Bulletproof Writing

Nurturing writers and aspiring writers.

Writing Techniques

“Method Writing”: My Favorite Way to Write what I Don’t Know

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Let’s say you want to write a historical novel about a 21-year-old man living in Derbyshire, England, in 1883. Countryside_at_Haddon_Hall,_DerbyshireHe wants to get to know the daughter of the local miller, but when he tries to engage her in conversation she laughs at his big nose and awkward manner, and her father manages to make him look like an idiot by engaging him in a conversation about wheat grinding – about which, being a sheep farmer, he knows nothing.

Easy-peasy, right?

The only problem is that you’re a 45-year-old woman living in Chicago who has never seen a live sheep, much less a flour mill.

How can you possibly evoke the right emotions that the young man is no doubt feeling as he is systematically torn to emotional bits by both his love interest and her father?

Enter Method Writing, my patented (not), brand-spanking-new invention.

How I “discovered” Method Writing

Method Writing is based on Method Acting, which is “a dramatic technique in which actors identify as closely as possible with the character played by correlating experiences from their personal lives to the character.” In other words, using Method Acting, even a sixteen-year-old girl brought up in a convent could play a runaway, or a recovering alcoholic could portray a teetotaling Amish father.amish

I’ve thought long and hard about whether the old bromide, “Write what you know,” is the be-all and end-all of authorship, and although I believe it can give depth to writing and make what an author says more believable, at the same time I feel that it limits the author’s possibilities.

I therefore began to explore the possibility of expanding a writer’s horizons to enable him or her to write about practically anything that excited his or her interest –  but how could an author do this without joining a commune, converting to a new religion, having a sex change, or getting him- or herself arrested?

Method Writing allows writers to expand their character and plot repertoires by digging deep into their pasts and their memories, in order to apply to their writing the emotions engendered by their own life experiences.

 

How to implement Method Writing

I like to use Anne Lamont’s one-inch frame exercise, which she made popular in Bird by Bird, her wonderful book on writing. Think of your life as one giant canvas, or tapestry. Then take just a one-inch swatch of that and write about it. Set a timer for 15 minutes and start writing!hand-timer-11932882

Take ideas from your life, past or present, and simply write about them. You don’t necessarily have to write down each and every emotion you felt during whatever you experienced. Merely telling the story will allow your emotions to rise to the surface, and even if the emotions themselves are not written down they’ll be there for you to use in your “real” writing.

Here’s an example:

Let’s say that you used to get a stomachache every day, right before gym class, when you were in the seventh grade. You knew what was in store for you: humiliation from the students, who made fun of your looks (think awkward preteen), and scorn from the teacher, who thought you were incredibly lame (you were).gym shoes photo

If you write about that for 15 minutes, not only will you have completed your daily writing quota, you will have a new entry in the data base of emotions you can retrieve at will.

And don’t forget to…

  • Write every day, for 15 minutes. Does that sound overwhelming? Read about my six-minute theory, which says that once you’ve been doing an activity for six minutes, everything kicks in and you get into zone.
  • Do outstanding factual research. This is essential for both fiction and non-fiction writers. Just as non-believable or unrealistic emotions can ruin a piece of writing, shoddy research and embarrassing factual mistakes can too. For fiction writers, Google your way to understanding the geography, history, dialect, customs, dress, etc., of the characters in your novel – in other words, the non-emotions. For those of you who write non-fiction, it goes without saying that you must get all your facts straight.

Where the rubber meets the road

Let’s go back to the 21-year-old sheep farmer and the snobby young miller’s daughter. Do you see a parallel between the young man’s humiliation and your seventh-grade gym class? Put those old emotions to good use. That’s what Method Writing is all about.

Using emotions from your personal experiences works in non-fiction writing, too.

Imagine writing an ebook on tennis for nerds. There are two ways you can go about it:e830b4062ef71c3e81584d04ee44408be273e4dc1cb4194494f3_150_tennis-racket

  1. You can write 25,000 words on serving, lobs, love, dropshots, deuce, groundstrokes, etc.
  2. You can start out by saying, “Did the following happen to you the first time you tried to play tennis? You fell flat on your face, either literally or figuratively, you missed every ball that was volleyed to you, your serves never made it over the net, you tripped over your own feet, and you ran to the right when the ball was coming to the left. It seemed as if everyone at the park was watching you make a fool out of yourself, laughing at your inadequacy. You still blush when you think about it.”

Can you see the difference when you use emotion even when teaching tennis? How connecting to your readers all but guarantees engagement and thus implementation (and acceptance letters)?

 

More benefits of Method Writing

Method Writing works for the following reasons:

  • It’s stress free. You have to come up with only a small piece of your personal tapestry for each session.
  • It’s quick. It’s a 15-minute commitment per day. I’ll even give you one day off a week if you’d like.
  • It’s private. No one but you will read this, because Method Writing is meant to retrieve your emotions for use in another context.
  • It’s limited. If you’re writing about a painful event, you will be finished with it in a quarter of an hour and can pack it back up again into your consciousness until needed.
  • It helps with “Show, don’t Tell.” When it’s time to write your novel or non-fiction piece, the feelings you retrieve from your emotional database will weave themselves into the prose without your having to spell everything out, as in, “Clive felt humiliated.”
  • It’s liberating. Like a journal, once you get stuff on paper you are no longer a prisoner of it.prisoner photo

***

Once you start building up a cache of memories and emotions you will be well on your way to culling them for future pieces, whether for fiction or for non-fiction, for first-person point-of-view or third-person point-of-view.

Here’s my challenge to you: Get out a piece of paper (longhand is better for this exercise) or fire up your computer, and write for 15 minutes about your experiences in gym class when you were an adolescent.

And as an added thank you for being such a great group of people, go ahead and get my free ebook, “144 Prompts: Your Daily Writing Guide.” Never again be at a loss for what to write about, and build up your emotional data base at the same time.

 

Happy writing,

Deena

Deena Nataf

www.BulletproofWriting.com

Deena@BulletproofWriting.com

Writing What You Know: A Clever Way to Get Your Point across, or an Exercise in Boredom?

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What are the first two things you learn in writing class (or on writing blogs other than mine)?

 

“Show, don’t tell.”

“Write what you know.”

 

We’re going to dispense with “Show, don’t tell,” for now, but those of you who want to learn more about it are invited to see my previous blog post on it, here.

Now that I have your attention, let’s talk about that other old writing bromide, “Write what you know.” Even I used to give this advice to aspiring writers.

 

Is writing what you know really such a bad thing?

What’s wrong with “Write what you know?”

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Stuart Miles for FreeDigitalPhotos.com

On the one hand, writing what we know gives us automatic context within which to write. In general, our prose will sound much more authentic than if we were to write, say, about Marc Antony’s stable boy. On the other hand, constantly and exclusively writing what we know runs the danger of getting incredibly boring, both for us and for our audience.

There are, however, numerous outstanding authors who are able to write over and over again about what they’re familiar with, and their tales are always interesting and fresh. I’d like to explore two of them, whose works are separated by a century, who use their talents and their experiences to deliver masterful writing and more. How are they able to write about the “same old, same old” and still be phenomenally successful?

