The following examples of musical writing I took from what I had handy at the moment, e.g., a magazine article, a newspaper movie review, however, for the most part, from old favorites on my bookshelves. Notice how the rhythms and sounds provide energy and meaning.
There he is, in all his glory, Brad Pitt, that beautiful, chiseled chunk of celebrity manhood. You want him? Go see “Fight Club.” You want action, muscle, and atmosphere? You want boys bashing boys in bloody, living color? “Fight Club” is your flick, dude. —Desson Howe, The Washington Post. 10/1999
The first technique Howe uses here is the rise with questions, then a contrasting downward thrust with commands or assertions:
You want him? Go see “Fight Club.” You want boys bashing boys in bloody, living color? “Fight Club” is your flick, dude.
Howe also uses poetic alliteration— repeating sounds in adjacent or nearby words:
Brad Pitt, that beautiful, chiseled chunk action, muscle, and atmosphere boys bashing boys in bloody “Fight Club” is your flick
I could give many excellent reasons for my dislike of large dinner-parties, soirées, crushes, routes, conversazioni and balls. —Aldous Huxley, “The Traveller’s-Eye View”
Here Huxley also uses poetic listing, made poetic in part by his use of alliteration (crushes… conversazioni).
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Philadelphia, I was told in New York, was so slow that it was safe for people to fall out windows—they just wafted down like gossamer… —P. Gibbs, People of Destiny, 1920
Brilliant use of the arrangement of stressed and unstressed syllables in this one. For more about that, see my post on Grokking Scansion.
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Further fun examples:
We knew you were wondering, and the answer is no. Mohair is not the hair of the mo. —Jonathan Raush, “The Golden Fleece”
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No typos in this one, by the way (not that I could find anyway); this is how Armstrong wrote it:
We don’t think that we could be more relaxed and have better neighbors any place else. So we stay put After all— we have’ a very lovely home. The house may not be the nicest looking front. But when one visit the Interior of the Armstrong’s home they’ see a whole lot of comfort, happiness + the nicest things. Such as that Wall to Wall Bed— a Bath Room with Mirrors Everywhere‘ Since we are Disciples to Laxatives. A Garage with a magic up + down Gate to it. And of course our Birthmark Car‘ a Cadillac’ (Yea). The Kids in our Block just thrill when they see our garage gate up, and our fine Cadillac ooze on out. They just rejoice and say, “Hi—Louis + Lucille— your car is so beautiful coming out of that rise up gate,” which knocks me out. —Louis Armstrong, In His Own Words
Tony Morrison said, “The function of freedom is to free someone else,” and if you are no longer wracked or in bondage to a person or a way of life, tell your story. Risk freeing someone else. Not everyone will be glad that you did. Members of your family and other critics may wish you had kept your secrets. Oh, well, what are you going to do? Get it all down. Let it pour out of you onto the page. Write an incredibly shitty, self-indulgent, whiney, mewling first draft. Then take out as many of the excesses as you can.” —Anne Lammott, Bird by Bird
I stepped onto the hot tarmac of Tan Son Nhut air base to the ear-splitting howl of jet fighters. These jets had an aura of aggression, with their pointed noses painted as sharks hurtling down the runway, bombs tucked under wings, afterburners aglow. The energy of the war was awesome. —Jon Swain, River of Time
…hold on with a bull-dog grip and chew and choke as much as possible — President Lincoln to General U.S. Grant
“When somebody threatens me,” he says, “I usually tell them to pack a picnic and stand in line.” — Mikey Weinstein quoted in “Marching As to War” by Alan Cooperman, Washington Post
There is about our house a need… We need someone who’s afraid of frogs. We need someone to cry when I get mad, not argue. We need a little one who can kiss without leaving egg or jam or gum. We need a girl. —George H. Bush, letter to his mother, 1953
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What are your favorite books? I would venture to suggest that those, the books you have already read and most truly enjoyed, are going to be your best teachers. I’m betting that, as you comb through them, abundant examples of musical writing will be easy to find.
What are your favorite books? I would venture to suggest that those, the books you have already read and most truly enjoyed, are going to be your best teachers.
P.S. To really make this sink into your writing mind, I would suggest that you try marking the stressed and unstressed syllables, and also identifying some of the author’s poetic techniques.
