storytelling

Does anybody have an idea where I might find reliable statistics on how many people living in the US right now have actually had fiction published? I'd be interested in that figure for other countries as well, but I'd really like to know about the US. Ideally I'd like to know how many people have published

-- one novel
-- more than one novel
-- one short story
-- multiple short stories (in collected volumes, too) but no novels
-- multiple short stories and one or more novels

For my purposes, I'd exclude self-published work. Now, these figures might not be available from anybody, anywhere, but I'll continue to wonder. There so much in the publishing business which happens out of sight, in an ignore-that-man-behind-the-curtain way.

Posted by at 1:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Posted by at 5:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Over at Making Light, TNH has a longish weblog post about the proliferation of massive amounts of bad advice on writing and publishing fiction. She went to Amazon and found twenty-eight pages of books on fiction writing. She also observes that a good proportion of people writing books about writing and publishing fiction have had little or no success at it themselves. She says:

Not all of those books are awful, but far too many are, and the latter always seem to have an aggressively self-promoting author attached to them. For instance … …

Huh. Okay, a weird thing just happened to me. I looked at the paragraph I’d just written, and found myself wondering whether I really wanted to get into arguments with four or five combative fuggheads at once. I don’t know where this is coming from. Is it possible that I’m finally developing a sense of prudence?

There are people who want to write and there are people who do write. Only people in the latter category actually have a chance of being published. And if you've been to a megabookstore lately, you'll see that quite a few of them succeed. So here's the thing. There are people who want to write, and pursue books on how to write, but never do. There are people who do write. Some of them produce awful, some mediocre, some good, some great work. Some of them will be published. Some of them will fail to publish. Some subset of all these people will write how-to books. And so the cycle perpetuates itself.

TNH finds it disconcerting, which it is. It also makes me wonder what in the heck I'm doing here, writing down my thoughts about writing. I hope I'm not doing any lasting harm. Not because my advice is good or bad, but because I'm just one more person encouraging people to write. TNH threatens to write a book to reverse this trend:

Contemplating this universe of bad advice makes me feel at once curmudgeonly and appalled. It makes me want to put out a book called The Oppressively Real Guide to Writing and Publishing. Sample chapter titles:

Why You Shouldn’t Write.
A Taxonomy of People Who Are Out To Get You.
Myths and Legends of the Author Tribe.
Ever Wonder Why They Call It Submission?
Things That Won’t Happen.
Some Mistakes We Have Seen.
Recurrent Episodes in the Life of the Writer.
You Can Still Escape.

Posted by at 3:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

If you'll remember, a Category Seven novel:

1)
(a) is well written (prose that is above the ordinary, strong characterization, etc);
(b) has a strong, well structured plot;
(c) is thematically relevant or fashionable or at least, potentially engaging

2) is a critical success (has been noted by major review/newspaper outlets in an over-all positive way)

3) is a commercial success (though we haven't figured out if we're talking world-wide commercial success or not).

whether a novel is (1) commercially successful, (2) critically successfuly, or (3) both depends on the ratio of the three characteristics given above (strong writing, strong plot, strong theme) as well as on marketing. More specifically, my hypothesis is that a book can be commercially wildly successful if it has some combination of (a) and/or (b), and that (c) doesn't predict much except critical success. A novel that meets ALL the criteria is a Category Seven novel.

• To Kill a Mockingbird | Harper Lee
• Birdsong | Sebastian Faulks
• Regeneration | Pat Barker
• Fly Away Peter | David Malouf
• The Lovely Bones | Alice Sebold
• The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time | Mark Haddon
• The Name of the Rose | Umberto Eco
• Possession | A. S. Byatt

If you could measure commercial success solely in terms of books sold (as they do with box office receipts for movies) it would be a little easier to talk about this, but as it is, we have to be pretty flexible in our definition of commercial success. It occurs to me that it would be interesting to name some hugely successful novels and see how they fit into the scheme. What about these big sellers?

The only book I've evaluated is The DaVinci Code, because I've reviewed it here, very bluntly. And this is my opinion, of course, and nothing more. I could fill in the others according to my own perceptions, but that would defeat the purpose. Because i do have one.

Posted by at 3:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

I know what these things mean to me, but I've got this sense that my definition is probably somewhat different than most people's. For example, in my view of things, a novel can't be a critical success if the critics ignore it -- and it's a simple fact that the major critical venues ignore most novels. There are just too many of them to review them all. Homestead, for example, first came out with a small independent press and was not reviewed by the New York Times or any other big name publication. Then it won the PEN/Hemingway award and suddenly, about a year late, the NYT did review it -- and reviewed it very favorably. But only because of the reward, of course.