(On September 9th, I will be publishing a blog post on writing what you don’t know. It’s definitely possible to pull off, and carries a lot of benefits for both you and your readers. Stay tuned…)

 

Joseph Conrad175px-Joseph_Conrad

Joseph Conrad spent much of his youth and young adulthood at sea, and most of his short stories and books take place on ships or are otherwise about seamen. His writing is so good, his use of description is so vivid, and his metaphors so spot on that it doesn’t matter whether the setting is the same from one book to the next. Here is one beautiful description from his short story, “Youth”:

[The wind] blew day after day: it blew with spite, without interval, without mercy, without rest. The world was nothing but an immensity of great foaming waves rushing at us, under a sky low enough to touch with the hand and dirty like a smoked ceiling….Day after day and night after night there was nothing round the ship but the howl of the wind, the tumult of the sea, the noise of water pouring over her deck….The sea was white like a sheet of foam, like a caldron of boiling milk….There was for us no sky, there were for us no stars, no sun, no universe – nothing but angry clouds and an infuriated sea.

I don’t know about you, but I’m exhausted. I can feel the violent rocking of the sea and the unrelenting wind and seawater attacking the sailors.

Conrad also uses his writing to describe the human condition. One way he makes each new piece of writing fresh is to explore the same themes but with characters of different ages. In his short story “Youth,” for example, the main character, Marlow, tells us:

O youth! The strength of it, the faith of it, the imagination of it! To me [the boat] was not an old rattle-trap carting about the world a lot of coal for a freight – to me she was the endeavour, the test, the trial of life. I think of her with pleasure, with affection, with regret – as you would think of someone dead you have loved. I shall never forget her.

Conrad reintroduces us to Marlow in what is perhaps his most famous short story, “Heart of Darkness.” You could rename it “Adulthood.” With brilliant and sometimes gruesome description, Conrad explores the themes of power, corruption, evil, and inhumanity via a much older Marlow.

“Heart of Darkness” is set in the Congo Free State, the colony set up by Belgian King Leopold II for the purpose of exploiting a large part of central Africa’s natural resources in the late nineteenth century. Conrad had spent time there, and was therefore able to produce a work as authentic as it was grisly. His short story helped publicize the atrocities that were being committed by the officials in charge of the colony, and as a result a movement was founded to stop the slavery, genocide, and murder taking place.

 

Khaled Hosseini

(Sorry, ladies; he's married.)

Sorry, ladies; he’s married.

Another master of writing what he knows is Khaled Hosseini of The Kite Runner fame. I’ve read all three of his books, and they are magnificent. Think one book about Afghanistan and its recent implosion(s) is enough? Each of Hosseini’s books focuses on different types of people and characters, and each tells the story of Afghanistan from different and multi perspectives.

Hosseini himself grew up in Afghanistan, and thus his descriptions of that beleaguered country are realistic and authoritative. He uses Afghan cultural norms, nationalities, and religious practices to tell his tales.

Late-twentieth-century Afghanistan, from Kabul to remote villages, is the perfect backdrop for Hosseini to explore family, friendship, loyalty, the burden of guilt, the gray area between good and evil, and the question of winning at the expense of someone else’s losing.

As a result of his novels, which raised awareness of the plight of Afghan refugees, Hosseini became Goodwill Envoy to UNHCR, the United Nations Refugee Agency, as well as created his own organization, the Khaled Hosseini Foundation, to provide humanitarian assistance to the people of Afghanistan.

 

What writing what you know can do for you

Conrad and Hosseini, these masters of “write what you know,” can teach us a lot about writing within our own frame of reference. Here are a few things I noticed:

  • Their knowledge is used as a backdrop to examine the meta issues common to all of humanity.
  • They use what they know as a jumping-off point to employ picturesque description, stunning metaphors, and other literary devices.
  • Their authoritative knowledge sets them up as the experts on whatever subject, theme, or setting their writing represents.
  • Their knowledge can lead to their becoming instruments of social change.

***

I hope you will consider the benefits of writing from within your own special world. Let me know in the comments what you think.

And please send me any other insights you have discovered about the two authors whose work we examined, or about any author who writes what he or she knows. Your observations will help everyone in our tribe!

 

Happy Writing,

Deena

Deena Nataf

www.BulletproofWriting.com

Deena@BulletproofWriting.com

Becoming Rembrandt: Description Revisited

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Is your prose either too simple and boring, or too pretentious and inauthentic? Do you ever feel like you just can’t find the right words?

You’re not alone.

Back in December I published a post on description. I discussed how you can use it in your writing to convey character, place, mood, and context to your readers.

Many of you requested more posts on both description and its mother-in-law, the “show, don’t tell” technique.

I want to show you how an author of historical non-fiction uses description to paint a written picture so vivid, so accurate, that you can actually see colors, smell odors, feel textures, hear voices, and taste flavors.

Her name is Barbara Tuchman, and the book is The Guns of August. Published in 1962, it won the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction in 1963. (BTW, it’s Pull-itzer, not Pule-itzer.) According to Wikipedia, that arbiter of truth and accuracy, the book focuses mostly on the first month of World War I, roughly one-fiftieth of the conflict. Weighing in at 511 pages, that’s a lot of description. (Did I just dangle a participle? See this article to find out.)

I like to think of Barbara Tuchman as a classical author, sort of like the Rembrandt of words. She was both a historian and a journalist, combining the two disciplines to produce her magnificent books.

Read this:

Far to the left, since early morning, the British and von Kluck’s Army had been locked in a duel over the sixty-foot width of the Mons Canal. The August sun broke through early morning mist and rain, bringing promise of great heat later in the day. Sunday church bells were ringing as usual as the people of the mining villages went to Mass in their black Sunday clothes. The canal, bordered by railroad sidings and industrial backyards, was black with slime and reeked of chemical refuse from furnaces and factories. In among small vegetable plots, pastures, and orchards the gray pointed slag heaps like witches’ hats stuck up everywhere, giving the landscape a bizarre, abnormal look. War seemed less incongruous here.” (The Guns of August, p. 254)

Don’t ever tell me that non-fiction can’t be more interesting than fiction.

Why is this paragraph so brilliant? Here are four techniques Tuchman employs:

She uses all five senses.

We can see early morning sun and anticipate the weather becoming more intense throughout the day. We hear the villages’ church bells competing with each other as the people stream out of their homes and into their houses of worship. It’s easy to smell the metallic odor emitted by the machines coming off the slimy canal; I can even taste it in my mouth.

pastureland photo

Photo by Les_Williams

The ugly gray slag heaps provide a dramatic contrast both visually and tactilely to the bright colors of the vegetable plots, the pastures, and the orchards.

She uses simple, clear words.

Except for the last sentence, you don’t see academic-level words over here: “The August sun broke through”; “Sunday church bells were ringing”; “The canal…was black.” The perfection is in how Tuchman arranges them by adding descriptive adjectives and varying her sentences with both active and passive verbs, clauses, a simile or two, commas to slow the reader down, and continuous words to speed him or her up.

She makes her words do heavy lifting.

ID-100122628

image courtesy of David Castillo Dominici for FreeDigitalPhotos.net

This obviates the need for long-windedness. Observe how seamless “the sixty-foot width of the Mons Canal” sounds, as opposed to “The Mons Canal, which was sixty feet across,” or worse, “…the Mons Canal. It was sixty feet in width.”

Notice the phrase “as usual,” which evokes continuity and regularity, and the vivid, descriptive clause “bordered by railroad sidings and industrial backyards,” which Tuchman slips in between the simplest of sentences (“the canal…was black”). The clause is show, while the sentence that bookends it is tell.