Stressed, unstressed: Not all syllables are the same. My writing assistants model the concept.
Knowing how to work with scansion, whew, rocket fuel! Not all but many of the following examples are taken from Paul Fussell’s Poetic Meter & Poetic Form and John Gardner’s The Art of Fiction. The former is fairly technical, but serious fiction writers will find the chapter on scansion worth the price of the book. As for The Art of Fiction, the bit on scansion is an itsy bitsy bit, however, I consider Gardner required reading for any aspiring fiction writer. I read The Art of Fiction so many times that my copy fell to pieces and I had to buy another. Nonetheless, over the years, many of my writing students have told me, and oftentimes bitterly, that they found Gardner’s tone so arrogant as to induce a writing block! So you have that caveat. (But if Gardner’s arrogant tone is all it takes to induce a writing block…. hmmm… that will be another post.)
Scansion = representation of poetic rhythms by visual symbols ̆ = unstressed syllable / = stressed syllable
Because scansion marks are difficult to insert in this program, where we would expect to find a “/” above a stressed syllable, I have underlined that syllable instead and left the unstressed syllables unmarked.
Favors to none, to all she smiles extends; Oft she rejects, but never once offends.
If this is wigging you out already, trust me, there’s nothing too complicated about this. As you read a line aloud, just notice which syllables naturally sound a little stronger and maybe a little louder? Those are your stressed syllables. Everything else, those would be unstressed. And yes, sometimes some syllables can be stressed or unstressed depending on how you choose to read it. There are gray areas aplenty. La de da.
To slow down, make it heavy:
For this, following Fussell, you’ll want “a succession of stressed syllables without the expected intervening unstressed syllables” – for example:
When Ajax strives some rock’svastweight to throw The line too labours, and thewordsmoveslow
To go fast, lightly, and/or easily:
Here what works, says Fussell, is “a succession of unstressed syllables without the intervening stressed syllables” – for example:
Ripple on the surface of the water – were salmon passing under – different from the ripples caused by breezes – Gary Snyder “Ripples on the Surface”
Mirror the rhythm:
“all the waves of the billows of the sea” — H Melville, Moby Dick
To show something sudden / different / new:
Fussell: “an unanticipated reversal in rhythm”– for example:
The pig thrashed and squealed, then, panting, trembling, lay helpless. –John Gardner, The Art of Fiction
No scansion marks on the following. Try reading these aloud, listening carefully for for rhythms and the changes in rhythm– they will be obvious to your ear.
…the roller coaster’s track dips and curves like a barn swallow. Just now, a train full of flushed riders climbs, swerves, tilts on its side, then plunges on the rail’s fixed flight through the park… –Lynda McDonnell, “Veblen and the Mall of America”
I could not bear upper Madison Avenue on weekday mornings… because I would see women walking Yorkshire terriers and shopping at Gristede’s, and some Veblenesque gorge would rise in my throat. –Joan Didion, “Goodbye to All That”
Gorge! Well!
To conclude, here is an old poem with especially clear and energetic rhythms. Note the stressed and unstressed syllables:
THE FAIRIES by William Allingham W.B. Yeats, ed., Fairy & Folk Tales of Ireland
Up the airy mountain Down the rushy glen We daren’t go a-hunting For fear of little men; Wee folk, good folk, Trooping all together; Green jacket, red cap And white owl’s feather!
As you revise the draft of your short story or novel, and especially as you put your eye on crucial descriptions and/or actions, or lines of dialogue, see if by marking the stressed and unstressed syllables, you can identify where the rhythms work well and where your text might be rearranged or rewritten to make the rhythms more apt, which is to say, more congruent with what you mean to show, and thereby more vivid for your reader.
This blog posts on Mondays. As of 2019 the second Monday of the month is devoted to myworkshop students and anyone else interested in creative writing. You can find my workshop schedule and many more resources for writers on my workshop page.
We have a ways to go still, but the end of the corona virus shut-down is on the horizon! In that out-and-about spirit, here is a post with some of my favorite writing exercises for making good use of your time in airports, train stations, and more.
Five 2 Word Exercises for Practicing Seeing as a Literary Artist in the Airport (or the Mall or the Train Station or the University Campus or the Car Wash, etc.)