As far as commercial success is concerned, that means to me (1) sales and (2) positive public awareness. How about you?

Posted by at 4:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Oh and, this is the new digs. Ignore the packing boxes and the mess, and eventually it will all sort itself out.

Posted by at 11:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (7)

Thus far, I'm not spending any money, but I am reviewing questions that haunt me on a regular basis.

If you read a lot, you'll know that there are a million novels out there. The publishing business may be in trouble, but that doesn't stop them from putting hundreds and hundreds of new novels out every year. More than anybody could possibly read. I read across genres because I'm always interested in a good story, and because it's of professional interest to me, seeing what's out there, what publishers take a chance on and how the public responds.

So of these four books I've read in a few days, I would have to say that three were very disappointing, in spite of a variety of reviews from critical venues and individuals who gave them high praise. This led me to try, yet again, to work out the very subjective issue of what makes a novel work (critically and commercially) and what factors contribute to a novel's success. I came up with this chart, which may not survive a lot of close observation and thought, but it is a start.

I've said before, I'll say again: a book can be a huge commercial success even if it is (a) poorly written (in terms of prose) and (b) the plot is fraught with difficulties -- category (6) on the chart -- if the topic and themes somehow resonate with the book buying public. The DaVinci Code is the obvious example here, in my opinion (and of course, this is a subjective process). Other candidates for (6) might include The Bridges of Madison County and ... I'm sure you can come up with some. Novels that tickle the zeitgeist and then, through word of mouth and/or marketing, really take off.

More commonly, a big seller will fall into category (3), I think. A good storyteller with a good theme is the darling of the masses even if his or her prose is ham handed. Many people don't care about a well turned sentence or a strong visual image or poetic language. The story is the thing. The story is the first, and for some, the only thing, which means that books that fall into category (1) -- great story, blah theme, blah writing -- still have a good chance of doing well.

My sense is that for the general public, the importance of the three critical areas: story, theme, writing, is ranked pretty much in that exact order. They want a great story; they'd prefer it to be about something that interests them to start with (a good love story, a good spy story, a controversial story about famous characters). Well written prose is frosting on the cake, and not much missed. Which means that novels that fall into categories (1) and (6) have a good chance of succeeding commercially (given the right marketing); but a novel that falls into category (5) -- one that has beautiful writing going for it, but little else -- is rarely going anywhere in terms of sales. The critics may love it (character is all; plot is a four letter word -- that crowd) but the critics have never been very good at predicting what the readers really want.

Of course, a well written novel that has a great plot is in good shape, as is a well written novel with a theme that interests the public. The ultimate, of course, is category (7): a beautifully written novel with a solid, engaging story that is thematically interesting. That's the holy grail of novel writing. That's the novel that will make the critics sing hosanas, and even Bob will go out and buy the darn thing in hard cover.

There are not many books that fall into category (7). I can name a few that might qualify, but certainly there would be a debate about any title I propose. Person X might not think much of the prose; Person Y might find the plot flawed. But anybody who reads widely will have a list of such books according to their own tastes and evaluations. Here's one possiblity: To Kill a Mockingbird. This is a story that is still popular, because, I believe, it's a solid, three legged stool, almost impossible to upset.

What's disturbing and mystifying is how many hundreds of novels out there stand not on two legs, but on one. Novels that make it into print with half a hackneyed plot, two dimensional characters and awful prose because they are well timed in terms of theme, and play into publisher x's burning urge to get on a particular bandwagon.

Of course, I have no solutions to offer. The publishing business is in deep trouble, we're told, and who knows what's down the road? Editors clinging to books that fall into categories (1) (3) and (6), almost certainly. Which is depressing, and sad, and sobering for anybody who makes a living writing stories. Like me.

Posted by at 4:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

You are a SRDF--Sober Rational Destructive Follower. This makes you a Fountain of Knowledge.

You are cool, analytical, intelligent and completely unfunny. Sometimes you slice through conversation with a cutting observation that causes silence and sidelong glances. You make a strong and lasting impression on everyone you meet, the quality of which depends more on their personality than yours.

You may feel persecuted, as you can become a target for fun. Still, you are focused enough on your work and secure enough in your abilities not to worry overly.

You are productive and invaluable to those you work for. You are loyal, steadfast, and conscientious. Your grooming is impeccable. You are in good shape.

