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May 16 - June 11, 2022
Our schools now often teach little of an essential and once common knowledge, the vocabulary of grammar—the techspeak of language and writing. Words such as subject, predicate, object, or adjective and adverb, or past tense and past-perfect tense, are half understood by or wholly unfamiliar to many. Yet they’re the names of the writer’s tools. They’re the words you need when you want to say what’s wrong or right in a sentence. A writer who doesn’t know them is like a carpenter who doesn’t know a hammer from a screwdriver. (“Hey, Pat, if I use that whatsit there with the kinda pointy end, will
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A skill is something you know how to do. Skill in writing frees you to write what you want to write. It may also show you what you want to write. Craft enables art.
Since narrative is what this is all about, try to make each exercise not a static scene but the account of an act or action, something happening.
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What it has to do is move—end up in a different place from where it started. That’s what narrative does. It goes. It moves. Story is change.
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The chief duty of a narrative sentence is to lead to the next sentence—to keep the story going. Forward movement, pace, and rhythm are words that are going to return often in this book. Pace and movement depend above all on rhythm, and the primary way you feel and control the rhythm of your prose is by hearing it—by listening to it.
THE POET CAROLYN KIZER SAID TO ME once, “Poets are interested mostly in death and commas.” Maybe storytellers are interested mostly in life and commas.
Morality and grammar are related. Human beings live by the word. Socrates said, “The misuse of language induces evil in the soul.”
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Lying is the deliberate misuse of language. But language misused through “mere” ignorance or carelessness breeds half-truths, misunderstandings, and lies.
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Writing can be completely conversational and informal, but to communicate thought or emotion of any complexity at all, it has to follow the general agreements, the shared rules of grammar and usage. Or, if it breaks them, it breaks them intentionally. To break a rule you have to know the rule. A blunder is not a revolution.
In a narrative, the chief duty of a sentence is to lead to the next sentence. Beyond this basic, invisible job, the narrative sentence can of course do an infinite number of audible, palpable, beautiful, surprising, powerful things. In order to do them, it needs one quality above all: coherence. A sentence has to hang together.
And many people admire the elaborate, ornate prose of writers such as Nabokov, which I find difficult to get through because it’s always stopping to be admired.
EXERCISE THREE: Short and Long Part One: Write a paragraph of narrative, 100–150 words, in sentences of seven or fewer words. No sentence fragments!* Each must have a subject and a verb.
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Part Two: Write a half page to a page of narrative, up to 350 words, that is all one sentence. Suggested subjects: For Part One, some kind of tense, intense action—like a thief entering a room where someone’s sleeping. For Part Two: A very long sentence is suited to powerful, gathering emotion and to sweeping a lot of characters in together. You might try some family memory, fictional or real, such as a key moment at a dinner table or at a hospital bed.
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EXERCISE FOUR, PARTS 1 AND 2: Again and Again and Again I can’t suggest “plots” for these; the nature of the exercise doesn’t allow it. Part One: Verbal Repetition Write a paragraph of narrative (150 words) that includes at least three repetitions of a noun, verb, or adjective (a noticeable word, not an invisible one like was, said, did).
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Part Two: Structural Repetition Write a short narrative (350–1000 words) in which something is said or done and then something is said or done that echoes or repeats it, perhaps in a different context, or by different people, or on a different scale. This can be a complete story, if you like, or a fragment of narrative.
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When the quality that the adverb indicates can be put in the verb itself (they ran quickly = they raced) or the quality the adjective indicates can be put in the noun itself (a growling voice = a growl), the prose will be cleaner, more intense, more vivid.
Those of us who were brought up to be unaggressive in conversation are liable to use qualifiers—adjectives and adverbs such as rather, a little, which soften or weaken the words they modify. In conversation they’re OK; in written prose they’re bloodsuckers—ticks. You have to dig them out right away.
Nothing in your story happens “somehow.” It happens because you wrote it. Take responsibility!