More heavy-duty words: “reeked,” “bizarre,” “abnormal.”

There is no better way to demonstrate the incongruity between the breathtaking agricultural villages that made up most of the European countryside in 1914 and the prospect of war, than by writing about an ugly, smelly, and depressing-looking mining village and employing the phrase “less incongruous.” Think what the last sentence of this paragraph would have (not) evoked had Tuchman used “fitting,” “appropriate,” or even “congruous.”

She demonstrates absolutely no pretense.

This is the culmination of the first three techniques. Notice how Tuchman shows and tells it like it is, eyes forward, never looking over her shoulder to see how impressed we are with hokey words and lazy adverbs that shove her editorial opinions down our throats. There is no need for her to pass judgment or patronize. Like the quintessential journalist that she was, Tuchman reports.

Just for the record: Words: 121. “To be” verbs: 3. Adverbs: 0.

In my opinion, there is a direct correlation between the second two statistics and seamless, close-to-perfect writing.

Your turn!

You knew I’d say that.

Write a paragraph, about one hundred words, describing somewhere you went recently. Use your new insights from this post. And don’t forget to send it to me, either in the Comments section or via email (Deena@BulletproofWriting.com). I’ll publish some of them on the Writer’s Clinic page.

Happy writing!

Deena-Nataf-Bulletproof-Writing - Copy

Deena Nataf

www.BulletproofWriting.com

Deena@BulletproofWriting.com

On Becoming a Grandmother

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Two weeks ago I became a grandmother.

Aside from the excitement, happiness, and gratitude I’m feeling, I suddenly see my own child from a new perspective as he assumes a new role. I will have no say in the way this child is brought up, but on the other hand, I can play with her and give her back dirty.

I am about to become a marginal player in my own life.

One consolation: grandparents and grandchildren have a special relationship because they share a common enemy.

All kidding aside, I’ve been thinking a lot these past few months about the legacies we leave to those we love and to the world at large. Indeed, when I describe this blog, I say that I help people make their mark on the world with tips and techniques to improve their writing.

For some of you this means to publish. Some of you write because you can’t imagine not writing. Some of you use writing as catharsis, others as therapy. Back in 1988, when I was reeling from, to paraphrase F. Scott Fitzgerald, “a sad thing that happened to me,” daily writing on the subway to and from work in a shabby spiral notebook literally kept me sane.

 

Introducing memoir

Besides its being cathartic as well as one of the best ways to get perspective on events in our past, writing memoir (notice I don’t use the article “a” in front of the word “memoir”) is a terrific way to leave a legacy.

Here’s how one of the definitive books on memoir writing, Marion Roach Smith’s The Memoir Project: A Thoroughly Non-Standard Text for Writing & Life, is introduced on Amazon:

A recent study revealed that the Number 1 thing that baby boomers want to do in retirement is write a book….about themselves. It’s not that every person has lived such a unique or dramatic life, but we inherently understand that writing memoir – whether it’s a book, blog, or just a letter to a child – is the single greatest portal to self-examination.

 

What memoir is and what it isn’t

Writing memoir doesn’t need an “a” because it’s not one specific, definitive work; that would be an autobiography. Memoir is its own genre, like poetry, history, fiction, etc. You come at it from an entirely different perspective than that of (auto)biography, because it begins and ends in the middle. Writing memoir is about vignettes.

I like to recall what Anne Lamott describes in her well-known book on writing, Bird by Bird, which I have mentioned in a previous post. She describes the “one-inch frame” method of writing, wherein you imagine your life as a big canvas, then take an imaginary one-inch frame and place it down on one small part of the canvas and write about that. I used this method in a writing class I taught at the beginning of the year. I gave my students a subject – gym class – and they had fifteen minutes to write their memories about it from any perspective they chose. Later I’ll talk a bit about what I wrote.

Roach Smith says memoir should offer transcendence to the reader (and to yourself, I might add). How did gym class change you? Your perspective on life? Your self-perception? Don’t make your memoir just a page torn out of your journal. Observe the small things and mold them into something bigger than just you. Get out of your own way and tell the story.

William Zinsser says that what we write about our own lives can be “immensely helpful to other [people] wrestling with similar angels and demons.”

Yet Zinsser, who is the author of On Writing Well and Writing about Your Life, two other outstanding, must-read books on writing (the latter of which is dedicated to memoir), warns us not to go whole hog and make memoir into therapy (although you’re allowed to use it as therapy as long as you promise not to publish it). Here’s what he says (emphasis mine throughout): “Make sure every component in your memoir is doing useful work.…see that all the details…are moving your story steadily along.” This is something I’ve mentioned before – all elements in your plot or your nonfiction piece are there for one purpose only: to advance the plot or thesis.

 

What will the neighbors – or my mother – think?

One of the biggest fears of writing memoir is that someone will read it. Memoirists are afraid people in their life will recognize themselves and be livid. They are afraid to reveal their and others’ secrets.

This is a legitimate concern. Here’s what my friend Carol Ungar, author and leader of memoir workshops, has to say:

Like the Nike slogan, just do it. Too many people don’t because they are petrified about whom they will alienate. Don’t let your fears freeze you up.  Write your story. After you’ve got it down there will be plenty of time to solve potential libel issues.  Remember ؘ– you are free to delete revealing names and personal details, publish under a pen name or even segue into fiction.

Lamott has a hilarious piece of advice with regard to old boyfriends: tell the truth, but change one little detail which would embarrass him if he took you to court. See the last chapter of Bird by Bird.

 

It’s all in the details

Every author I’ve mentioned above stresses that memoir is all about the details. Roach Smith says to take something small and develop it into something universal, something we can all relate to.

Zinsser says:

“Unlike autobiography, which spans an entire life, memoir assumes the life and ignores most of it. The memoir writer takes us back to some corner of his or her past that was unusually intense…or that was framed by…[an] upheaval.” Notice the word “frame.” This is not a coincidence.

Zinsser continues:

“Think narrow, then, when you try the form. Memoir isn’t the summary of a life; it’s a window into a life, very much like a photograph in its selective composition.”

Ever notice that windows have frames?

Use all of your senses as you write memoir: the taste of your grandmother’s chicken soup, the smell of your mother’s perfume, the heat of the asphalt on your sneakers, the scratch of the microphone.

 

Tell the truth, tell the truth, tell the truth

That is how Elizabeth Gilbert begins her memoir, Eat Pray Love.

Don’t be pretentious; don’t look over your own shoulder when writing memoir. As Zinsser points out, “To write a good memoir you must become the editor of your own life, imposing…a narrative shape. Memoir is the art of inventing the truth.”

Many writers trap themselves into literary straitjackets; it doesn’t even occur to some of us that we can write about the person and history we know best. Zinsser says this comes from thinking we don’t have permission to write about ourselves; on the contrary, we get permission “by being born.” Readers want to read “whatever it is that makes [us] unique.” He says that if you are afraid or don’t have the nerve to write memoir, it means you think you don’t have permission.

Give yourself permission.

 

What I wrote about gym class

When I wrote my vignette about gym class, instead of describing basketball games or my green shorts and white shirt, I wrote about this one bully of a girl who used to taunt and belittle me in the locker room. She was a beautiful, tanned, blond girl and I was, uh, pretty homely, with my pale skin and jet-black afro (not the bronzed sun goddess I am today). Gym was absolute torture. Day after day I was bullied by this witch.