You are kind of a tool, but you get things done. You are probably a week away from snapping.

Addendum, 2004/07/19: this fits me 99%, there is a slight inaccuracy however. We are not necessarily completely unfunny. If we have a sense of humor (I do) it surfaces on the occasion with well-timed, completely dry, very sarcastic, wit. - Chase

Of the 81364 people who have taken this quiz since tracking began (8/17/2004), 7.4 % are this type.

Did I ever mention that my students were generally intimidated by me? No matter how I tried to counteract that.

Posted by at 4:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Reds is still in no-man's land, but Yanks is in production and will be available on DVD March 1 of this year. Which makes me very happy.

Farscape: The Peacekeeper Wars is also out on DVD. Just to mention it. Not that I would push Farscape or anything. And if I were going to mention that you should watch it, then of course I would have to say that you really shouldn't start with Peacekeeper Wars. You should start with The Princess Trilogy in Season Two and then move forward. By the time you're done, you'll be curious to death about the earlier seasons and you'll go back, and the weaker early episodes will just be interesting because they provide backstory. If I were to even get into this subject, that's what I'd say.

Posted by at 9:28 PM | Permalink

Jackson was out of his element in New Orleans, at least in cultural terms. English came a distant third as language of choice (French, Spanish, a whole lot of dialects of various Native American languages, and then, maybe, English); the social setup had to be as foreign to him as France would have been, or Haiti (which was not called Haiti at that point, of course). The whole episode, small and insignificant as it is, reminds me of one of Shakespeare's side jaunts into silliness, ala Much Ado about Nothing.

The names are sometimes the best part of reading all these summaries. Many of them are French, but there are a handful of men called Diego and Pepe. The slave names are quite striking, or very mundane. Anglophone names jump out simply because they are unusual.

This is the stuff I like best about research, the footnotes and asides, the little glimpses into what day to day life must have been like. I really could care less about Jackson himself (Jacksonian democracy, what a crock), but the people around him have all my attention. There was a French sugar plantation owner who also dabbled in piracy called Henri Ste-Geme who fought as an officer in the militia. All of five foot tall with a huge plume on his hat. Could I possibly invent a quirkier character? I'll try, of course.

I'll be going back to New Orleans next month to spend a couple days in the archives, because I haven't been able to locate enough information about what martial law looked like in New Orleans, and what went on in the weeks before the battle. I dislike being away from home, but I am looking forward to reading old broadsheets and immersing myself in advertisements of the period. So I'm a history geek. So sue me.

Posted by at 11:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Once in a while I'm able to write down observations for a longer stretch, but sooner or later I always fall out of the habit. Oh and, it's not just observations I write down -- that any writer should keep track of -- but also overheard dialogue. I've written about that here at some earlier point. If I weren't so lazy I'd go search.

Another excellent place to look for story ideas and writing prompts is to keep track of advice columnists. The stories people write in about range from the mundane to the catastrophic, but such letters can be a goldmine of evocative images and strange ideas. In the last six months or so I've been reading Cary Tennis's advice column at Salon.com. Tennis is a psychologist or a psychiatrist, a doctor at any rate, with many years of experience as a therapist, and so he answers letters from readers. And he's good at it.

Now, this is Salon we're talking about so you don't get the dear-abby-esque "where do I sit my mother-in-law at luncheon" type questions. Most of the letters Tennis answers are pretty serious in nature -- heroin addiction was a recent topic -- but others are lighter and even funny. Here are some recent columns and the tag line for each:

My sister's addicted to heroin
Is there anything I can do to help her? Pay her rent? Get her into rehab? Tell her new husband?
By Cary Tennis [2005-01-20]

Long-lost friendship
After 30 years it pains me how these once-dear friends are so cold and aloof!
By Cary Tennis [2005-01-19]

We're in love, but there's a cultural barrier
I'm not Muslim and I'm the wrong ethnicity, so my girlfriend is afraid to tell her family about us.
By Cary Tennis [2005-01-18]

Who's my daddy?
I want a boyfriend who acts like the father I never had.
By Cary Tennis [2005-01-14]

The cat in my flat won't go back (my ex left her pussy in my lap!)
Her kitty is one more problem she has thrust on me -- and I don't know how to get rid of it.
By Cary Tennis [2005-01-13]

I had a one-night stand, and now my wife says no more drinking!
It's not the drinking that made me do it -- I like to have a few beers is all.
By Cary Tennis

Salon.com is, unfortunately, a subscription service, and you may not want to invest in it. But there are lots of advice columnists about there, and many of them are great material for a mind atuned to the oddities of the human mind and the way we relate to one another.

