a sought-after experience,” states Margee Kerr, staff sociologist at a place called ScareHouse in Pittsburgh, PA. It’s Kerr’s job to make the place more frightening but to also study how visitors respond to an array of experiences designed to maximize fright.

She explains that the reason people enjoy being frightened is the feeling of success from having survived the experience. The distinction between enjoying a scare and being truly frightened is “knowing whether or not you’re in real danger.” Obviously, those in the fright business endeavor to make you believe you might be in real dangers and might not survive. All of this has become the realm of psychological research.

Of course, the business of fright has been benefited and enhanced by the modern technologies of sight and sound, and even smell that add realism to the pretend. But it’s one thing to use sight and sound and smell to generate fear and quite another to scare someone with mere words. How to do that? What are the techniques?

There are few rules, but required first is a mastery of word-painting—brushing just enough of a mental picture on a page to prompt that part of the reader’s imagination inclined to run amok to make a break for it and run past frightening connections and observe (i.e., mentally construct) horrifying visages and scenes along the way. The best way to achieve this is through practice and sharing your efforts with trusted friends who will give you an honest assessment of the effectiveness of your efforts. If the feedback you receive includes admissions of being truly frightened by your words, that constitutes your certificate of completion from horror writing school. Like cooking, no matter how good the recipe sounds, you need a taste test.

The ultimate effectiveness of details to scare rests in part on how well the writer sets the scene and populates it with appropriate character(s) that display effective horrific traits, intentions, and actions. The better the details interweave a reader’s five senses, the scarier the words become. Dim lighting enhances the effect. The impact of a scary yarn in the well-lit parlor is exponentially enhanced when the same story is told in a dimly lit room. Add a slight draft.

Consider Loren Eiseley’s “The ‘Something’ in the Well”:

Once long ago as a child I remember removing the cover from an old well. I was alone at the time and I can still anticipate, with a slight crawling of my scalp, the sight I inadvertently saw as I peered over the brink and followed the shaft of sunlight many feet down into the darkness. The sunlight touched, just touched in passing, a rusty pipe which projected across the well space some twenty feet above the water. And there, secretive as that very underground whose mystery had lured me into this adventure, I saw, passing surely and unhurriedly into the darkness, a spidery thing of hair and many legs. I set the rotting cover of boards back into place with a shiver, but that unidentifiable creature of the well has stayed with me to this day.

For the first time I must have realized, I think, the frightening diversity of the living; something that did not love the sun was down there, something that could walk through total darkness upon slender footholds over evil waters, something that had come down there by preference from above.

What Eiseley accomplished with basic and simple words, none separately and fundamentally scary, is a scene as scary as if it had been ourselves moving the cover aside and looking down into the darkness—an experience we’ve all had when opening the door to a dark garage at midnight to park the car or looking for something amid a cluster of musty boxes in an unlit corner of a basement. Add an odor—preferably musty if not hinting of something dead—perhaps a glimpse of something moving—even if a cockroach—or a scratching of something against an ancient brick wall or cardboard box, and the dial on the fright-o-meter jumps.

Turn the well into an abandoned and allegedly haunted silver mine that a group of teenagers, on a dare, decide to explore on a dark All Hallows Eve. There they are, exploring, their bravery bolstered by the light of their torches and group confidence when suddenly a blast of odiferous air blows out their lights . . . Each is instantly alone with his or her fears and the reader joins them there.

What made Edgar Allen Poe so effective in telling tales of fright was the attention he paid to the emotional impact of his words. Beyond that, there too is a slightly haunting rhythm. Poe knew the impact he wanted a story to produce and carefully assembled his words to create the desired effect. Read “The Tell-Tale Heart” or “The Premature Burial” (he wrote a couple dozen scary tales) and you’ll see how carefully he crafted his words to create a mood of fear—the atmosphere of the story. Pick any writer known for his or her skills to scare and study the choice of words, diction, and pacing of the sentences. Try to discover what makes the work scary to you. If you don’t find a writer scary, find one that is. If you don’t find a writer who can scare you, don’t bother with trying to be scary to your own readers. Find another genre. In the process, remember: you can’t copy. You are looking at and analyzing techniques and effects. It takes a little practice to properly employ them.

An acquaintance of my father many years ago lent him an old fashioned telescope—the type you would see the pirates in old movies use to spot a victim ship on the horizon. Sitting on neighbor Tom Risa’s next door back stoop talking about the mysteries of space, we passed the scope back and forth peering through its lenses at the pocked surface of the moon and scanned its wondrous craters. As we passed the scope back and forth we’d share what we saw and suggest to each other where to look to find some interesting detail or crater. As I peered at the gray orb on one of my turns, I saw something that remains as vivid in my memory as when I first observed it on that long-ago dark night—a red orb suddenly appeared from behind the moon on its right side and moved in a perfect arc across its face to disappear behind its left side. A single orbit. Nothing fancy. No sparks. It left no trail. It just appeared—a smallish, red, round, unhurried object circling the moon at its equator.

To this day, I wonder about what I saw—or imagined—and whether there might be something on the dark side of the moon waiting to be discovered. Were I to sit down to write a scary story, that is the way I would tell it—straightforward, no frills, just observations and related details sufficient to prompt the reader’s imagination—in the darkness—to do the rest. Two astronauts hovering above the backside of the moon searching for evidence of something out of the ordinary, or perhaps from the point of view of something down on the surface, watching them.