This is a universal theme about pre-adolescence: being homely, being underdeveloped, being unpopular, being a lousy basketball player, being humiliated, being uncomfortable in one’s own body.

***

Isn’t it time you started writing memoir?

I challenge you to write a short, 500-1,000 word vignette. Give yourself fifteen to twenty-five minutes. Go ahead and place that one-inch frame on any piece of your canvas. Pay attention to the details, to your five senses, to the emotions bubbling up. Show, don’t tell.

Anyone who would like to share their memoir with me and the group is welcome to paste it to the comments below, or to email it to me at Deena@BulletproofWriting.com. If you give me permission, I’ll publish a few of them on my Writer’s Clinic page.

 

Happy writing!

Deena Nataf

www.BulletproofWriting.com

Deena@BulletproofWriting.com

top image: khunaspix for FreeDigitalPhotos.net

How Doing Research Will Get You from Paris to Tehran Faster

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Hi, everyone!

I spent twelve years as senior editor at an indie publishing house (meaning independent, not Indianapolis, where, incidentally, I lived from 1991 to 1995). I saw many howlers in the novels submitted by semi-professional writers. My two favorites:

1) “Mr. Eiffel” committed suicide by jumping off his tower.france-and-the-eiffel-tower-100210159

2) In order to get to Tehran from Paris you have to fly over the Atlantic ocean. (In the map below, black shows Paris to Tehran via the Atlantic; red shows a slightly more direct route.)

And why always Paris?

In any case, if you want to be thought of as a serious writer, you must do your research!

Don’t know where to start? The following tips will help you begin.

Father Google

By far the most popular research tool in the world today is Google. I recommend it with many reservations, the first being that it is full of misinformation being circulated throughout cyberspace, eventually ending up as The Truth. Be skeptical during your Google searches, and try to find reputable sources for the information you seek.

Here are some Google search tips and tools. Special thanks to my friends and colleagues Avishai Magence and Ita Olesker.

1. Search an exact phrase. In order to do this, put the phrase in quotation marks. For instance, if you search “What a Piece of Work Is Man” you will get 152,000 results with that exact wording; if you search What a Piece of Work Is Man, without the quotes, you will get 217,000,000 results of all kinds with the words piece, work, and man in them. You will also get plenty of results with the words Hamlet and Shakespeare.

2. To search for books, use Google Books. You might be able to get the full text of a book, which is great when you need to quote a source. Click on Books  (in the line under the Google search box). You can also Google Advanced Book Search, which allows you to refine your search. For example, you can search for books published by a specific publisher. (Thanks to my friend Debbie for this tip.)

3. To search for scholarly works, journal articles, etc., use Google Scholar (type Google Scholar into the search box). This is also good for finding the exact, accurate, scientific name for something.

4. To narrow or limit a search, you can use the minus sign. For example, if you search for jaguar speed (intending the large cat), you will get a lot of results about the car also. If you type in jaguar speed -car (with no space after the minus sign), you will eliminate all the results with the word car in them, and get only (or primarily) cats. To limit the search even further, you would type in jaguar +cat -car, which should find all the sites that include the words jaguar and cat but do not include the word car.

5. Search in Google Advanced Search by typing Advanced Search into the search box. As with Advanced Book Search, it enables you perform a more refined search.

6. Safe search setting. For those of you who love the internet but hate the filth, click on the gear button, top right of screen, and then click on Turn on SafeSearch. Or, click on Option in the gear button, and then click on Search on the left side of the new screen, and go in from there. This will  give you the option to Lock SafeSearch. Theoretically, this will cut down on undesirable images. (You can set YouTube on safe mode too. At the bottom of the YouTube page, click on the button that says Restricted Mode and set it to “on.”)

7. Wildcards. Use an asterisk as a fill-in-the-blank.
Example: search for “see this email * below” (note that the phrase must be inside of quotation marks). This will give you results that say: see this email correspondence below;  see this email screen capture below; see this email in your inbox below; see this email exchange below, etc.

8. Searching for a particular subject on a specific site. Use the characters site: in the search box. For example, Jacqueline Kennedy site: New York Times will show you the places where Jacqueline Kennedy is mentioned in the New York Times before it lists any other sources.

9. Incognito search. Hit control-shift-n and you will be able to log on anonymously. Among other advantages, your search will not be recorded in the Google history (and don’t tell anyone, but you can read unlimited articles on the New York Times website, which usually limits non-member viewing to ten articles per month).

10. Searching for Images. Enter the name of what you want into the search box, using some of the above methods, and click on Images  (in the line under the search box). Then click on Search Tools (also in the line under the search box), and specify size, color, etc. Click on Usage Rights on that same line, and choose the appropriate platform (noncommercial, commercial, etc.).

Proper Usage

I count usage under research. It is essential that your spelling and grammar are correct, as well as your diction. Remember: whether you are writing articles, writing a book, or writing just about anything really, you will look unprofessional (and, unfortunately, you will be unprofessional) if you haven’t gotten the nuts and bolts of the language down. For example:

  • Is there a clear cut distinction between Hillary and Bernie, or is it a clear-cut distinction? Or perhaps it’s clearcut. The dictionary is your best friend. You should never be without it. It should sit right next to your computer, or a site such as Merriam-Webster should be open at all times.
  • Would you say: “Former President Charles de Gaulle was once heard to remark, ‘How can you govern a country which has 246 varieties of cheese?'” or would you say: “Former president Charles de Gaulle was once heard to remark, ‘How can you govern a country which has 246 varieties of cheese?'” Put aside the weighty issue of governing such a country (Paris, again), and go to The Chicago Manual of Style, 16th edition, chapter 8, sections 18 and 20. This is another tool you cannot afford to be without. If you prefer it online, it costs $35 per year.
  • Prophecy or prophesy? Stationary or stationery? Who or whom? Then or than? For words such as these it’s usually back to the dictionary or Chicago. Make sure you are using your words correctly, as it could be a life-or-death matter. Here’s an example:
“I’m going to prescribe penicillin,” said Dr. Google.
“I’m going to proscribe penicillin,” said Dr. Google.
In the first sentence, you would take your medicine and feel better in the morning. In the second, if you took the medicine you would end up in the hospital.

What Do the Experts Say?

When writing an article, you might need either a quote from someone in the field about which you are writing or simply some background information in order to make your piece credible. Go to the experts.

Stay with me, writers of novels. This one’s for you, too.

You probably know – or know someone who knows – experts in a variety of fields. And if you don’t, writers’ forums and listserves are fabulous resources. On the writers’ forum I belong to, not a day goes by where someone doesn’t ask to speak with “fathers of special needs children” or “women who went through a divorce.”

Don’t be afraid to contact experts, or even just someone who has information you don’t have. Most will be happy to help. People love to be consulted; don’t you? (One of my favorite moments last year was when my daughter called me up and said, “I need your advice.” I almost dropped the phone.)

By the way, for many of the people you consult it will be a win-win situation if you include their website or mention a few books or articles they’ve written.

Fiction writers ahoy! In order to avoid those unmentionable situations where you are just about to give your character a cesarean section but don’t know where to make the first cut, speak to an OB, for crying out loud. You don’t want to be sued for literary malpractice.

Writing Isn’t Only about Writing

Rigorous research makes you and your writing credible. It fleshes out and enhances your work, making it sparkle and giving it the realistic feel all writing needs.

Getting the details right allows your writing to rise to the top of the gatekeeper’s inbox like cream separating from raw milk.