Just a suggestion, of course.

Posted by at 4:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

She's had another loss, and as usual its in these awful situations that her writing (always excellent) takes on the characteristics of an aria. This paragraph:

What I wanted from this journey - what I still want, even now - is for it to have meaning, some kind of value.  I want it to make me a better human being.  I don't believe that "things happen for a reason," that there's a specific, mystical purpose underlying every random accident and heartbreak.  But I do believe that heartbreak can be infused with purpose, that we can choose to give it meaning.  On my better days, I think that's what it means to be alive - to create a coherent arc of meaning out of the seemingly disparate, and occasionally tragic, events of our lives.

By the way, Joshua is also back in town. This is a typical post and it also gave me a lot to think about.

Posted by at 3:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (8)

First, I don't really want to get into a big discussion of M. Night Shyamalan's work. I will say, just as a statement, that I think he's struggling uphill, the way anybody will who first has a huge hit and then has to try to match that again and again. My own take on his films: I liked Unbreakable best for its quirkiness and dark colors and what I considered a far more interesting underlying conflict than The Sixth Sense; The Sixth Sense next; then The Village; last (and least) Signs. So if you haven't seen The Village but want to, and don't want any surprises spoiled, don't read any further.

I watched this movie twice on DVD in the last few days, and a lot of ideas went through my head. Most of them are not things M. Night Shyamalan would be happy about. For example: somebody with a PhD in American history who teaches as The University of Pennsylvania (the main character, but you don't know that to start with: you see him as an elementary school teacher) is bound to have a far more sophisticated and less romanticized view of the 1800s than M. Night Shyamalan does, and so the whole premise of the movie fails.

To be more specific: if such a professor, traumatized by the violence of modern life, wanted to get away and start fresh, he'd know too much about the way things really were to try to create this perfect world of a circa-1890 village in the middle of a huge, private wildlife preserve.

Because of course, that's the twist. They aren't in the past at all, but in a pseudo-Amish type present, except nobody in the younger generation KNOWS that. The elders know, because they chose to start the Village, and they've spent the last thirty years trying to keep the youngsters from going out and exploring the wider world. To protect them from violence. Of course, violence sometimes comes from within, and they learn that the hard way.

The other kinds of questions that went through my mind were along this line: look at those shoes, do they have a cobbler? and, If they can't go into the woods, how are they heating all those buildings through a Pennsylvania winter? Where does the firewood come from? and: Crikey, the brute labor necessary to keep this community in food and clothes and shelter without ANY trade with the outside world -- these people look way too relaxed and merry. Where did they get the cotton for those dresses, because they sure aren't growing it in that climate. Where are the flax fields? Who makes rope when they need it? Where are all the spinning wheels and looms? What about the mills for corn and for cutting lumber? Do they make ink, and use quills? Where's the blacksmithy? Who supplies glass when one of the windows in the greenhouse breaks? Wait, what did they sweeten that wedding cake with? Honey?

All of these questions led me to figure out the twist (that they aren't in the year 1897, really) very quickly. Especially as the timing was just off. By 1897 photography was pretty wide spread, and it's almost impossible to imagine an eastern village so isolated that nobody would come looking for the people in it, sooner or later. Maybe -- maybe I could have bought all this if the year had been 1700, when huge portions of the country were far less overrun with European types -- but even then it would have been hard.

Now see, because I had such trouble with the historical aspects of this movie, I couldn't really appreciate the story, and there were things to appreciate. Joachim Phoenix -- he really is an excellent actor -- did an incredible job with one of the main characters. The love story, which wasn't much of the plot but important, was gently told and really beautiful. I really cared about some of the characters, but there just wasn't enough of most of them to pull me in.

I wish I could turn off my mind when I see a movie like this, but that seems to be beyond me.

Posted by at 2:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

Joshua:

I just noticed you gave _Mona Lisa Smile_ the same number of stars as _28 Days Later_? Are you serious?

... about 28 Days Later. I was mean to it because I seriously disliked the ending. Don't sell me a dark movie and then give it a hopeful happy ending. ALL of Europe had to be reeling with violent zombies, not just England. That's just status quo.

And I was overly nice to Mona Lisa because I hate the way critics automatically slam movies about female teachers.

So both reviews were biased, I admit it. Just in opposite directions.

