uncovering what works in sensory language

The Writer's Chronicle for May/Summer 2012 includes an article by David Jauss with the slightly hokey title of "Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Abstraction?: Modes of Conveying Emotion."  Nonetheless, as with most essays and articles by Jauss on the craft of writing, it helps identify strategies for mustering life into faltering prose.

Jauss is keen to make the point that emotions reside in the senses, and "without some appeal to the senses, ... it is very difficult, if not downright impossible, for us to make our readers experience our character's emotions."  He suggests the "primary ways writers can convey emotion through the senses are body language and metaphors."  But it can be hard work to convey such emotion on the page, and often the writer will take a shortcut, i.e. just use an abstraction, a sensory bypass, and get on with the story.  For instance:

Cornell experienced an immense grief.

But when we abstract like this, Jauss cautions, "we are asking the reader to do the hard work of imagining the physical sensations of the emotion for us, and the readers aren't any less susceptible to laziness than we are ...so she just skips the trip entirely."  And maybe also closes the book.  Jauss gives his own examples where, instead of simply naming the character's emotion, as in the sensory bypass naming Cornell's grief, a writer might work a little harder at portraying the emotion in some unexpected way.  "In A Gate at the Stairs, Lorrie Moore makes Bo Keltjin's grief visible through his unusual use of a handkerchief at his son's funeral.  Instead of drying his eyes with it, as we might expect, he 'presse[s] it completely over his face, like a barber's hot towel.'  With a sentence like that, we don't need the word grief; we witness it."

And then we have the gloss.  "Whereas a sensory bypass might allude to body language but doesn't actually describe it, a gloss does describe body language--but then proceeds to interpret it for the reader.  As in:

Tears of grief wet Cornell's face.

The writer is trying to make sure the reader hasn't missed a turn somewhere and is interpreting those tears correctly.

Another interesting area of enriching sensory language to rescue it from mere gloss or abstraction as discussed by Jauss is to mix the body language with metaphor.  To illustrate, he takes another example from Lorrie Moore: "'Here Sarah looked at me mischievously, her look a complicated room one might wander through, exploring for quite some time if there were any time.'  If Moore had merely said, 'Here Sarah looked at me mischievously,' she would have been guilty of writing a gloss and the emotion labeled by the abstract evaluation mischievously would have been dead on arrival.  The metaphor brings it to life."

Jauss gives many more juxtapositions of body language, abstraction, gloss, metaphor, and action that can bring emotional life to your characters, and the complete article is worth reading.

pen names and genre rodeos

Publishers seem to prefer to keep their authors focused on a particular genre after they've achieved at least some initial success.  No doubt there are business and marketing principles at work, and there are undoubtedly payoffs for both parties, but it might also be like fitting the author with a pair of horse blinders (remember those side flap goggles worn by the horse pulling the junkman's cart, to keep the horse's attention on the road ahead?).

The publisher may feel it has money invested in the author's name--the brand--and has hopes of building a faithful, ever larger consumer base for the brand.  Our author meanwhile may be pleased by the past commercial success, but he's an artist for god's sake and may want to give free rein to new creative energies.  So what if a venture into the new genre doesn't sell as well?  Well, life is hard, money is tight, shareholders have expectations, and authors might be a little crazy.  Still, if an author has a day job to meet subsistence needs, riding a new bull at the rodeo might be exhilarating.

Famous authors are more likely to get a nod from their publishers when submitting cross-genre work.  Some whom I have read with good crossover adult, young adult, and middle grade novels within their individual collections include Louise Erdrich, Carl Hiaasen, and Neil Gaiman, to name just a few.  So it can be, and is, done.  It's just less of a financial risk for the publisher, or career risk for the author, if the author already has a following.

Of course it's also less of a risk if the author is still inhabiting the same moral and physical universe of his other genres.  Neil Gaiman might not reverberate in romance genre as well as in his more typical fantasy genre.  It could be interesting to see what happens though.