EXERCISE FIVE: Chastity Write a paragraph to a page (200–350 words) of descriptive narrative prose without adjectives or adverbs. No dialogue. The point is to give a vivid description of a scene or an action using only verbs, nouns, pronouns, and articles. Adverbs of time (then, next, later, etc.) may be necessary, but be sparing. Be chaste.
Abstract discourse is always in the present tense (I’m writing it right now). Generalities aren’t time-bound, and so philosophers, physicists, mathematicians, and God all speak in the present tense.
EXERCISE SIX: The Old Woman This should run to a page or so; keep it short and not too ambitious, because you’re going to write the same story twice. The subject is this: An old woman is busy doing something—washing the dishes, or gardening, or editing a PhD dissertation in mathematics, whatever you like—as she thinks about an event that happened in her youth. You’re going to intercut between the two times. “Now” is where she is and what she’s doing; “then” is her memory of something that happened when she was young. Your narration will move back and forth between “now” and “then.” You will
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EXERCISE SEVEN: Points of View Think up a situation for a narrative sketch of 200–350 words. It can be anything you like but should involve several people doing something.
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Please use little or no dialogue in these POV exercises. While the characters talk, their voices cover the POV, and so you’re not exploring that voice, which is the point of the exercise. Part One: Two Voices First: Tell your little story from a single POV, that of a participant in the event—an old man, a child, a cat, whatever you like. Use limited third person. Second: Retell the story from the POV of one of the other people involved in it. Again, use limited third person.
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Part Two: Detached Narrator Tell the same story using the detached author or “fly on the wall” POV. Part Three: Observer-Narrator If there wasn’t a character in the original version who was there but was not a participant, only an onlooker, add such a character now. Tell the same story in that character’s voice, in first or third person. Part Four: Involved Author Tell the same or a new story using the involved-author POV.
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If your original story simply doesn’t lend itself to this voice, find a story you want to tell that you can be emotionally and morally involved in.
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YOU CAN CHANGE POINT OF VIEW, OF course; it is your God-given right as an American fiction writer. All I’m saying is, you need to know that you’re doing it; some American fiction writers don’t.
the involved author can move from one viewpoint character to another at will; but if it happens very often, unless the writing is superbly controlled, readers will tire of being jerked from mind to mind, or will lose track of whose mind they’re supposed to be in.
EXERCISE EIGHT: Changing Voices Part One: Quick Shifts in Limited Third: A short narrative, 300–600 words. You can use one of the sketches from Exercise 7 or make up a new scene of the same kind: several people involved in the same activity or event. Tell the story using several different viewpoint characters (narrators) in limited third person, changing from one to another as the narrative proceeds. Mark the changes with line breaks, with the narrator’s name in parentheses at the head of that section, or with any device you like.
Thin Ice In 300–1000 words, tell the same story or a new story of the same kind, deliberately shifting POV from character to character several times without any obvious signal to the reader that you’re doing so.
Some people interpret story to mean plot. Some reduce story to action.
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A story that has nothing but action and plot is a pretty poor affair; and some great stories have neither.
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There are a limited number of plots (some say seven, some say twelve, some say thirty). There is no limit to the number of stories. Everybody in the world has their story; every meeting of one person with another may begin a story.
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The world of the story must be created and explained in the story. This is part of the particular interest and beauty of science fiction and fantasy: writer and reader collaborate in world-making. But it’s a tricky business.
Crafty writers (in any genre) don’t allow Exposition to form Lumps. They break up the information, grind it fine, and make it into bricks to build the story with.
Almost all narrative carries some load of explaining and describing. This expository freight can be as much a problem in memoir as it is in science fiction. Making the information part of the story is a learnable skill. As always, a good part of the solution consists simply in being aware that there is a problem.