On 28 Days and Mona Lisa Smile—

I'm not sure the rest of Europe *did* need to be overrun with zombies, just because Britain's an island and the onset of the zombie virus happened so quickly that it would be hard to transmit over water. So it's not like someone could have a latent infection and make the journey over the channel. All the continent would have to do once they realized there was a problem in the UK would be to seal off the tunnel (the only route from the UK to Europe that a zombie could travel on foot) and the problem would be effectively confined to the island.

The thing about Mona Lisa Smile is that it was just so… fantastically irrelevant. I mean, it's a movie about the expectations placed on rich young women 40 years ago. Most young women today face a completely different set of expectations and there are about five times as many young women growing up under the poverty line (then and now) than there are going to private schools. Yet it never seems to occur to anyone to make a movie about a teacher in a public high school who teaches poor girls to overcome the (infinitely more repressive and violent) sexism that exists in the poorer parts of American society—to use birth control and go to college and dump guys who won't drop. So, to my experience, the insult of Mona Lisa Smile's self-congratulatory preachiness was compounded by its glaring failure to interrogate its own appallingly class-based assumptions about who's going to qualify to be "tomorrow's leaders, not their wives".

(1) There are many stories that should be told but are not.

(2) There are other stories that may be over told from some perspectives.

(3) There's really no such thing as an overtold story. There's a badly told story, sure. But that's as far as I'll go.

Women of my generation, women like me -- definitely did not grow up middle class or above, but have got there by hook or crook -- need stories like Mona Lisa. It reminded me that I'm fortunate, and why, and about the women who paved the way. Corny, maybe, but nonetheless: true.

Posted by at 11:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

Lots of things to get done this year: books to write, mostly, but also other projects to get off the ground. I'd like to be one of those gloriously young looking fifty year olds. Alas, I don't think that's in the cards, so I'll settle for being a healthy fifty year old, matronly in appearance but with a reasonable cholesterol count. With a happy girlchild and a contented husband, with excellent friends and puppyboys. And stories to tell, and people who want to read them.

The really important things are in place, and I count myself fortunate.

Posted by at 6:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (6)

Never, ever kid about Bob. In the last few days I've had at least three hundred comments from Bob. Really. Here's his address, in case you want to write to him: [email protected]

He's got lots of stuff to sell you, or, you can play poker with him. He's desperate to get to know me, and I'll bet he'll love you too. A lot. To excess.

Posted by at 3:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

2) alt.angst Protocols and Acceptable Behaviors:

a) alt.angst does not tolerate cheeriness in any form. This includes use of the notorious smiley (which is conspicuously absent here). If you feel inclined to post any stories with a happy ending, post them to alt.good.news, or some other forum -- perhaps alt.romance.chat. You'll be lucky if other members use such kind words to tell you to do the same.

Posted by at 11:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I love your Into the Wilderness series. I have not got to the fourth one yet, for college takes up a lot of my time. I love to write also, only I write children's stories (none to be published yet). I have a question and I hope you don't take offense, it's just something I've been curious about. I have watched, not got the chance to read yet, The Last of the Mohicans. You seem to have gotten your characters from that work of fiction. Yet in the movie Nathaniel is Hawkeye. How did you get the chance to use the characters from this piece and did you have some reasoning for changing this characters name and using it for his son's instead? This is a question that has been bugging me for some time. I hope you can find time to reply.

Why not? Retelling stories is as old as the hills. West Side Story is a retelling of Romeo and Juliet. A Thousand Acres is a retelling of King Lear. Some people claim there are only twenty possible basic plots, and everything is a retelling of something else. We tell stories to make sense of the human condition, and we keep doing that because we haven't yet figured it out. Stories -- telling them, listening to them -- seem to be an important part of the human psyche. As far as the characters are concerned, some characters are brought to life by a particular author with such stunning success that they outlive their creator. Hawkeye is one such character -- so many people have been compelled to bring him back to life in one way or another. The Man of LaMancha is another -- the underdog, always fighting windmills. He can be found in a hundred stories. I took some characters who mean a great deal to me to see what I could do with them; I invented others of my own, but even those owe a debt to all the stories that came before.