Another way to potentially upset your hardworking publisher is to run your next piece of work past him with a pseudonym on it.  "Some famous authors publish under pseudonyms so that they can get a fresh reading of their work," says an article in the NY Times (2/23/2012).  "In 1987 Joyce Carol Oates released a book under the name Rosamond Smith but apologized and swore off pseudonyms when her publisher discovered what she had done."  Apparently they didn't think it was a very good decision in her case, but authors might resort to using pseudonyms for various reasons.  In earlier times women authors sometimes adopted men's names in hopes of being taken more seriously as writers.  Joanne Kathleen Rowling took the neutral gender J. K. Rowling in hopes of better attracting more boy readers.

The same Times article discusses an author, Patricia O'Brien, who had published several books including a novel, but whose most recent novel had been submitted to 13 publishers by her agent without finding a home.  An Internet check on BookScan showed it had sold only 4000 copies, which was considered a flop.  However, her agent, who had a lot of confidence in the book, said "I realized that the book was not being judged on its merits.  It was being judged on how many books she has sold.  I needed somebody who couldn't look on BookScan."  When the book reached another publisher under Ms. O'Brien's new pseudonym, Kate Alcott, there were no adverse digital footprints found on Internet searches, and it received an enthusiastic reading, and was accepted.  In time Ms. O'Brien came clean with the publisher, everyone remained friends, and the same publisher later bought another novel from Ms. O'Brien.  A fortuitous outcome in this case.

the holy clay

Some earlier posts discussed the use of themes taken from myths, and the mythical characters, as archetypal elements for the writing of contemporary fiction.

This installment concerns a holy clay, lifted from the grave of a reputed saint buried in an ancient, ruined monastery of St. Colmcille on Tory Island, about a mile off the north coast of Ireland.  The story of the saint is part of the folklore of the island, and a few of the anecdotes are collected in "Stories from Tory Island,” by Dorothy H. Therman, 1989:

The cliffs along the north coast are penetrated deeply by inlets, or clefts (scoilteanna).  To the east of the lighthouse, not far  from the graveyard (of a shipwrecked crew of the HMS Wasp, another story altogether) is Scoilt an Mhuiriseain.  Onto its stony beach, in the time of St Colmcille, there drifted a boat carrying seven people.  Dr. Edward Maguire quotes Manus O'Donnell, the sixteenth century author of "The Life of St. Columba":  'The fame of his [St. Colmcille's] wisdom, his knowledge, his faith, his piety, had gone forth throughout the entire world, and the holy children of the King of India had conceived love for him on account of the rumours ... there were six sons (of them) and one sister.'  The children set sail in search of him and were not heard from for a long time, until they finally reached the northwest coast of Tory.  'And on their coming to land, they died in consequence of the fatigue of the sea and of the ocean.'  They were brought across the island and buried together at a place on the edge of what is now West Town, where the foundations of one of St Colmcille's little chapels are still visible.  But for three mornings in a row, the body of the woman was found lying on top of the grave, so she was buried separately and from then on rested peacefully.

   

Alfred McFarland, who visited Tory in 1849 and wrote "Hours in Vacation" (Dublin, 1853) believed that the seven were Scandinavian royalty; Mr. T. J. Westropp stated in the "Antiquarian Handbook Series" in 1905 that they were Hollanders. Dan Rodgers of Tory Island says the islanders thought the woman might have been a saint.  And it is from the grave site of the 'saint' that the eldest of the Duggan clan retains the perogative given to him by St. Colmcille to lift 'holy clay', which has the power not only to banish rats, but to protect fishermen from the dangers of the sea. (Rat control was a life and death matter for farmers needing to protect food storage cribs over the long winters).

A bit of the holy clay was lifted for the writer one night by the eldest of the Duggan clan living on the island at the time of my two weeks visit there. I still have the clay among my totems, and am as intrigued by the legend now as I was then. I prefer the legend of siblings from India. It has the elements of a Joseph Campbell myth, from his "The Hero With A Thousand Faces," (3rd ed. 1973). Campbell uses myths taken from cultures around the world, describing a hero's quest for some gift or boon for his people. The quest usually involves a perceived call, often supernatural, a series of trials while on the quest, attainment of the sought-after boon, and a return to the Hero's people.