Don’t be left with the dregs on the bottom of the pail.

***

What other resources have been helpful to you when researching a subject for your writing? Let us know in the comments here, or shoot me an email.

Happy writing!

Deena
Deena Nataf
www.BulletproofWriting.com
Deena@BulletproofWriting.com

Inside the Deep, Dark, Mysterious Brain of an Editor

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Inside the Deep, Dark, Mysterious Brain of an Editor

Most of you know that I have been editing books and journals for over thirty years. One of the several books I’m editing at this time is actually my husband‘s. This is his fourth book, and the fourth one of his that I’ve edited, and I am pleased to report that we are still married. He gets to make things difficult for me by writing about ideas that are hard to understand, and I get to enjoy myself by writing nasty comments in the margins. A great time is had by all.

I thought it would be instructive to show you exactly what goes into editing a book. I am of the strong opinion that an editor is a better writing instructor than another writer. An editor sees things from above, and from a much broader perspective. And it’s easier for an editor to be objective.

When working on anything, a good editor will constantly be thinking two things:

  1. What exactly is the author trying to say?
  2. Will the reader be able to understand it?

I’d like to take you behind the scenes with my husband’s (nonfiction) book, and show you how I am editing it. I believe that you, as a writer, will be able to glean some important writing techniques from this exercise. And I might even show you one of my nasty comments.

Don’t use a lot of adverbs and connective words

A lot of writers want to pad their ideas with adverbs and other boring words. Trust me: you don’t need to introduce every thought and every sentence with one. Just write. I know every teacher you’ve ever had told you to use “transitions” at the beginning and/or end of every paragraph/new thought/word (just kidding about word). Let the sentences themselves move your prose along, not a bunch of I-am-a-lazy-writer words.

Here are a few naughty words hubs has begun his sentences with, sometimes three or four times in a paragraph. I have deleted most of them. And yes, of course you can use them sometimes. In fact, I’m using one now. They are listed in increasing order of pompousness.

  • and
  • but
  • however
  • yet
  • nevertheless
  • incidentally
  • interestingly
  • of course
  • therefore
  • obviously
  • in any event
  • on some level
  • in fact
  • true
  • thus
  • hence
  • granted
  • indeed

Don’t take 47 words to say something that can be said with 3

Many non-fiction writers – not my husband, I might add – enjoy hearing themselves talk; I mean, write. They would do well to abide by Stephen King’s wonderful piece of advice, which goes like this: “Kill your darlings, kill your darlings, kill your darlings.” The King of Horror knows about killing things, whether darling or not.

Here’s my favorite excess verbiage from yesterday’s editing session:

“It is true that the above notwithstanding, this event may have been one of the most important…”

Huh?

I fixed this by chopping off that first, unnecessary clause and simply beginning the sentence with “This event may have been one of the most important…”

Here’s another one:

“The book gives several answers to try to explain the connection”

Any time you come across “to try to” or “to try and,” you are in trouble. There is usually no reason for these three words. Get rid of them. And while you’re at it, get rid of a couple more as well.

Here is how I edited the sentence: “The book offers several explanations for the connection.” Everyone knows that the job of answers is to try to explain, so why do you need to remind your readers?

Say it loud and say it proud, but say it only once

man with megaphone

(image courtesy of stockimages for freedigitalphotos.net)

This is the bane of an academic editor’s existence. Scholars generally spend the first third of their book/essay/chapter – usually all three – telling you what they’re going to say, the next third saying it, and the last third telling you what they said. Do not do this.

Here are some danger signs that you are repeating yourself, or at least suffering from diarrhea of the keyboard:

  • As mentioned above
  • Before we conclude our discussion, we should note that
  • Let us now return to
  • As noted
  • In several of the preceding chapters
  • We just mentioned that
  • We are now ready to go back and better understand the idea
  • But first we need to
  • Before we go further
  • But even before looking at
  • In order to answer the question, we need to first
  • There are two answers to this question. The first is that

If you are guilty of using a loquacious-laden phrase, you can either delete it and just get on with your point, or you can use it as a cue that you might be starting (or continuing) to repeat yourself.

Here’s the nasty comment I promised

You’ve been so attentive that I feel compelled to share one of my especially pungent notes to hubs. In fact, I’ll give you two:

cartoon balloon

(image courtesy of Salvatore Vuono for freedigitalphotos.net)

“Can you stop with all the double negatives when you want to say something positive?”

“Can you say this in three words or less?”

♥♥♥

Special thanks to hubs for allowing me to share his book with my tribe.

And one more thing: I’m much nicer to my non-spousal clients. 🙂 Check out my Work with Me page.

Okay, now I want to hear from you. Do you think editors make better writing teachers than writers? Why or why not? Let me know in the comments below.

Happy writing,


Deena Nataf
www.BulletproofWriting.com
Deena@BulletproofWriting.com

6 Ways to Take an Overdone Story Line and Make it Unique

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I just finished reading a novel on Kindle that I got for $1.99. It’s called Vintage, and it’s written by a practicing lawyer named Susan Gloss. The book as a whole was pretty good; I’d give it a 3.5 out of 5. However, I can’t stop thinking about it, as the author did many smart and unique things. Frankly, it’s a pity that smart and unique are what separates a good book from a mediocre one, because in my opinion all fiction should be smart and unique. 

Spoiler alert

I need to give a basic story line as well as reveal a few things in order for you to understand why this book spoke to me so much as an editor and the owner of a writing blog (but not so much as a reader), so I apologize at the outset.
The book explores three women: a pregnant eighteen-year-old whose boyfriend just broke their engagement, a thirty-eight-year-old divorcée who owns a shop selling vintage clothing, and woman in her late fifties whose marriage might or might not be falling apart. Their lives intertwine and they end up helping each other grow.
Now here’s the thing: the story line is not unique at all, right? Pretty stock-like characters, no? How many novels have you read where people are struggling with relationships? Where a group of strangers are thrown together and end up making an impact on each others’ lives? Where boy meets girl, boy gets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl back? No doubt you have concluded that Vintage is typical women’s fiction, or as I refer to this genre, “good trash.”
So how did Gloss take this overdone, boilerplate-of-a-storyline and make it unique?

1. She chose something she knew and used it as her backdrop

Just because you aren’t a) a pregnant teenager who had a clinically depressed mother, 2) a childless divorcée with a tattoo, 3) an Indian immigrant with a super-American daughter, or even 4) a woman, doesn’t mean you can’t write about it. How can you ever hope to grow as a writer or explore anything outside the four walls of your home if you don’t stretch your boundaries?
On the other hand, you must make your book sound authentic, and you must create a unique backdrop into which to drop your boilerplate story line. Here is where you should go with what you’re familiar with. Gloss, for instance, aside from being a lawyer, has a lifelong fascination with vintage clothing and in fact runs an Etsy shop to sell her finds. She also lives in Madison, Wisconsin, which is the setting of the story. This is how she made her story different and convincing. We could see, hear, and smell downtown Madison, and none of the vintage clothing details felt artificial.

2. She didn’t give in to clichéd situations

And believe me, she had many opportunities. Here’s one: The vintage store owner’s ex is an alcoholic, and he breaks into her apartment one night. And then of course her new significant other shows up in the middle of the confusion. Can you get more clichéd than that? Gloss steered clear of three typical outcomes:

 

  • He starts beating her up and the new SO gets there just in time
  • He tries to rape her and the new SO walks in on them and thinks she’s two-timing him
  • She decides to give her ex another chance

 

Insteamotel6d, the woman and her new SO put the guy in the car, take him to a motel, and dump him. The next morning the ex trashes her store. Love it.