Originally posted on Madam Mayo blog, October 10, 2016
Wherever there be a parade of people, there’s an opportunity for a writerly exercise. This is a quick and easy one, or rather, five. The idea is to look– using your artist’s eye, really look at individuals and come up with two words (or 3 or 4 or 7) to describe them.
Yep, it is that easy.
It helps to write the words down, but just saying them silently to yourself is fine, too. The point is to train your brain to pay attention to detail and generate original descriptions. This helps your writing reach beyond stereotypes (e.g., she was a short Asian woman or, he was a tall black man, or she was a blonde— and other such staples of workshop manuscripts) and so offer your reader something more original, more memorable, and definitively more vivid. “The vivid dream,” that’s what it’s all about.
So, there you are in the airport and, as some random person walks by:
1. Come up with one word to describe the shape of this person’s hair; a second word (or two) for the color of his or her shoes, naming a food item of that same color. For example:
knife-like; chocolate pudding
Now I have the raw material to string together a brief but extra-vivid description, for example:
She wore a knife-like bob and slippers the color of chocolate pudding
Again, find one word for the shape of the hair, and one word for the color of the shoes, referring to a food item.
curve; pork sausages
His head was a curve of curls and he wore pinkish clogs, a pink that made me think of pork sausages
sumptuous; cinnamon candy
She had a sumptuous Afro and sandals the red of cinnamon candy
stubbly; skinned trout
He had stubbly hair and tennis shoes the beige-white of skinned trout.
(Is “stubbly” a shape? Oh well! Don’t tell anybody.)
By the way, it doesn’t matter if the words you come up with are any good or even apt; the point is to practice coming up with them. (Why the color of a food item for the color of the shoes? Welllll, why not? Make it the color of some sand or rock, whydoncha.)
2. Is this person carrying anything? If so, describe it with one adjective plus one noun, e.g.:
fat purse
She carried a fat purse
lumpy briefcase
He leaned slightly to the left from the weight of a lumpy briefcase
crumpled bag
She clutched a crumpled bag
Dixie cup
On his palm he balanced a Dixie cup
3. Gait and gaze
loping; fixed to the ground
He had a loping gait, eyes fixed to the ground
shuffling; bright
She had a shuffling gait but bright eyes
brisk; dreamy
Her walk was brisk, her gaze dreamy.
tiptoe; squinting
She seemed to tiptoe, she was squinting at the monitor
4. Age range
older than 10, younger than 14
perhaps older than 20
I would believe 112
obviously in her seventies, never mind the taut smile
5. Jewelry?Tattoos?
a gold watch; a silver skull ring
feather earrings; a toe ring
eyebrow stud; hoop earrings
a wedding band on the wrong finger; an elephant hair bracelet
a tattoo of a bracelet
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When you sit down to write you certainly do not need to use all this detail; again, the point is to generate it in the first place.
So with the benefit of this wild mélange, here’s what I came up with for a fictional character:
She wore a knife-like bob and slippers the color of chocolate pudding. She carried a fat purse. Her walk was brisk, her gaze dreamy. Perhaps she was older than twenty. She had a wedding band on the wrong finger and an elephant hair bracelet.
Hmmm, maybe that’s the opening for a story. Or something.
By the way, if you’re stuck standing around in an airport, or some such place / situation, these little exercises, silly as they may seem, are better for your writing game than ye olde pulling out the smartphone. The former trains your brain to do what a writer naturally does. Scrolling and clicking gives you the shallows, and so makes writing increasingly difficult.
The study of English Literature has its pleasures and virtues, and much to do with learning the craft of creative writing; nonetheless, these are not one and the same endeavor. You can earn a PhD in race, class, gender, fill-in-the-blank in the novel, yet still not have the wherewithal to actually write one. That said, a novelist who has never read anything by Shakespeare or, say, Jane Austen, and learned to appreciate why such works are so celebrated, is working at a calamitous disadvantage.
Analogy: an art historian specializing in baroque cabinets is not the cabinet-maker who crafts them. While the art historian focuses on fact and figures and on what the baroque cabinet represents in all its broader context; the latter actually makes one. The former might yammer on for a book or two about the Hanseatic League or the Counter Reformation or the rise of the urban bourgeoisie, and so and and so forth; the latter, she’ll worry about the specifics of the grain of the wood; the type of joint; the choice of tool; a carved rose or a daisy for the keyhole?