In a short discourse on the Hero as Saint, Campbell relates how St. Thomas Aquinas reaches a boon of mystical spiritual revelation as he neared the end of writing his major opus of Roman Catholic doctrine, Summa Theologica, put down his pen to leave the last chapters to be completed by another hand, and died soon after, in his forty-ninth year. In his case, St. Thomas, unlike, say, the Bodhisattva, does not return to his people, but has: 

"stepped away from the realm of forms, into which the incarnation descends ... the realm of the manifest profile of The Great Face. Once the hidden profile has been discovered, myth is the penultimate, silence the ultimate, word."

Did the princess of India and her brothers receive a mystical spiritual revelation like that of St. Thomas upon reaching landfall after the perilous sea voyage? Or did their journey and its fateful conclusion have other meaning? There seems a lot of creative energy available to a writer in the pondering of old myths like this one.

novellas

 The generic term for the fiction story usually considered by publishers to be too long for a short story and too short for a novel is the novella.  A dictionary describes the word as derived from Italian/French forms of 'new,' and means: a story with a compact and pointed plot; or, a short novel or long short story.  It is generally thought to be somewhere between 15,000 to 40 or 50,000 words.

Probably most writers think of it as being hard to place for publication: too long for the literary journals and other short story venues, and too short for hardcover book publishers.  Unless, that is, you are a big-name author.  An article in The Writer's Chronicle, "Revaluing the Novella," by Kyle Semmel, provides some interesting reading on the use of the form.  Semmel grounds some of his views and analyses on the legendary author and writing teacher John Gardner, and his book,"The Art of Fiction."  It's a book I revisit often, and I'll paraphrase or quote some material Semmel chose from Gardner to describe the novella:

1.  The novella moves through a series of small epiphanies or secondary climaxes, usually following a single line of thought, and reaches an end where the world is radically changed.

2.  "The novella normally treats one character and one important action in his life, a focus that leads itself to neat cut-offs or framing."

3.  Notwithstanding the above norms, three distinctive types of novella include: (1) single stream ("a single stream of action focused on one character and moving through a series of increasingly intense climaxes"); (2) non-continuous stream, or "baby novel," ("shifting from one point of view [or focal character] to another, and using true episodes, with time breaks between"); and (3) pointillist ("moving at random from one point to another").

There are all sorts of experimentation with the structure and overlap of the types given above, and some powerful novellas have resulted.  Semmel's descriptions of the basic structures, and his discussions of example novellas, will provide a good footing for the aspiring novella writer.

I liked Semmel's discussion of the non-continuous novella, "Where the Rivers Flow North," by Howard Frank Mosher, in which the narrative moves in and out of the two main characters' points-of-view, that of a Vermont farmer, and his housekeeper,  but which is broken up by another third person, authorial point-of-view.  Sounds like a hard one to pull off successfully, but there you go!

I also liked an example given in Gardner's book for the continuous stream novella focused on a single character and moving through a series of increasingly intense climaxes.  Semmel didn't use this example, but check it out: "The Pedersen Kid," by William Gass.

In retrospect, I think one of my favorite 'short' novels (about 44,000 words), "The Member of the Wedding," by Carson McCullers, might also be thought of as a novella.  Challenge yourself this year with a novella.

mythic characters

An interesting article, "The Absence of Their Presence: Mythic Characters in Fiction," by Steven Schwartz, appears in The Writer's Chronicle, Dec. 2011. Schwartz shows how developing a mythic character in a fiction piece requires some attention to the use of the point of view (POV) chosen to narrate the story. A basic concept is a need to stay out of the head of the mythic character. The reader gets to know him or her only through dialog and action, and through reports of the story narrator. Even in a third-person, omniscient POV, the narrator should not move into the head of the mythic character to show any of his feelings or thought process.

"What might seem less than more at first--an external perspective versus an internal view--turns out to be the necessary narrative device for creating their unique myths.

Using "Moby Dick" Schwartz illustrate's his point:

"With more conventional characters we may feel cheated when their motivations remain opaque, and their psyches, like Ahab's, ultimately unknowable. But we do not make the same demands of mythic characters, often because the prearranged audience in the story reflects our own bafflement. By their surrogate reactions and scrutiny, they preempt our silent protests. That is, we need (the POV narrator) to act as our agent of disbelief..." and, "...we may clearly see what (the mythic character) do(es), but not why, and it's the why that creates a chilling gap of suspense."