EXERCISE NINE: Telling It Slant Part One: A & B The goal of this exercise is to tell a story and present two characters through dialogue alone. Write a page or two—word count would be misleading, as dialogue leaves a lot of unfilled lines—a page or two of pure dialogue. Write it like a play, with A and B as the characters’ names. No stage directions. No description of the characters. Nothing but what A says and what B says. Everything the reader knows about who they are, where they are, and what’s going on comes through what they say. If you want a suggestion for the topic, put two people into
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EXERCISE NINE, PART 2: Being the Stranger Write a narrative of 200–600 words, a scene involving at least two people and some kind of action or event. Use a single viewpoint character, in either first person or limited third person, who is involved in the event. Give us the character’s thoughts and feelings in their own words. The viewpoint character (real or invented) is to be somebody you dislike, or disapprove of, or hate, or feel to be extremely different from yourself.
EXERCISE NINE, PART 3: Implication Each part of this should involve 200–600 words of descriptive prose. In both, the voice is either involved author or detached author. No viewpoint character. Character by indirection: Describe a character by describing any place inhabited or frequented by that character—a room, house, garden, office, studio, bed, whatever. (The character isn’t present at the time.) The untold event: Give us a glimpse of the mood and nature of some event or deed by describing the place—room, rooftop, street, park, landscape, whatever—where it happened or is about to happen.
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The Expository Lump
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Study this piece of false history and invented information till you’re familiar with it. Then use it as the foundation of a story or a scene. As you write the scene, compost the information: break it up, spread it out, slip it into conversation or action-narration or anywhere you can make it go so it doesn’t feel Lumpy. Tell it by implication, by passing reference, by hint, by any means you like. Tell it so that readers don’t realize they’re learning anything. Include enough of it that readers can fully understand the situation the queen is in. This will take, I think, two or three pages,
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Crowding is what Keats meant when he told poets to “load every rift with ore.” It’s what we mean when we exhort ourselves to avoid flabby language and clichés, never to use ten vague words where two exact words will do, always to seek the vivid phrase, the exact word.
What you leap over is what you leave out. And what you leave out is infinitely more than what you leave in. There’s got to be white space around the word, silence around the voice. Listing is not describing. Only the relevant belongs. Some say God is in the details; some say the Devil is in the details. Both are correct.
Climax is one kind of pleasure; plot is one kind of story. A strong, shapely plot is a pleasure in itself. It can be reused generation after generation. It provides an armature for narrative that beginning writers may find invaluable. But most serious modern fictions can’t be reduced to a plot or retold without fatal loss except in their own words. The story is not in the plot but in the telling. It is the telling that moves.
Crowding and leaping have to do with the focus and the trajectory. Everything that is crowded in to enrich the story sensually, intellectually, emotionally, should be in focus—part of the central focus of the story. And every leap should be along the trajectory, following the shape and movement of the whole.
EXERCISE TEN: A Terrible Thing to Do Take one of the longer narrative exercises you wrote—any one that went over 400 words—and cut it by half. If none of the exercises is suitable, take any piece of narrative prose you have ever written, 400–1000 words, and do this terrible thing to it.
In revision, as a rough rule, if the beginning can be cut, cut it. And if any passage sticks out in some way, leaves the main trajectory, could possibly come out, take it out and see what the story looks like that way.
Some people see art as a matter of control. I see it mostly as a matter of self-control. It’s like this: in me there’s a story that wants to be told. It is my end; I am its means. If I can keep myself, my ego, my wishes and opinions, my mental junk, out of the way and find the focus of the story, and follow the movement of the story, the story will tell itself.
Mutual respect and trust are absolutely essential to a workshop, and free critique does permit expansive egos to silence shyer ones. Many, perhaps most, peer groups do regular mutual critiquing for years using the right-round-the-circle mode as the fairest and least stressful.
Each critique should be: Brief. Without interruption from anyone else. Concerning important aspects of the piece. (Trivial quibbles should be written on the ms.) Impersonal.
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As you take your turn voicing or e-mailing your critique, avoid challenging the other critiquers. No sneers; no put-downs; no flame-throwing. Enlarge the group discussion without repeating. If you agree with Jane’s comment, say so. If you disagree with what Bill said, say so without animosity, and explain how and why you disagree.
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