Summer Starter 2015
Session III6-22-15
MSW Home
Sessions: One, Two, Three, Four
D.H. Lawrence Class Member's cards and sticky notes!!
A Little More Business
Check out the image of a class member's office above, next to D.H. Lawrence! The cards are used for moving around to adjust the flow of the scenes and plot arc.
As usual, if you don't get your second homework back by Friday (June 26, 2015), please let me know ASAP. Don't wait to see it before you go ahead with this week's work.
You are always invited to substitute pages of your own choice for the assignment.
Whatever you send, whatever exercises you do or don't do, however many words you send in for response, make sure this class if working for you. You aren't writing for me, you are writing for yourself.
Special Request!
One of our class members has been working on a novel for some time. She is concerned about the opening. She writes, "This..first chapter....accomplishes a lot of necessary tasks in setting up a structure, but I'm not sure if many readers will want to read more. Other chapters have a greater pull and tell a lovelier or more riveting story, but they can't come first. Could you suggest how I better make this opening chapter draw in a new reader?"
So my request is, if you have time, could you read the .pdf file— Keisha Opening.pdf? Read rapidly, not for editing, but to answer the question about whether or not you are drawn in and what would help to draw you in if you aren't.?
This is, of course, totally optional.
Send responses to me at meredithsuewillis@gmail.com, and I'll send them on the writer and post them for everyone to read. Thank you in advance!
Commas and Creative Housekeeping
A couple of people in this class and elsewhere expressed a lack of confidence about their use of commas. If you would like a good quick lesson on 4 basic rules, try the California State University at Long Beach's page on the four rules of comma use.
That's quick and dirty, and very useful, but if you like thinking about issues of grammar and such at greater length, I like this New York Times blog article on the comma.
Some general resources on grammar include: The Grammarist, Grammar Girl, University of Chicago Writing Program, Grammarcheck.net, and The Center for Writing Studies.
Housekeeping in prose narrative generally comes as part of late revision. You check for continuity (do the hero's steely blue eyes suddenly morph into puppy dog brown?); you go over your time sequence; you make sure facts are reasonably accurate (don't put the capital of South Carolina in Charleston—it's Columbia).
While I'm not too crazy about housekeeping houses, I do find housekeeping novels and other long prose narratives far more useful than simply catching errors. It has begun to seem to me to be part of the creative process.
When the initial flood of ideas slows down, I often do a little research (usually on the incredibly handy Internet). I get my state straight, but I also get an idea—maybe for a character to make the stupid mistake I did about the capital of the state, or maybe for a scene that uses a public building for a setting. Or, if I start checking the date for the newspaper a character is reading, I might get ideas for what else was happening that day that could be useful for what people are thinking about and talking about or even for the plot.
This kind of grounding (chronology and history, but also what were they wearing that year? What was popular in music, at the movies? Whose team was making a run for the pennant?) is certainly useful for bringing readers into a story, but it seems to me at least as important for you, the writer, in your journey through your story. If the characters are baseball fans, you get a whole world of possible imagery: "He was at a low point in his life that year, and the fact that the Mets were in the cellar again seemed part and parcel of the general mood."
Exercise One: Do some research on the year in which your story takes place (or, if you're looking for a starter, a year that has always interested you— or a year that has absolutely no resonance for you). Get a chronology off the Internet, but also try to find some old newspapers that will have ads for cars and clothes. Write a scene that begins with something in the news (a heat wave? war? sports? an actor dies?) and then go wherever it takes you.
Working with Sex Scenes
I want to write a little bit about sex scenes. A number of people in the class—no surprise—are writing scenes with sex.
The first thing to keep in mind about sex scenes is that they are, above all, scenes. That is, they are units of action, points in time when we pull together our resources to dramatize events, quintessentially showing rather than telling. This does not mean sex scenes have to be explicit. It does mean they should include things like dialogue (often the heart of what is happening), physical action, sometimes monologue (thinking), and certainly some description, whatever narration is necessary, etc.
Some years ago, I wrote a novel about a woman toward the end of her life who lives on cruise ships. Imagining her and her life so different from mine, gave me a lot of satisfaction, and at several points in writing the character seems to come up with some statement that seemed wiser to me than I was.
I love that feeling: that the character knows more than I do.
In one scene, she is advising a young girl about love. She says to herself (and looking back, I wish she had said it aloud to the girl): "Oradell....wanted to tell all the young people, Yes, yes, sex is terrific, nothing quite like it, but it isn't a big deal. You're going to be doing it for the next fifty or sixty years. You'll do it in as many moods as you eat dinner. So relax. " (Oradell at Sea ).
So this is my advice for writers who want to dramatize physical love. First, think of a sex scene as a scene; then, take Oradell's advice and remember that there isn't one kind of sex, but multiple kinds, and sex that comes out of character or situation is going to be more interesting to read than standard issue sex.