Of course the mythic character has to present actions and dialog that elicit a tension and bafflement which grow to suspense. Often appearing as an outsider, with abnormal behavior, the writer should avoid having the observer-narrator explain away the mythic character's motivations, and "never minimize the complexity nor the significance of the strange."

Schwartz explores the mythic dimensions of Jay Gatsby, in Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby," and of Bartleby, in Melville's "Bartleby the Scrivener." I've read and enjoyed Gatsby, though he doesn't quite hold a mythic dimension for me. Still, we are never invited into Gatsby's head to discover what he really feels about his experience, and we have only Nick Carraway's first-person POV for a subjective opinion on Gatsby. Gatsby is an outsider in his society, but never really seems to show a strange or abnormal behavior. Bartleby, however, does seem to show such behavior, and in abundance.

Schwartz uses a Steven Millhauser short story, "The Knife Thrower," to illustrate other points about writing the mythical character. Interestingly, Millhauser uses the plural first-person, we, to serve as both narrator and audience watching the controversial knife thrower, Hensch, as he visits their town for a one-time performance. The narrator alludes to rumors that Hensch, in his early carnival days, had badly wounded an assistant. Now, the narrative leaves open a possibility that Hensch in his present performance mortally wounds an audience volunteer, a girl, who had wished to be marked by him. Schwartz discusses the story's use of the first person plural POV:

"All of which makes for a strangely normative viewpoint that in its plurality gives additional weight to its judgment of Hensch. On the other hand, this impersonal "we" relies on rumor and hearsay and is even more incapable of penetrating Hensch''s mystery than an individual observer-narrator such as Nick Carraway ... would be in gaining confidences, creating an extra layer of insulation from the subject. And Millhauser clearly wants it that way to promote the morally ambiguous atmosphere and mythic tone...

"At the conclusion of "The Knife Thrower," illustrating the elusive nature of the mythic, the collective viewpoint voices its frustration. The more we thought about it, the more uneasy we became, and in the nights that followed, when we woke from troubling dreams, we remembered the traveling knife thrower with agitation and dismay. This could well stand as a summary of all mythic characters. Fascinatingly inconclusive, they trick us into remembering them by the absence of their presence."

Creating a mythic character may be quite a challenge.

serial novels

The NY Times (11/21/2011) reports that the writer, Mark Z. Danielewski ("House of Leaves," "Only Revolutions") is planning a 27 volume novel, titled "The Familiar." The novel is planned to be released with one new volume every three months, beginning in 2014. Knopf Doubleday is reported to have paid one million dollars for the first ten books.

Danielewski has an optimistic view that a huge, long-running, serial release like his will generate perhaps daily, or at least ongoing, buzz about the characters and story-line. He hopes for something similar to what unfolds in newspaper columns, radio talk shows, and public conversations during a season of popular TV episodes, like the recent "Sopranos," or the current "Mad Men."

"Literature is capable of being a subject that people want to catch up on or discuss, whether at a coffee shop or a watercooler," Mr. Danielewski said. "It can become an intrinsic part of their dialogue." His editor says the books will be an attempt to create a "serial relationship" with the readers.

Well, certainly J. K. Rowling had epic success with serial releases (7) of her Harry Potter fantasy novels over about 10 years. According to Wikipedia, her book series has sold about 450 million copies.

Another greatly successful novel series was the eight books, beginning with "Anne of Green Gables," written by Canadian author Lucy Maude Montgomery, and published between 1908 and 1921. The books track the life of Anne, beginning when she arrives as a precocious 11-year old orphan at a farm on Prince Edward Island in Canada, up until she is a teacher there in her early fifties. The books have sold about 50 million copies, according to Wikipedia, and are included in school curriculums all over the world.

An example of success in serial novel publication in a different genre is Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin seafaring adventures, which included 20 novels published between 1969 and 1999. Jack Aubrey is a British Royal Navy officer, and Stephen Maturin is ship's surgeon, who serve together at sea during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. This series sold over 2 million copies, according to Wikipedia.