Further analogy: any furniture maker who would manufacture a baroque-style cabinet would undoubtedly benefit from some familiarity with the finer examples that have survived.
DEFINITIONS
As a writer, I don’t noodle much about literary definitions of the sort a highschool English teacher would lay on a multiple choice exam, e.g., whether thus-and-such is a simile or a personificaction, metaphor, or allusion. I just think of “imagery” as my palette of “metaphor stuff.” I, the artist, can ignore it. Or I can make tiny dabs of this; squirts of that; wild oceanic splashes! In other words, as I write a novel or a story or a poem or an essay, I use imagery– I apply “metaphor stuff”–when and as I judge it apt.
(Of course, if we aim to find readers, then comes revision and editing, and further revision… More about that big bramble of a subject anon.)
For using imagery, there is no formula. Some marvelous writers relish using loads of it, others, equally marvelous, apply it sparingly.
In general, it serves to slow down, focus and brighten an idea, a character, act, place, thing– whatever it is you want the reader to more sharply “see.”
Yeah, but what about clutter?
In my experience, most people who come to a writing workshop for the first time do not have the easily fixable problem of cluttering up their writing with “metaphor stuff”; rather, for lack of it their writing is dull. And when they do use metaphor stuff, alas, it’s more often than not cliché– that is, somebody else’s metaphor stuff, warmed over 279 times. (More about cliché here.)
How to come up with your own original “metaphor stuff”?
1. Practice. The more often you practice, the easier it gets. Like riding a bike, it doesn’t require some otherwordly talent; most people find it challenging at first and then, quickly, something they can “just do.” For a trove of exercises, have a look at my workshop page’s “Giant Golden Buddha” & 364 More Five Minute Writing Exercises.
2. Learn to notice it as you read. You already have an immense treasure of metaphor stuff at-hand, right there in the books you have already read and loved. Go pluck one off your bookshelf, open it at random and chances are, you’ll find metaphor stuff aplenty. As you reread– and as you read any new book– keep your eyes sharp for the way the author uses it. (See my post on Reading as a Writer.) How well do they use it? If you love the book, chances are, the author uses it very well indeed.
For those feeling a little creaky with the creativity mojo, I’ve posted previously about emulation or permutation exercises. Basically, you jot down another writer’s line or two– anything you especially admire– and then vary the nouns and/or verbs, adjectives and/or adverbs (or however you want to do it). In short, in these exercises the idea is not to plagarize another writer; rather, you emulate; by means of play, you create your own lines.
Yes, sometimes, like a big fat cheesy enchilada, too much metaphor stuff in a manuscript can be too too… uhhff, pass the Alkaseltzer.
But again, there is no formula. Switching back to the furniture analogy, I mean, “metaphor stuff,” not everyone wants all the swirls and twirls and dainty dimpled cherubs and roses and whatnotty-whatnots of baroque furniture. But some people think baroque is the Dickens’ chickens.
For your reference, and the satisfaction of all English teachers, herewith some definitions:
ALLUSION An expression designed to call something to mind without mentioning it explicity; in indirect or passing reference.
“Where’s the Plantation?” John Wesley asked. “Gone With the Wind,” said the Grandmother. “Ha ha.” —Flannery O’Connor “A Good Man is Hard to Find”
ANALOGY A comparison between two things, typically on the basis of their structure and for the purpose of explanation or clarification; a correspondence or partial similarity.
A mind is like a parachute. It doesn’t work if it’s not open. —Frank Zappa
Minds are like ovens— if you leave them open all the time, everything comes out half-baked. —John Michael Greer
METAPHOR A figure of speech in which a word or phrase is applied to an object or action to which it is not literally applicable; alternatvely, a thing representive or symbolic of something else, especially something abstract.
She had heard any number of women talk of pregnancy as a slow ordeal to be endured, but now from month to month she felt only a peaceful ripening. —Richard Yates, “A Natural Girl”
PERSONIFICATION The attribution of a personal nature or personal characteristics to something nonhuman, or the representation of an abstract quality in human form. (Throw animal forms in there, too, whydoncha.)
He watched the clouds: dark swift horses surging up the sky —Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano
SIMILE A figure of speech involving the comparison of one thing with another thing of a different kind, used to make a description more emphatic or vivid.