There are, of course, special caveats with sex scenes. One is the language we use. All of the words for body parts especially are highly fraught and almost never neutral. Well, there are clinical words– penis
and vagina at the top of the list (not to mention mons veneris and its ilk)– but their neutrality is not the neutrality of "hand" or "knee" but rather have the sound of a medical clinician doing an exam. This tone may be just what you want for a particular scene, but it isn't (to my ear) particularly sexy.
Exercise Two: Make a list for yourself of nouns we use for male genitalia; then one for female genitalia. This might be fun to do with a friend. Include neutral words and words used in other contexts as insults. Include a few baby words that we use in families or that lovers use for each other. Write a few sentences about sex that use the various words and check out the tone each has. Does any of this fit what you are writing?
Just for fun, you might want to read online the big first sex scene in From 'Lady Chatterley's Lover', by DH Lawrence: (http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/love-sex/consummation/consummation-scene-lady-chatterleys-lover-by-dh-lawrence-931187.html) .
Lady Chatterley's Lover was first published in 1928, and the unexpurgated edition didn't appear legally in England till 1960. It was notorious for its story of physical sex, largely for the explicit descriptions and words, but also for the fact that it is a working class man who brings an upper class lady to sexual fulfillment. Lawrence eventually developed a complicated belief system exalting sex. He makes it for Lady Chatterley (and her "tormented modern-woman's brain"!) a spiritual experience.
Exercise Three: Write a sex scene (not necessarily intercourse, but physical or at least yearning) in which the characters reach a plane beyond the mundane joining of bodies. Maybe, in fact, they decide NOT to have sex and the sacrifice lifts them up?
Here's an example from one of the students in this class who is writing a novel about two people who have memories of past lives and have been together for many millennia. Here the narrator (the man in this section) describes his beloved:
She remained near to me and I could still feel her breath enter and exit her body. Her body's vibrations were subtle. I could not move, paralyzed by her words. We stood extremely still while the entire café continued to move, with a quick pace, as any New York café would. I leaned forward burying, my head in her neck, her skin soft and warm, notes of rose petals and amber whirling me into the past, 4,000 years or so when I first inhaled her scent....
How nicely the writer uses smell and touch there! It makes the 4,000 years seem completely natural because I, the reader, am so caught up in the concrete this world description f skin fragrance.
Exercise Four: Write a scene between two characters that highlights senses other than sight, especially touch and smell. (More about using the intimate senses below).
Another caveat about sex scenes (and of course this is why sex scenes are so challenging), is not to write something so airy and non-physical that it becomes a parody of primness and repression: "When her lover touched her, she felt like a rose blooming opening from bud to full fragrant blossom..." A whole generation of movie-going children developed strange ideas about sex because of all those cameras cutting from the embracing couple (standing upright, of course) to the sunset.
Mainstrem movies have come a long way into explicit sex, of course, with one big step on the way being the famous horizontal kiss in the 1953 movie From Here to Eternity when the lovers embrace on the beach. This one still strikes me as a pretty powerful image—perhaps making the case for something between full frontal explicit body parts and euphemistic imagery. The surf is a real nice touch.
Romance novels used to be very discreet, but now have their own separate categories that range from Christian Romance (kisses before marriage are acceptable, period) to explicit eroticism, so the reader can choose her level of sex. Pornography, itself an ancient if not honored genre of literature, generally takes as its purview the highly explicit scene with no attention to nuance or character. One of the guiding principles of pornography is that it is primarily visual.
This seems an important strategy to learn: the more distant and visual your scene, the more it veers towards pornography. One of the best ways in my opinion, to create a strong sex scene that stays with real people and does not stray into pornography, is to decrease the visual details and replace them with touch and smell and sound. The farther we pull back and see a sex act, the more voyeuristic and distant we are from the people and their experience. Using the intimate senses, especially touch and smell, is one way to emphasize the characters' experience and draw the reader close. The reader (and you the writer) may still feel some level of arousal, but it will come from a more human—more holistic—place. It will be part of the story.
One of our class members is writing a novel in which a woman who has had relatively little experience takes a lover. The scene is richly detailed. The character comes home from work at a hospital and takes a long bath, makes preparations for the arrival of her love, a young physician. She falls asleep and is awakened by a rainstorm:
She woke to a violent banging; the back door in the kitchen was unlatched and the wind opened, then slammed it repeatedly. Rain had poured into the kitchen, wetting the sill and floor. Ellen closed the window, mopped the floor with the dry mop, and dried the sill with a kitchen towel. She turned off the radio, then moved to the back porch, listening to the rain. She loved the clean, earthy smell of it.
At the sound of Nico's car, she hurried to open the front door. He carried his raincoat over his head like an umbrella, but he was already soaked. "Sorry I'm late, there was a bad car accident. I've been setting bones and stitching people." He removed his squishy shoes. His sodden pants clung to his legs.
She was about to say "You should take off your wet clothes," but stopped herself.
"I ought to keep a change of clothes here," he said, as though reading her mind.
" I just remembered something," she disappeared and returned with a large plaid robe.
"And this robe belongs to?" he asked smiling.
"It was hanging in the closet when I rented the place; Mrs. Timmons, said the previous tenant left it."