 

 

Here’s another one: when they’re driving home from the motel the new boyfriend asks calmly, “Is there anything still between the two of you?” And he actually believes her when she says no, and that’s the end of it. In fact, the couple, are, refreshingly, totally open and honest with each other. The conflict, which by the way must exist in any novel, has nothing to do with a misunderstanding that almost ruins everything but is righted just before the point of no return. Nice one, Gloss.

3. She kept a bit of mystery

The pregnant teenager is obsessed with finding out whether her mother’s death was a suicide. We never really find out because the daughter realizes she herself will never be sure. By keeping the answer to the suicide question a mystery, Gloss not only turns a “formula” story line on its head, she forces us to focus on a different issue: whether it matters. The daughter receives reassurance, but not of the type she thought she needed in order to move on. The result is that we gain a different perspective on “need to know.”
Does the shop owner have more heartache from her ex? Does the Indian woman’s marriage sew itself back together? I don’t know, and neither will you. And that’s fine, because neither do the women themselves. And that is real life.

 

4. Her dialogue is character-specific

Gloss has the rhythm and tone of each of her characters down. She was able to give each and every one a completely unique voice. This is no small feat. The dialogue felt authentic.
The Indian woman, for example, has the exact cadence and uses the exact diction of someone from that region of the world. I could literally hear her in my head. Think The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel. (Gloss thanks two Indian women in her Acknowledgements, i.e., she did her homework. Being authentic sometimes requires serious research.)
Did I like the shop owner’s potty mouth? No, but if she sounded like Tinkerbell I wouldn’t have believed her character. (Gloss gave it a nice touch, however: she has the character reminding herself not to use language in front of her customers. Now that’s realistic.)

 

5. She created unique supporting players

There are several more minor but pivotal characters in this novel. One noteworthy example is a soccer mom who gave up an acting career in New York City in order to get married and have kids. Total cliché alert. Gloss chose not to create an embittered has-been. This woman is happy with her life. If I were to typecast, I’d say she’s one of the two fairy godmothers in the book. Her spunky kindness, her love for her family, and her mini-midlife crisis combine with Gloss’s unique plot to make her an extraordinary character.

 

6. The characters don’t get everything in the end, and if they do it’s because they themselves made it happen

When Ms. Shop Owner and her beau break up, it’s for a well-thought-out reason on the part of the former. As I said above, there are no angry misunderstandings here. She gets on with her life, not expecting to get back together with him, and leaving things fully in his court.
The Indian woman, too, goes about her business with integrity. She might or might not go back to her husband, and she has created new rules. This feels so much more real than taking back the rapscallion who has seen the light and is groveling and weeping before her on one knee, begging for another chance. And by the way, she created an atypical wandering husband, too. Bonus points.

***

Keep these devices in mind and you too can craft a unique story even out of an overdone formula. Because the truth of the matter is: how many different story lines are there — ten? Twenty? I doubt there are even six. The trick is to use what you know, combined with outstanding research about what you don’t, and produce something that is entirely new.

How many formulas can you come up with? I’m interested to know how many we can come up with together. Start brainstorming, and put your offerings in the Comments below.

I’ll start you off with one: Coming of age. Now it’s your turn!

Happy Reading,

Deena_now-470x353

Deena Nataf

www.BulletproofWriting.com

Deena@BulletproofWriting.com

The Uses and Misuses of Description

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Hi, everyone!

Ever hear a joke and have the teller explain the punch line? Or worse, have the moral of a story spelled out, like you’re too dumb to get it — or the speaker is worried you won’t?

That’s how a reader feels when you misuse description.

Description: An Essential Building Block of Prose

There are several reasons you need to use description in your writing. Think of these reasons as goals you want to accomplish:

  • To make your readers feel a particular feeling
  • To draw an accurate picture of your character
  • To convey mood
  • To show time and place
  • To give context

Done correctly, your readers will feel all the right things, have sympathy or antipathy for all the right people, and understand the point you’re trying to get across. Done incorrectly, you will either bore the daylights out of them or cause them to put away your book, article, or blog.

Now don’t get me wrong: you’re allowed to somewhat manipulate guide readers into feeling what you’d like them to feel, or into understanding the point of your story. But as with almost everything in life, moderation is the name of the game.

What One Brilliant Paragraph Can Teach Us

Here’s an outstanding example of an opening-page description by one of my favorite authors, Anna Quindlen, from Still Life with Bread Crumbs. See if you can pinpoint where Quindlen has met many of the goals of description outlined above.

She had no idea what time it was. When she had moved into the ramshackle cottage in a hollow halfway up the mountain, it had taken her two days to realize that there was a worrisome soft spot in the kitchen floor, a loose step out to the backyard, and not one electrical outlet in the entire bedroom. She stood, turning in a circle, her old alarm clock in her hand trailing its useless tail of a cord, as though, like some magic spell, a few rotations and some muttered curses would lead to a place to plug it in. Like much of what constituted Rebecca’s life at that moment, the clock had been with her far past the time when it was current or useful.

We have learned several things from just three beautiful sentences. You’ll see below why I’m color-coding them:

  1. Rebecca is living in a mountain cabin that is falling apart.
  2. She’s not too savvy about country houses.
  3. She has a problem that she doesn’t quite know how to solve — and wouldn’t it be great if it could just solve itself?
  4. Things aren’t going quite so well in her life right now.

How to Bore Your Readers to Death in One Easy Lesson

Now let’s learn the same information in a blander, more “telling” way:

Rebecca lived in a broken-down mountain cabin. It was situated in a hollow halfway to the top. The cabin was totally falling apart: the kitchen floor was uneven, there was a loose step out to the backyard, and there were no electrical outlets in the bedroom. City girl that she was, she hadn’t noticed these things until two days after she moved in. She had no idea what time it was because she couldn’t plug in her old alarm clock. Rebecca’s life was falling apart, just like the house.


It’s not a great paragraph, and it’s certainly not as interesting and nuanced as Quindlen’s. (Ever notice how interesting and nuanced often go together?) It has four times the amount of “to be” words as Quindlen’s paragraph.The facts are just stated, and they are told instead of shown. And it’s kind of boring.

Deconstructing Brilliance

Here’s Quindlen’s paragraph again, color-coded to match the information we listed above:

She had no idea what time it was. When she had moved into the ramshackle cottage in a hollow halfway up the mountain, it had taken her two days to realize that there was a worrisome soft spot in the kitchen floor, a loose step out to the backyard, and not one electrical outlet in the entire bedroom. She stood, turning in a circle, her old alarm clock in her hand trailing its useless tail of a cord, as though, like some magic spell, a few rotations and some muttered curses would lead to a place to plug it in. Like much of what constituted Rebecca’s life at that moment, the clock had been with her far past the time when it was current or useful.