…a young woman in slacks, whose face was as broad and innocent as a cabbage —Flannery O’Connor, “A Good Man is Hard to Find”
When I teach this workshop I ask my students to each take a turn reading an example aloud. I would suggest that you do the same: Slow down, waaaaay down. Take a long, cool moment to read these examples aloud carefully, crisply, as if you were at the podium before a rapt audience.
We drove on, the morning
growing in the sky to our left.
—Rupert Isaacson, The Healing Land: The Bushmen and the Kalahari Desert
I wandered the village of rounded earthen houses, golden and white, decorated with stark geometric designs. They had a peculiar organic quality, as if they had bubbled up from the earth and dried there. Flattened dung cakes stuck on walls to dry looked like giant polka dots. —Naomi Shihab Nye, “Camel Like Only Camel,” in Never in a Hurry: Essays on People and Places
Inquisitiveness flutters this way and that, like a bird in a glass house. —Aldous Huxley, “The Traveller’s-Eye View”
Given the single fossil bone, one fancifully builds up the whole diplodocus. —Aldous Huxley, “The Traveller’s-Eye View”
A Hollywood millionaire is a strong, silent man, clean-shaven, with a face, either like a hatchet or an uncooked muffin. These, on the contrary, had tremendous beards, talked a great deal, were over-dressed and wore white gloves. They looked like a little party of Bluebeards. —Aldous Huxley, “The Traveller’s-Eye View”
Most of the above examples are from a handout I’ve used over the years in my “Techniques of Fiction” and “Literary Travel Writing” workshops at the San Miguel Writers Conference and the Writer’s Center. In case you’ve already seen those, herewith, from recent reading, some fresh examples:
But his smile stung me like a nettle. So I barked, “Have you been to the post?” —Arthur Japin, The Two Hearts of Kwasi Boachi
My playing is no more like hers, than a lamp is like sunshine. —Jane Austen, Emma
I have come out to lie on the rocks where I have the black edge of the north island in front of me, Galway Bay, too blue almost to look at, on my right, the Atlantic on my left, a perpendicular cliff under my ankles, and over me innumerable gulls that chase each other in a white cirrus of wings. —J.M. Synge, The Aran Islands
Again, a curagh with two light people in it floats on the water like a nutshell —J.M. Synge, The Aran Islands
He stuck with the tried and true—adding figures in his head. You could hear his lips whispering quick-quick-quick, like nuts rolling down a hill, and before you knew it he had the balance. —Yenta Mash, “The Irony of Fate,” in On the Landing (translated from the Yiddish by Ellen Cassedy)
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WALLACE STEGNER’S BEYOND THE HUNDREDTH MERIDIAN
In the past couple of weeks, apropos of my book in-progress on Far West Texas (trying to get my mind around the history of the American West in general and Reclamation in particular) I’ve had the rich pleasure of reading Wallace Stegner’sBeyond the Hundredth Meridan: John Wesley Powell and the Second Opening of the West. Stegner is a master of many things, including “the metaphor stuff.”