Q: What is the relationship of these novels to James Fenimore Cooper's work and the movie, Last of the Mohicans? James Fenimore Cooper wrote a series of books called the Leatherstocking Tales. His main character was Natty [Nathaniel] Bumppo (also called Hawkeye, and several other names), and seemed to be based on the legends that grew up around the real life character Daniel Boone. One of his novels was The Last of the Mohicans; another, set in Hawkeye's later life, was The Pioneers. The Last of the Mohicans has been filmed a number of times, the last and most memorable by the director and producer Michael Mann. That is the movie staring Daniel Day-Lewis and Madeline Stowe. In Mann's version of the story, Hawkeye's real name was Nathaniel Po. I wasn't so much interested in retelling the story of The Last of the Mohicans -- that has been done often enough -- but I was interested in Hawkeye's later life. So I set out to do a few things: first, write a very loose retelling of The Pioneers (keeping some of the plot, some of the characters, and some of the themes, especially the environmental ones); second, to tell the story from the female perspective (Cooper was a fine storyteller, but he didn't write women very well -- they come across as idealized and two-dimensional); third, to put my own spin on the legend of the frontiersmen who populated the New-York frontier; fourth, to try my best not to contribute to the stereotypes rampant in literature about the Mohawk. I hoped to portray them as a people who survived in spite of great hardship. Because I wanted to put my own version on paper, I changed Hawkeye's name yet again. Not Bumppo or Po or Boone, but Bonner. So I have a Dan'l Bonner and his son, Nathaniel Bonner.

Q: What are the laws in regard to using another author's characters? This question came up on a discussion board that I visit and your books were mentioned.

A good summary of copyright and domain facts can be found here. Anybody can use the characters, retell the story, etc etc. if a work is in the public domain; any work published before 1928 is in the public domain. Shakespeare, Jane Austen, and James Fenimore Cooper fall into this category. So I am completely within the law by retelling Cooper's The Pioneers and using some of his characters. There are hundreds and hundreds of books in the public domain that you can get for free over the web.

Now, as far as works that are still in copyright: no, you can't just borrow the characters. You can't write a novel about John Crichton and Aeryn Sun unless you first get written permission from the owners of that copyright -- the Henson Company. <

Posted by at 6:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

So I am thinking about writing conflict but mostly these last few days I'm just thinking about writing in general, because right now it feels pretty draining and I wonder if I can keep it up. I think about Dorothy Dunnet who produced, what? -- ten or more big fat, well researched, beautifully written historical novels between age fifty something and her death at seventy something. Is there a second wind coming? There's certainly a birthday on the horizon. I'll be forty-nine on Friday.

Thirty-nine hit me harder than forty; forty-nine isn't coming easy, either.

How's that for all kinds of conflict?

So I will try to put down some organized thoughts about writing confrontation scenes, look for them right here, hopefully tomorrow.

Posted by at 3:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

I'm thinking of moving this weblog to another hosting service. SaraLaughs will stay here, but the weblog itself will live elsewhere, with a hosting service who will take care of installing and upgrading the Movable Type software so I don't have to think about it.

Now, I'm not sure about this yet, and so it would probably be good to get some input from you. Assuming you have to do no work (except changing your bookmark, if you have one for this weblog), are there things you'd like to see that would make your stops here more useful? For example: if I do move, I'll take that opportunity to fine tune categories, and divide "research and craft" up into topic areas (writing sex scenes, for example) so there's an easy link to all posts covering that subject (excuse the pun) in the right sidebar.

I'm also wondering how people feel about registering in order to leave a comment. The protective measures I have in place to keep spammers out are only partially effective, and I still have to do a lot of maintenance. I could turn off comments on older posts, but that would be unfortunate. Today, for example, there were some good comments on the writing good bad-sex entry (508) that would have been blocked if I went that far to keep spammers out. I know people are reluctant to sign up -- I am reluctant to sign up -- in even one more place, so my inclination is not to turn on this feature. But I wanted to get some input on this.

And, if anybody has specific ideas on where you'd like my blatherings about writing conflict scenes to go, I wish you'd speak up. Please.

Posted by at 12:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (7)

I've been thinking about the use of language in conflict, and find I can't get away from my academic training. Some linguists spend their entire careers studying discourse analysis. (My area of specialization was related, but distinct: critical discourse analysis. Which doesn't have anything to do with telling people how to talk. Just the opposite.) Deborah Tannen from Georgetown has a great summary of what discourse analysis is all about here, at the Linguistic Society of America website.

The bit about speech acts is especially interesting:

Speech act analysis asks not what form the utterance takes but what it does. Saying "I now pronounce you man and wife" enacts a marriage. Studying speech acts such as complimenting allows discourse analysts to ask what counts as a compliment, who gives compliments to whom, and what other function they can serve. For example, linguists have observed that women are more likely both to give compliments and to get them. There are also cultural differences; in India, politeness requires that if someone compliments one of your possessions, you should offer to give the item as a gift, so complimenting can be a way of asking for things. An Indian woman who had just met her son's American wife was shocked to hear her new daughter-in-law praise her beautiful saris. She commented, "What kind of girl did he marry? She wants everything!" By comparing how people in different cultures use language, discourse analysts hope to make a contribution to improving cross-cultural understanding.