I have chosen three of Quindlen’s description techniques, which you can use in your own writing to make it more effective and to get, as it were, more bang for your buck:

  • She conveys more than one fact or idea in the same passage. For instance, in the second sentence, we learn that Rebecca used to live somewhere else, that the place she moved into is falling apart, and that she must be a city girl if it takes her so long to figure out the house is in serious need of repair.
  • She makes use of tools such as metaphor and simile while describing a character. Take a look at the passage in green. What is Rebecca doing? Is she “standing up and looking around for an outlet, hoping to find one”? Well, yes, but see how the words and techniques Quindlen chooses teach us so much more about her personality while she’s looking for a place to plug in her clock.
  • She uses industrial-strength verbs and adjectives, nouns with nuance, and nary an adverb. 1) There are only two “to be” verbs in this entire 126-word passage. 2) Look how much we learn from a hard-working adjective such as “ramshackle” tacked on to the unexpected noun “cottage.” Wouldn’t you have expected “cabin,” or even “house”? Doesn’t “cottage” usually summon up coziness, gentility, order? 3) With words like these, who needs an adverb?

You too can develop description skills. Just keep your goals in mind as you write. Take advantage of meaning-rich words, but don’t get dramatic or overuse metaphor and simile.

You are walking a tightrope between pungency and nuance. Subtlety is the key here. Don’t shove anything down your reader’s throat.

The Challenge

Try writing a paragraph about a seventeen-year-old girl and a bicycle. Send it in to me and I’ll post the three best on my Writer’s Clinic page.

Happy writing!

Deena Nataf
www.BulletproofWriting.com
Deena@BulletproofWriting.com

Didn’t Show-and-Tell End in Kindergarten?

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Let me guess.

You are new or not so new to writing, and you keep hearing about this mysterious “Show, don’t tell” rule. Everyone’s talking about it: bloggers, authors, writing instructors. Doesn’t it seem like the be-all and end-all of writing?

But do you have any idea what it means?

Neither did I.

A caveat: “Show, don’t tell” has nothing to do with Ramona Quimby bringing her doll Chevrolet (named after her aunt’s car) to kindergarten.

Crime and Punishment

If you ever saw The Untouchables (back when Kevin Costner was at his most gorgeous), no doubt you remember the scene where Robert De Niro, as Al Capone, is striding up and down the boardroom lecturing about loyalty when he suddenly stops, takes a mallet, and bashes a man’s head in.

That’s how I used to imagine writers will be punished for not obeying the “Show, don’t tell” rule. Imagine a room full of senior editors and gravelly voiced literary agents sitting around a long, rectangular table deciding which writer’s head to bash in (or whose book to reject) for the crime of telling and not showing.

How can you tell the difference between showing and telling? Aren’t they the same thing, only different? And who’s checking to see if it’s being done right?

The Show-and-Tell Mystique

Although showing rather than telling is indeed the foundation of descriptive prose for both fiction and non-fiction (and even for content writing, I might add), the key to unlocking its mystery is to realize that it’s not mysterious at all. Basically, it’s just a fancy way to say “Use active voice, interesting verbs, and all five senses.”

There; that wasn’t so bad, was it?

I think the best way to explain “Show, don’t tell” is to show you through great prose instead of tell you with useless platitudes. Here are three basic techniques to enliven your writing:

1. Make it sensual. Close your eyes and imagine your characters or your subjects. What are they doing, physically feeling, seeing, hearing? Where is the scene taking place? For fiction, how can you use these resources to move the plot along? Ditto for non-fiction: avail yourself of the five senses to describe your subject, to paint a historical or scenic background, or to deliver information. Warning: this doesn’t mean to be overly verbose or flowery (see number 3, below).

Listen to this account of a slave being whipped in Sue Monk Kidd’s wonderful novel, The Invention of Wings. Pay attention to the senses she uses in these five sentences:

The first strike came straight from the fire, a burning poker under my skin. I heard the cotton on my dress rip and felt the skin split. It knocked the legs from me. I cried out cause I couldn’t help it, cause my body was small without padding. I cried out to wake God from His slumber.

Is that good writing or what? What would it have sounded like had the whipping been merely “told”? Probably something like this:

The first lash hurt like the dickens. The whip ripped my dress and opened my skin. I fell down. A scream escaped me; I knew my body couldn’t handle too many more lashes. I prayed to God that He would answer me.

Which passage would you rather read? Which evokes a perfect picture of the scene? Which evokes more powerful emotions in you?

2. Show the effect, not the cause. Credit for this one goes to Tom Farr, who is a storyteller, blogger, freelance writer, and high school English teacher. In his blog post, he suggests that causes are described by “to be” verbs, whereas effects naturally tend toward action verbs. He’s also an advocate of using the five senses to describe an effect.

Here’s another beautiful paragraph from The Invention of Wings. This time, the slave’s dying owner is being fed soup by his daughter. Pay attention to the diversity and vividness of the verbs Kidd uses here:

I brought cod soup to Father’s room. When he tried to eat it, his hand quivered so violently, spoonfuls splattered onto the bed sheets. He lay back against the bedstead and let me feed him. I chattered about the squalling ocean, about the serpentine steps that led from the hotel down to the shore, almost frantic to divert us from what was happening. His mouth opening and closing like a baby bird’s. Ladling in the colorless broth. The helplessness of it.

What caused all this beautiful prose to happen?

  • The father was too sick to eat in the dining room.
  • His hand was shaking.
  • He was too weak to sit up straight in bed and to eat on his own.
  • He was dying.
  • He was unable to feed himself.
  • The soup was unappetizing.
  • He was helpless.

Look at all the “to be” words in this list! Can you imagine reading a paragraph composed of these sentences? It’s enough to make even me want to bash someone’s head in.

Use action verbs, new verbs, exciting verbs, evocative verbs. (But don’t go overboard and don’t get weird.)

 

 

 

3. Make your words earn their keep. Consider Alvin Toffler’s description of modern life in his classic non-fiction work, Future Shock:

As we rush toward super-industrialism…we find people adopting and discarding lifestyles at a rate that would have staggered the members of any previous generation. For the lifestyle itself has become a throwaway item.

Or would you have preferred to read: “As our progress toward super-industrialism gets faster, we find people changing lifestyles much faster than people did in earlier times. For the lifestyle itself has become disposable.”

Not bad, but isn’t “we rush” more concise and descriptive than “our progress…gets faster”? Isn’t “at a rate that would have staggered the…previous generation” much more nuanced than “faster than people did in earlier times”? Doesn’t the power of “a throwaway item” evoke more emotion than “disposable” does? It’s like the difference between color and grey scale.

A Voice of Dissent

I recently read a thought-provoking post by Joshua Henkin, who is both a prolific writer and the director of the MFA program in Fiction Writing at Brooklyn College. He brings up four important points, some of which I have quoted verbatim:

  • The phrase “Show, don’t tell” is an implicit compact between a lazy teacher and a lazy student when the writer needs to dig deeper to figure out what isn’t working in his story.
  • It’s much easier to write “the big brown torn vinyl couch” than it is to describe internal emotional states without resorting to canned and sentimental language.
  • The phrase “Show, don’t tell” provides cover for writers who don’t want to do what’s hardest but most crucial in fiction (i.e., describing internal emotional states).
  • The “Show, don’t tell” rule doesn’t mean that a writer should never say a character is handsome or happy, i.e., that he or she should never “tell.”

I like what Henkin says because we can easily get enmeshed in the net of writers’ bromides and well-worn hacks, and our writing will reflect the stiff, overly self-conscious style that comes from constantly looking over our shoulder and rigidly following a set of rules. Our writing would be like shooting an arrow and then drawing the bull’s-eye.

My recommendation? Maintain an uneven balance between Show and Tell in your prose.