Some examples:
It is easy to skirt the region, hard to cross it, for from Bear Lake at its northern border to the Vermillion Cliffs along the south, Utah has a spine like a Stegasuarus. —Stegner, BTHM, p. 161
Powell saw the boat hang for a breath at the head of the rapid and then sweep into it. —Stegner, BTHM, p. 63
Suppose he and his family endured the sun and glare on their treeless prairie, and were not demolished by the cyclones that swept across the plains like great scythes. —Stegner, BTHM, p. 220
The inflexible fact of aridity lay like a fence along the 100th meridian. —Stegner, BTHM, p. 229
Characteristically, he took on more than he could finish. He was a Thor, always getting caught in an attempt to drink the ocean dry or uproot the Midgard serpent. —Stegner, BTHM, p. 279
His handling of the Commission was like a skilled muleskinner’s handling of a twenty-mule team. —Stegner, BTHM, p. 289
Three hundred and sixty degrees of horizon ringed them, the sky fitted the earth like a bell jar. —Stegner, BTHM, p. 297
The great men of Zion are on the map in Brigham City and Heber City and Knightsville, and beween and among these are scattered those dense but hollow names, smooth outside with use, packed with associations like internal crystals, that come from the Bible or the Book of Mormon—names that are like Lehi and Manti and Hebron, Nephi and Moroni and Moab. —Stegner, BTHM, p. 192
But here before him was the opportunity of his life, the massive and complex problem of planning for the West whose parts meshed in an intricate system. And here was he with twenty years of experience and knowledge, every bit of which could be applied to the problem as an engine’s power is applied to the axles. The action of Congress, stumilated by Stewart and Teller, had shifted him into gear, and he was not now going to be content with making a humming noise or moving pistons meaninglessly up and down. He was going to turn wheels. —Stegner, BTHM, p. 305
It was the West itself that beat him, the Big Bill Stewarts and Gideon Moodys, the land and cattle and water barons, the plain homesteaders, the locally patriotic, the ambitious, the venal, the acquisitive, the myth-bound West which insisted on running into the future like a streetcar on a gravel road. —Stegner, BTHM, p. 338
He was not merely an explorer, an opener, and an observer, he was a prophet. And yet by the law of motion (and hence of history) which he himself accepted, his motion as a particle in the jar and collision of American life was bound to be spiral. His reforms have taken effect, his plans have been adopted, but partially, belatedly, sidelong, as a yielding resultant of two nearly equal stresses. —Stegner, BTHM, p. 350
>> Find more workshop posts in the archive here; and many more resources at my workshop page on www.cmmayo.com here.
This blog posts on Mondays. As of 2019 the second Monday of the month is devoted to myworkshop students and anyone else interested in creative writing. (You can find my workshop schedule and many more resources for writers on my workshop page.)
Wherever there be a parade of people, there’s an opportunity for a writerly exercise. This is a quick and easy one, or rather, five. The idea is to look– using your artist’s eye, really look at individuals and come up with two words (or 3 or 4 or 7) to describe them.
Yep, it is that easy.
It helps to write the words down, but just saying them silently to yourself is fine, too. The point is to train your brain to pay attention to detail and generate original descriptions. This helps your writing reach beyond stereotypes (e.g., she was a short Asian woman or, he was a tall black man, or she was a blonde— and other such staples of workshop manuscripts) and so offer your reader something more original, more memorable, and definitively more vivid. “The vivid dream,” that’s what it’s all about.
So, there you are in the airport and, as some random person walks by:
1. Come up with one word to describe the shape of this person’s hair; a second word (or two) for the color of his or her shoes, naming a food item of that same color. For example:
knife-like; chocolate pudding
Now I have the raw material to string together a brief but extra-vivid description, for example:
She wore a knife-like bob and slippers the color of chocolate pudding
Again, find one word for the shape of the hair, and one word for the color of the shoes, referring to a food item.
curve; pork sausages
His head was a curve of curls and he wore pinkish clogs, a pink that made me think of pork sausages
sumptuous; cinnamon candy
She had a sumptuous Afro and sandals the red of cinnamon candy
stubbly; skinned trout
He had stubbly hair and tennis shoes the beige-white of skinned trout.
(Is “stubbly” a shape? Oh well! Don’t tell anybody.)
By the way, it doesn’t matter if the words you come up with are any good or even apt; the point is to practice coming up with them. (Why the color of a food item for the color of the shoes? Welllll, why not? Make it the color of some sand or rock, whydoncha.)
2. Is this person carrying anything? If so, describe it with one adjective plus one noun, e.g.:
fat purse
She carried a fat purse
lumpy briefcase
He leaned slightly to the left from the weight of a lumpy briefcase
crumpled bag
She clutched a crumpled bag
Dixie cup
On his palm he balanced a Dixie cup
3. Gait and gaze
loping; fixed to the ground
He had a loping gait, eyes fixed to the ground
shuffling; bright
She had a shuffling gait but bright eyes
brisk; dreamy
Her walk was brisk, her gaze dreamy.
tiptoe; squinting
She seemed to tiptoe, she was squinting at the monitor
4. Age range
older than 10, younger than 14
perhaps older than 20
I would believe 112
obviously in her seventies, never mind the taut smile
5. Jewelry?Tattoos?
a gold watch; a silver skull ring
feather earrings; a toe ring
eyebrow stud; hoop earrings
a wedding band on the wrong finger; an elephant hair bracelet
So with the benefit of this wild mélange, here’s what I came up with for a fictional character:
She wore a knife-like bob and slippers the color of chocolate pudding. She carried a fat purse. Her walk was brisk, her gaze dreamy. Perhaps she was older than twenty. She had a wedding band on the wrong finger and an elephant hair bracelet.