A more common serial novel enterprise is, perhaps, the more manageable trilogy. A good example of a well-done trilogy is the recent "Hunger Games," by Suzanne Collins. It is a young adult, science fiction series set at some time in what could be a not too distant future, in which the surviving sociopolitical structure of North America has been reduced by internal wars to a despotic capitol and twelve outlying districts--a thirteenth was assumed to have been annihilated--and wherein the districts serve all the economic needs of the capitol. Annual 'Hunger Games,' gladiatorial contests organized by the capitol, in which a male and female from each district are selected by lottery to fight until the death of all but one, serve to keep the masses sufficiently traumatized, and entertained. Each of the books in this series were on best-seller lists, and were critically acclaimed.

It is interesting to note in Wikipedia the structure adopted by Collins for each of her books in the series:

Each book in The Hunger Games trilogy has 27 chapters and is further divided into 3 sections of 9 chapters each. Collins says that this format comes from her playwriting background, which taught her to write in three acts. Her previous series, The Underland Chronicles, was written in the same way, as Collins is "very comfortable" with this structure. She sees each group of nine chapters as a separate part of the story, and comments that she still calls those divisions "act breaks".

It seems interesting to organize the structure of a story, as Collins has done here. It is reminiscent of the very organized and focused method advocated by Jon Franklin in his "Writing for Story." Franklin is a two-time Pulitzer Prize winning author. His craft has been honed on creative non-fiction short stories, but his writing advice seems equally valuable for fiction writers. More next time on Franklin's methods that may be of use for serial novels.

That's it for some reflections for now on writing serialized fiction. Most 'unsung' writers would probably be happy to have the one novel that sells on the order of 30,000 copies. Onward!

the God theme in literature

Poetry and prose writers through the ages have produced some epic creative works with their visions of the immortal God(s), as conceived at particular times in history. Think of the Greek plays and epic poems, the Hindu epics, and the Middle Eastern and European pagan mythologies. The gods and super-heroes in these may be immortal beings endowed with supernatural powers, but they generally resemble or approximate human form, and have familiar human appetites.

The rise of the later monotheistic religions, beginning with Judaism and proceeding through Christianity and Islam, present a more mysterious God, but either through revelation or inspiration, the later writers retain some anthropomorphic qualities for the one God. For example, He occasionally speaks in a familiar language; He's concerned with interpersonal relationships between Himself and humans, and between humans; and He has given some laws which are to govern these relationships.

The descriptive qualities and characteristics of God given by these three dominant monotheistic religions have not changed much, if at all, in the last 1500 to 2000 years, and seem somewhat frozen in the language and conceptual abilities of the authors who committed them to writing. The stasis became reason enough for some philosophers to declare God was now dead. Further modern scholarship, scriptural criticism, and science, have continued to bump up against the traditional, dogmatic views of God. Indeed, there now seems a plethora of books by modern writers promoting the atheist view: God is not Great, by Christopher Hitchens; The God Delusion, by Richard Dawkins; and others. None of the atheists seem, however, to adequately address a resulting, fundamental issue of why then is there something instead of nothing?

Theologians have sometimes been hampered by religious authorities and a fear of heresy from more fully exploring the questions and nature of a revealed God in a religious dogma. Too bad. A lot more might have been discovered in all those years.

Even literary fiction might happen onto some useful insights to God, through imaginative story-telling, guided by human experience and psyche. Think: Moby Dick. Recently I came across a reference to Kafka in an article by Robert Pogue Harrison (NY Review of Books, Oct. 13, 2011), which got me thinking again about this topic:

"In his conversations with Gustav Jaknouch, Kafka reportedly remarked:

God dwells in darkness. And that is a good thing, because without the protecting darkness, we should try to overcome God. That is man's nature.

"These are the words of a modern individual speaking in the wake of what Nietzsche called the death of God. Something similar could be said of Shakespeare. Like Kafka's Deus absconditus, he withdraws into a protective darkness that prevents us from getting a secure handle on him, hence from overthrowing him."

Awesome. Hope the topic was of interest to blog readers.