Here’s a challenge: take a well-written paragraph from any book you have in your house, and rewrite it as a “tell” paragraph. Then write your own “tell” paragraph and turn it into a “show” one. I’ll publish a few of the results on my Writer’s Clinic page for the next post.

Maybe the phrase “Show, don’t tell” just needs a new name. What do you think? What would you call it? Let me know in the comments below, or shoot me an email. I’ll publish also these answers in the next post.

 

 

Happy writing,
Deena Nataf

www.BulletproofWriting.com
Deena@BulletproofWriting.com

Say What? The Telephone Conversation as a Plot and Characterization Device

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Hi, everyone, and happy Thursday!

You’re going to be hearing a lot from me about the all-important “Show, don’t tell” rule for writers. It’s pretty difficult to merely tell you what “Show, don’t tell” means, so I’m going to show you with one of the most powerful and effective ways to do it. Keep reading…

Dialogue: A Classic “Show” Device

Dialogue is one of the foundations of effective prose. Skillfully and subtly written dialogue engenders a feeling of trust in your writing ability. If not done well, however, it can light up a red “amateur” button in editors’ and agents’ heads.

One of the handiest dialogue techniques found in novels, autobiographies, and even self-help books is the telephone conversation. An effective one is not merely fluff; it’s a tool to serve your writing objectives. It can move the plot along quickly and smoothly, reveal a character’s personality, or illustrate the relationship between two characters.

Extremely Good and Incredibly Seamless

Here’s an example of a beautifully constructed phone conversation from Jonathan Safran Foer’s fantastic and unusual Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close (Penguin, 2005). Nine-year-old Oskar fakes being sick and his widowed mother calls from work to see how he’s feeling:

Schell residence…Hi, Mom…A little bit, I guess, but still pretty sick…No…Uh-huh…Uh-huh…I guess…I think I’ll order Indian…But still…OK. Uh-huh. I will…I know…I know…Bye.

Look how easy Foer has made it for us to figure out what Oskar’s mother is saying on the other end of the line. We know she asked how he’s feeling and what he’s going to have for lunch. We also notice that she probably told him Indian food isn’t so good for someone who doesn’t feel well (“But still”), and made him promise not to order it (“OK”). Oskar gets impatient with his mother’s questions (“I know”) and doesn’t seem to be too interested in communicating with her. What do you learn by the fact that such a young child is ordering lunch out?

In less than 40 words, Foer has communicated personality, relationship, information, and emotion.

Extremely Problematic and Incredibly Fixable

The conversation below is based on one that appeared in a manuscript I recently evaluated. See if you can find both the obvious and the not-so-obvious areas in which this paragraph can be improved:

“Helloooooo.” Mary Smith’s voice was abnormally high pitched as she tried to hide her excitement. “Yes, this is Mary Smith!…You want to come for Thanksgiving because you live on campus and no meals will be served that day? Yes, of course you can come; we’d love to have you…What’s our address? Twenty-three Oak Road …You don’t know where that is?  No problem; I’ll give you directions…And you want to bring two friends? That’s fine! Of course we have room for all of you. We eat at 4, and we’re really looking forward to meeting you…Oh, you don’t need to thank me…You want to bring something? That’s sweet of you, but we’re okay. Now, let me give you directions to our house…”

Step 1: Make it Real

Unless this is a young children’s book, it’s better to make a phone conversation sound as close to real life as possible. Eavesdrop on the people you live with, or sidle up to strangers on cellphones (it’s all in the name of getting your book published). With very few exceptions, real people don’t repeat what the other person says on the other side of a telephone line. Therefore it would also sound clunky and artificial in both young adult and adult fiction.

Step 2: Make it Subtle

Let the reader figure out what the person on the other side of the line is saying via the responses of your character. We don’t need to know everything the invisible person is saying, just the important things and the gist of the rest.

Look again at the Extremely Loud example. Do we know exactly what Oskar’s mom is saying to him toward the end of the conversation? No we don’t, but via Oskar’s responses and their length, as well as the repetition and emphasis of certain words, we know that she’s a worrier and that he’s getting impatient. Once Foer communicates the main points, all we need for the rest is the big picture.

Step 3: Go through it Line by Line

After you have written your initial phone conversation, read each chunk of dialogue (even aloud) and ask yourself: Am I hitting readers over the head with information? Does it sound real? Is my character repeating him- or herself? Am I communicating to the reader what I wanted to communicate? Does this conversation have a function such as moving the plot along or revealing another facet of one or more of my characters?

Let’s deconstruct the above conversation. The blue is edited text; the red is my commentary:

“Helloooooo.” Mary Smith’s voice was abnormally high pitched as she tried to hide her excitement. “Yes it is!… (The other person obviously said: “Is this Mary Smith?” Most people wouldn’t answer by repeating the question and giving their name again.)

“Yes, of course; we’d love to have you. I remember when I was in college far from home. It was so lonely that first Thanksgiving. And I was starving!”  (We now know that the caller is in college, is far away from home, is asking to come for Thanksgiving, and will have no food if she stays on campus.)

“Twenty-three Oak Road…No, not too far, and it’s easy to find; I’ll give you directions… (The starving student obviously asked where Oak Road is and/or if it’s far from campus. Or maybe she told Mary that she has no idea where anything is in this town. It doesn’t matter, unless it’s important to the plot that we know exactly what the student asked – in which case we would have to tweak Mary’s answer.)

“Yeah, no problem; they’re both welcome. In fact, the more the merrier!…Yes, I’m very sure, don’t worry…” (This is a seamless way to show that the student not only wants to bring two friends but that she was a little embarrassed to ask.)

“Let’s say four o’clock, and we’re really looking forward to meeting you…Oh, really, it’s a pleasure… (These were pretty subtle, and didn’t necessarily have to be changed. Nevertheless it’s smoother, because “We eat at 4” and “You don’t need to thank me” give a hint of spoon-feeding the reader.)

“No, just bring yourselves, but thank you for offering. Now, let me give you directions to our house…” (By now you’re an expert, and know exactly why the original needed to be changed. Notice that the unusual use of the word “bring” in this sentence shows us that the student asked if she could bring anything.)

Step 4: Put it All Together: A Conversation Reclaimed

“Helloooooo.” Mary Smith’s voice was abnormally high pitched as she tried to hide her excitement. “Yes it is!…Yes, of course; we’d love to have you. I remember when I was in college far from home. It was so lonely that first Thanksgiving. And I was starving!…Twenty-three Oak Road…No, not too far, and it’s easy to find; I’ll give you directions…Yeah, no problem; they’re both welcome. In fact, the more the merrier!…Yes, I’m very sure, don’t worry…Let’s say four o’clock, and we’re really looking forward to meeting you…Oh, really, it’s a pleasure…No, just bring yourselves, but thank you for offering. Now, let me give you directions to our house…”

Now it’s Your Turn

Set a timer for fifteen minutes and write a 2:00 am conversation between a clerk at the police station and the mother of a teenager who has just been rudely awakened by her phone ringing. Who will be featured in the dialogue, and who will be on the other side of the line? Through this one-sided conversation would we be able to figure out the back story and the teenager’s basic personality, or even what type of relationship he or she has with the mother? How would this scene move the plot along if it were a short story or a full-length novel?

When you finish, be sure to hit Reply and send it to me, or paste it in the Comments section. I will publish the three best pieces in my next blog, along with my comments.

Good luck, and have fun!

Deena 🙂

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Write. Polish. Publish.

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