1. Dialogue must never convey information alone. It must accomplish more than one thing at once to earn its keep. It may: characterize, advance the action, provide exposition (introduce theme/characters), provide setting, foreshadow, convey information.

2. Conversely, a line of dialogue shouldn't do all those things at once because then it will probably slip over the line (or march proudly over the line, better said) into the realm called (so elegantly) info dumping. Here's an example (it's fun to make examples of info dumping; but then I'm easily amused).

"But Joan, you went to law school because you adore your mother who has a law degree from Yale and worked for two years in the Eisenhower administration as White House Council."

That is, never convey backstory in dialogue. Very tacky.

You're writing a scene where George Bailey gets mad at his wife, Mary. He's really mad about the fact that she's so nice, which makes it hard to hate her, and then what does he do with all his dissatisfaction about the way his life has turned out? If George were one of my male relatives this contfrontational dialogue would take a certain shape, involving raised voices, direct accusation, and flinging of pots and pans. But this is George Bailey. Good, kind, repressed George. How do you get them into a situation where you can see what's going on behind the curtain?

This is where speech act theory raises its head in my mind. I think of all the ways we have (every culture has) of saying things indirectly: "gosh I'm cold" may mean "get up off your lazy butt and close the window" or "you never think about anybody but yourself" or "you forgot to take out the garbage last night again, and I'm going to make your life miserable by whining". The thing about writing a scene is this: maybe it does just mean that Henry is cold, and nothing more, but if that's the case: it doesn't belong on the page. That bit of dialogue hasn't earned its place.

More tomorrow.

PS UPS came to the door today. A new delivery person. And what was his name? Of course. Edited to add: the radiant Robyn Bender has thoughtfully posted this link to a crucial piece of clothing.

Posted by at 3:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Remember those car commercials that focused on road and street signs? And you thought it was just a marketing ploy.

When we were getting married oh so long ago and arguing about dish patterns (yes, my husband had an opinion on dish patterns, which (1) shocked and (2) outraged me in the most gender specific and unfair way. Of course he's entitled to an opinion, but it was MY choice. MY dishes. A streak of 1950s housewife in me? Who knew. So at any rate, while we looked at hundreds of dish patterns in the attempt to find one we both liked, Bill came up with an observation: the really ugly dish patterns were all designed by the same person. Once we saw that, we knew who to blame when we came across a particularly egregious crime against the aesthetic greater good.

Then there's this. According to my Italian teacher, a lovely woman from Switzerland who speaks many languages fluently, when she married an American she was told (by who?!) that to be accepted here she couldn't be without a middle name. Her parents had neglected to give her one, but that had to be remedied. She is now known as Sonja-Bob.

You need more evidence? How about the BOB books? By Bobby Lynn Maslen? A whole series of books designed (they tell you) to teach young children to read, but really, the idea is to turn very young children into Disciples of Bob. It almost worked for my daughter. She learned to read from the Bob Books (Not my idea, I tell you. It was her father, it was all him.)

Now that I've exposed the Bob Culture and the Universe of Bob, I expect I'll be terminated quite quickly. But I had to speak up. Enough is enough.

PS writing conflict will be back soon

Posted by at 11:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

"WHAT DO YOU BELIEVE IS TRUE EVEN THOUGH YOU CANNOT PROVE IT?"

Great minds can sometimes guess the truth before they have either the evidence or arguments for it (Diderot called it having the "esprit de divination"). What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it?

The bottom line? I voted for Sheila. You do as you like.

Posted by at 4:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

The loss of the Titanic is a very vivid disaster that (in comparison to a war) lasted a very short time, and it really evoked a huge response from people -- it continues to do that. So it makes a natural setting for stories of all kinds, and thus is a good example of starting a story with the meta-conflict. Ship sinks. No big mystery, no suspense. You know the ship is going to sink, how, when, and what the cost will be, how many deaths, etc etc. So how do you make a story out of that?

You build the characters and the conflicts between characters around the apex of the story, the actual sinking of the ship. Most usually people make up fictional passengers. Star crossed lovers; a wife thinking of leaving her husband. An Irish family fleeing poverty for the promise of gold in the streets. The ship going down has to fit into resolving (for good or bad) whatever conflicts you set up for these people. In the end, what goes on between them in the real story. If that's missing, then all you've got is a very graphic depiction of people dying an awful death. That's not storytelling: that's voyeurism. That's a nighmare.