Hmmm, maybe that’s the opening for a story. Or something.
By the way, if you’re stuck standing around in an airport, or some such place / situation, these little exercises, silly as they may seem, are better for your writing game than ye olde pulling out the smartphone. The former trains your brain to do what a writer naturally does. The latter gives you the shallows, and so makes the former even more difficult.
Ideally a novel provides the experience of a vivid dream, so when I teach my writing workshops, I always begin with specificity: generating specific detail that is vivid, that is, it appeals to the senses: sight, hearing, taste, touch, smell.
Inevitably, a hand goes up.
But isn’t this creating clutter? How do you know when the detail is too much?
Anyone who has taken a writing workshop or three will have heard: cut the adjectives, cut the adverbs, if you need an adverb you probably have the wrong verb, etc. All of this is right and good, however, in my experience, most writing– and I include first drafts by accomplished writers– is scant on vivid detail that appeals to the senses. Not vivid? No reader.
So, how to distinguish needed detail from clutter?
I like to use the analogy of interior decorating. Let’s assume the purpose of the living room is to host a tea party. So you decorate it in order to make your guest feel welcome, to make her feel both charmed and comfortable to come in, sit down on the sofa, and enjoy a cup (or three) of tea. That will be challenging if the entrance is blocked by five beat-up sofas and, say, a washing machine. It will also be, shall we say, rather uninviting if you’ve left last night’s pizza cartons on the coffee table.
A book invites a reader in– so, don’t ask, am I expressing myself?; ask, will my reader feel welcome? Will she feel confident that I am in control of the narrative (in other words, that I know what I’m doing?) If not, she’ll put the book down– in the same way that she would not want to sit down and drink tea in a peculiar and cluttered house.
More questions from the workshop:
When can I use adjectives? Can I use adverbs? Can I this, that, or the other thing?
There are no rules in art, but I think we find our path toward writing a good book when we understand and respect the intregity of our design.
The interior decorating analogy again: Some living rooms might be beautifully designed and yet feature a lot of detail. For example, a Victorian-style living room might have lace curtains, a knicknack cabinet with dolls and teacups and porcelain pugs; cabbage-rose upholstery; numerous chairs (a straight-back and a rocking chair, ottomans, etc); three potted palms, a fern on a stand; portraits of some twenty-seven ancestors and horses and dogs; and outside the windows, a glimpse of gingerbread trim. Despite all that detail, it could nonetheless be considered uncluttered— a guest could walk in, sit comfortably, and enjoy her tea in what is a very properly fussy Victorian room.
At the other extreme, we might have a beautifully designed yet minimalist penthouse: black leather and chrome furniture; everything white; one giant painting of a red slash. Outside the floor-to-ceiling window: nothing but sky. Certainly, a Victorian rocking chair would look like out of place, as would the washing machine and those pizza cartons.
Similarly, in the Victorian room, that chrome-and-leather ottoman would look more than rather peculiar, no?
Does your reader feel welcome? Does your reader perceive that you are in control as a designer / host / artist? One of the best ways to get a feeling for that is to go back and read a novel you have already read and absolutely loved, from beginning to end, for that is, by definition, a successful novel. Do not read as a consumer, for entertainment; read as a writer– examining how your fellow writer (be he or she Austen, Tolstoy, O’Connor, Kingsolver) put in or left out specific detail. Where are the smells, sounds, tastes, textures? Underline them.
Had there been signficant clutter, you would have put the book down when you read it the first time.
The books you have already read and loved are your best teachers– there they are, waiting for you on your own bookshelf. But you have to read them as a fellow craftsperson, not passively, as a “consumer”: nor, for that matter, as a student of English literature. The latter is akin to a student who writes about the history or perhaps sociology of interior decoration. It is not the same as being an interior decorator– the one who chooses the sofa, hauls it in, and determines where to place it. And if you’re wrong about the sofa, no need to return it. Take out your mental zap gun and zap it into the infinite warehouse of your mind.
