storytelling

There's a lot of back and forth in the blogosphere just now about the pros and cons of trying to write for a living. Not that this is a new topic of discussion; writers like to whine only slightly less than they like to appear stoic and above it all. I try for the second, and sometimes, in spite of my best intentions, end up in the first camp muttering to myself balefully.

At any rate, all this newest discussion has been sparked by an anonymous essay on Salon called The Confessions of a Semi-Successful Author (you don't have to subscribe to read it; you can get a day pass by agreeing to deal with the advertisements; oh and, Robyn pointed it out to me first). The gist of this article is that the author has four books published which (1) won prizes and (2) got good critical reviews but (3) made little or no money and (4) got her no lasting recognition so that (5) she had to get (gasp) a day job.

My problem with her essay is this: she never addresses the crucial question: do these prize winning books of hers actually contain a good story? Because, as she notes so mournfully, other, less well written books are selling like hot-cakes; what she fails to realize is that there's a simple reason for that. People want a story. They will put up with awful writing at the sentence or paragraph level as long as you give them a reason to turn the page.

Really, I hadn't planned to write about this here but then I caught scalzi.com's reaction to the Salon essay, which made me laugh and cringe at the same time with statements like this: "Of course the article is also running in Salon, which has a history of chronicling the 'misfortunes' of unfathomably privileged people who by all rights should be beaten in a public square for their heedless lack of clue."

Scalzi had a longish entry earlier this week with advice for writers which I liked a lot. The highlights:

1. Yes, You're a Great Writer. So What.
2. I Don't Care If You're a Better Writer Than Me.
3. There is Always Someone Less Talented Than You Making More Money As a Writer.
4. Your Opinion About Other Writers (And Their Writing) Means Nothing.
5. You're Not Fooling Anyone When You Take Your Laptop to a Coffee Shop, You Know.
6. Until You're Published, You're Just in the Peanut Gallery.
7. Did I Mention Life's Not Fair?
8. Don't Be An Ass.
9. You Will Look Stupid If You're Jealous.
10. Life is Long.

My favorite of these are numbers six and eight; go read them, I promise it's worth the jump. But I take exception with number five. For whatever reason, Scalzi dislikes people writing on their laptops at Starbucks, but that doesn't mean that some of them aren't on the up and up. Of the million words I have in print, about a third of those were written at a Starbucks, before I had a place to write at home.

Scalzi's main point -- and it's a good one -- is that you can't go into this business expecting to make a living from it alone. Many published novelists teach creative writing while they are pecking away at their next book. You have to take a day job as a given; if by some chance you get to the point where you can write full time, that will be the metaphorical icing on the cake. And it may not last. I have every expectation that some day I will have to go find an employer, and I'm prepared for that. In some ways, it will be a relief.

In the meantime, I'm not planning on divulging what kind of advances I get or how much I clear each year, because those numbers would have no substantive value to anybody else, at all.

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Metaphor is one of those things that is rarely explored in any depth in a classroom -- even in creative writing classes, but should be. A successful metaphor is a figure of speech that lifts an everyday object or observation off the page and makes the reader pay attention, but does so without disrupting the fictive trance (I've never read anything about this, but my guess is that when you're deep into reading and the story is working, you've entered a light hypnotic state; that's what a writer hopes to bring about in a reader).

A clumsy metaphor is like a slap in the face (that's a simile, of course). Even a cliche (and most cliches are metaphors) is preferable to a bad metaphor; cliches register as nothing at all.

Before going any further, it's probably a good idea to have a look at this website by Ronnie Manalo Ruiz which summarizes the various types of metaphor. With those distinctions in mind, if you start paying attention to metaphor in your fiction reading, you'll notice how prevalent they are.

The simplest way to look at a straight-forward metaphor is A=B. This applies to simile as well, of course. I'm going to use some less than wonderful metaphors [note addition (thanks, Ed): and similies] to demonstrate and hope you won't find it necessary to shoot the messenger. In these examples the first term in parenthesis is A, the second, B.

(you) are the (wind beneath my wings)
his (eyes) were like (three-minute eggs)
the falling (snow) made a (blanket) over the world

By these examples it should be clear that A and B are distinct objects being compared to each other because they share some crucial characteristic, for example: your influence on me is such that I am motivated to strive for greater things; or, his eyes were disgustingly runny; or, the snow made the world seem peaceful and comfortable.

It must be said that writing about romantic relationships and strong attachments produces some of the most awkward metaphors, maybe because it's just hard to write about the mania that goes along with falling in love, or lust. Which brings me to the next point.

One mistake novice writers seem to make a lot, in my experience, is stretching so hard for the right metaphor that they forget whose POV they are writing from. The way one character perceives Sam's smile will be (should be) distinct from the way the next character sees that same smile. To his little sister, his smile might be (forgive me, I'm making a point) a ray of sunshine while his landlady sees it as sputtering neon. The metaphor webpage I've referred you to puts the point very clearly:

a metaphor provides...a cue to what kind of thinking should be done...Metaphors act as a shepherds to lead the audience onto the correct path of thought and mindset.

And now the exception to go with the rule: you must avoid over-extended, awkward, cliched metaphors at all costs, but your characters have no such restrictions on them. A character can get away with an awful metaphor, if it's handled well. A character who tells everybody he works for the CIA but secretly writes Hallmark cards for a living might find himself blurting out aren't you just a ray of sunshine! when he's nervous. A mother at her wit's end with a difficult teenager who buys every self-help parenting book on the market might spit out one cliche after another when her daughter comes in at three a.m. She can get away with it; you can't. When that same mother goes into her daughter's room an hour later and studies the girl's sleeping face, what she sees there -- what you let us see through her eyes -- has to be simple and clean and honest.

This is a longer bit from Byatt's Possession, which I quote here as an example of a number of things, foremost among them a well done scene about sex, subtle and still evocative and distinctly poetic in its use of imagery and metaphor (click to open in a new window, large enough to actually read):

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