In the bathroom, he draped his sodden clothes over the shower rod, then wrapped himself in the robe. "Now we both look like patients at a sanatorium," he said as she handed him a glass of wine.
"I've been wanting to do something all day," he said, setting the glass on a table. "Let me say hello properly." He extended his arms and Ellen walked into them, as if on cue. He kissed her lips. She returned the kiss and relaxed into his embrace, her arms clasped tightly around his neck. She felt safe in his embrace, wanting to prolong it. They stood together, rocking slightly, like dancers who listen to their own music.
"I'm a little ahead of you on the wine," she said.
"Hmmm" he murmured, kissing her neck. He started to lead her to the sofa, but she took his hand and guided him to her bedroom.
"In here," she said, " we'll be more comfortable."
He pulled back the bedspread and sheet, kneeling beside her, opening her robe. When she was naked he lay her down in the middle of the bed. "Are you sure?" he asked. She nodded.
He dropped his robe at the foot of the bed, then stretched out beside her. He began to explore her slowly, caressing her face, her neck and her breasts. She moved closer to him and he slipped his hand between her legs, until she opened them to him. He stoked her gently and slowly, waiting until he felt the tension rising in her, then he eased himself into her, waiting for her body to be in synch with his. As she raised her pelvis, the bed began to rock.
"Lucky we're on the first floor," he almost said, before he was climbing with her; they reached a plateau, now she was climbing with him again and then she gasped, kept gasping and he reached for a further plateau. They were at the top of the mountain looking out over a huge expanse, the sky was pink and purple and gold. He reached down and lifted the small of her back.
"Oh, oh, oh" she said softly. They stopped rocking. There was a huge room of soundlessness.
The silence was holy; like the quiet at dawn or dusk. They had come to a new place. It was as though they no longer needed to breathe.
There is a lot I like about this passage. It builds naturally and leisurely. It isn't contorted or strange or fantastic, but rather healthy and friendly, almost. I like the line "They stood together, rocking slightly, like dancers who listen to their own music." This is something millions of people must have done–it is familiar and makes it easy to feel with the characters. Note also how he starts for the couch, but she invites him to the bedroom. I take this to mean that Ellen is in no way impaired, that she has made a conscious decision. These things to me are probably more interesting that what happens to the body parts–they give the encounter its flavor.
This writer uses a technique that is very useful: instead of thrusting penises, we have "he eased himself into her." This is, as I've pointed out, a mutual lovemaking, and he is making love to her with his whole body. Thus referring to "himself" is not a euphemism for penis, but a character-driven description of the wholeness of this man's act. This section ends with "The silence was holy; like the quiet at dawn or dusk. They had come to a new place. It was as though they no longer needed to breathe." This is not the overblown pagan religiosity Lawrence was after, but the way it feels to Ellen, our main character, who happens to be an ex-nun, so the imagery seems appropriate to what she would feel.
My main criticism of this passage was concerned with how the writer slips away from Ellen's point of view to Nico's. It is clearly a third person limited (to Ellen) passage, so I have asked the writer to keep us in Ellen's experience. I think most of us, in writing about sex, have perhaps been too influenced by our culture: we tend to associate swelling bosoms and other female attributes with sex, even though it is not necessarily what women experience personally when making love or otherwise having sexual encounters.
Exercise Five: Sketch out a brief sex scene from your project. For those of you working on projects for children, this exercise may be a starter for something different. For a middle grade novel, however, you might try having a young character have moment of brief attraction to, say, a friend. Write this brief scene flour times in different ways:
Summarize what happens. Give a setting, the people, what they do.
Write it totally visually, as if it were being seen by a camera on the other side of the room. Again, this would also work with two seventh graders noticing each other in a lunch room.
Write it again, using only the senses of hearing, smelling, touching. The girl suddenly becomes aware of the timbre of his voice, of his salty athletic boy smell...
Write it again, doing it mostly in metaphors. If it comes out humorous, that's fine. You might use it as a character making fun of herself.
Which version is most natural to you? Which one do you think reads best? Can you combine the best parts of your four versions?
Exercise Six : Write a passage of bad sex. This could be a memory/flashback. It doesn't have to be something violent or brutal. It could just be that something goes wrong, or a couple is having a fight. It could be funny: the dog decides to join the couple in bed. Perhaps one participant is angry or perhaps for any number of reasons, dissociated from the scene. Perhaps she or he sees what is happening mentally as if from a great distance.
I have to admit, reluctantly, that some of my "best" sex scenes have been about the worst sex. I imagined Oradell (the wisdom purveyor above) as a girl trading sex for something she wanted. It was hard to write, but reminded me, again, of how sex is only one more activity people engage in and use to express their desires and aims.
Main Assignment
Write a scene between two important people (or entities) in your project in which there is physical contact. This certainly could be sex, but it doesn't have to be. Whatever happens in the scene, work on not only dialogue and emotions, but also the location of body parts.
P.S. Don't forget to take a look at the classmate's beginning!
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