My personal take on the Titanic is that it has been overdone. If you want to build your story around a disaster, there are certainly enough of them out there to work with; why beat the poor Titanic into submission yet again? Unless you can come up with some set of characters in a conflict so absorbing, so perfect, that it has to be told. Of course, somebody has probably tried already. Romeo and Juliet on the Titanic, Madame Bovary on the Titanic, Don Juan on the Titanic.

I'll get back to George later today, or tomorrow.

Posted by at 9:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (2)

Almost every story will have conflict on multiple levels: meta conflict (things happening on a grand scale, to everybody); interpersonal conflict (the nature of the connections between the set of characters as a whole); relationship conflict (John and George, Mary and Inez, brother and sister, husband and wife); internal conflict.

Let's start with meta conflict. You can think about the global conflicts in a given story, the ones in the wider world that impact on all the individuals. The greater conflict can be (and often is) a war: Revolutionary, 1812, Civil, world wars, thirty-years war, the Japanese invasion of China, the Russian invasion of Afghanistan, the US invasion of... well. Let's stop there.

Other kind of meta conflicts that may impact your characters might be things like natural disasters on a larger or smaller scale (tornados, earthquakes, thunderstorms, the snowstorm that shuts down the airport, an epidemic). A person is often the focus of a meta-conflict. Fonzie comes back to Pleasantville and turns everybody's life upside down. A new principal who doesn't believe in evolution at the high school. A long lost aunt leaves a fortune to a squabbling set of sisters. In fact, a stranger or old friend arriving in town is one of the most standard ways of getting a story moving.

Usually stories are hatched at the opposite end of the scale.

internal conflict ...relationship conflict... interpersonal conflict.... meta conflict

This leads, of course, to relationship conflict. His father dies leaving him to save the family business; his bumbling uncle, dependent on him, makes his work more difficult. He falls in love and is angry at the woman and at himself, because this is another brick in the wall between him and his dreams. But George is not the kind of man who acts on his anger, or who even admits it to himself, so there's lots of pressure building up. Classic relationship conflicts, which also play out at the community level.

People have expectations: George will help, fix, support, be there. George helps, fixes, supports, and is always there. George is a model for those who have lost their way (the good girl gone bad), and a thorn in the side of the really bad guy (Mr. Potter, the banker with no heart or scruples). The meta conflict, of course, is the second world war, which makes many demands on George and seals his fate once and for all.

Now, is this a story? Not yet. Because in spite of all these points of conflict in George's life, nothing has happened yet to set off the crisis that will be at the heart of the story. When it does happen, it evokes each of the subsidiary conflicts and brings them, almost simultaneously, to the flash point.

So you might say that writing this story would be just stringing the reader along from conflict to conflict, some little, some big. Some subtle and some so loud and obvious they are impossible to overlook.

I'll try to approach this in a methodological way. How do you show your readers George's internal conflicts? What kind of scenes, interactions, observations? What about his relationship with his uncle, his brother, his wife? How about the way the war makes itself felt in his life, not in terms of food stamps, but old hurts and disappointments? Tomorrow I'll see what I can tease out.

Posted by at 9:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (1)

1. Do important stuff in scene. That means, you don't have the crucial confrontations, discussions, stares happening out of the reader's view. It's disappointing and frustrating to work toward the day when Jane finally tells Inez what she really thinks of her, and then not be invited to observe.

2. Dialogue is gold. Every word has to bear multiple burdens. Few writers can pull off pages of dialogue. Try writing a five page scene that is nothing but a telephone conversation, and you'll see what I mean.

3. Trust the reader to make logical leaps. We don't need, we shouldn't be subjected to, every movement and thought.

Now I'm going to take the puppyboys for a walk while I think about people mad at each other on paper.

Posted by at 9:46 AM | Permalink

So if you have time and energy to go over there and say hey and maybe vote, great. Otherwise, you're wondering, why am I not writing about writing? Because these last days I've been writing about Jennet and Luke and Hannah and about gardening. I have a friend who is launching an online gardening magazine and well, my philosophy is: you support your friends in the things that matter most to them. So for a while here y'all took a back seat to Garden Sense, but things are almost ready to launch over there and then I'll be done. Really.

Anybody interested in a discussion of writing argument and fight scenes?

Posted by at 9:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)