Summer Starter 2015
Session IV6-29-15
MSW Home
Sessions: One, Two, Three, Four
Welch, West Virginia Old Time Psychiatric Hospital. Long Island, NY Base Camp Mount Everest
Business
As usual, if you don't get your second homework back by Friday (July 3, 2015), please let me know. Meanwhile, go ahead with this week's home work.
You are always invited to substitute pages of your own choice.
It's the final session, so I want to work with beginnings. See T.S. Eliot for why.
Exercise One: Do a check on yourself. Have you done what you set out to do this month? More? Less? Something different? What, if anything, has gotten in your way? Obviously, some things are far beyond our control, but have you learned anything useful about how you organize your time?
I'll probably ask you later to fill out a short evaluation, but notes about what was useful and what not are always welcome.
A Little on Settings
The papers I've been looking at take place in wonderfully varied settings: a coal mining town in West Virginia, an old-style psychiatric hospital, the mountains of Western Maryland in the winter, a beach house, New York City, and more. The children's story is mostly set on Mount Everest where various groups of animals are preparing for a race to the top to win a prize. Hint: the protagonist is a penguin.
Obviously, the setting of any story is important for grounding the reader. Even if you are writing a minimalist short story or a dialogue-heavy exchange among a group of friends in a bar, there will still be reason to indicate somewhere that we are not floating in space or cyberspace. If your setting is a bar, however little you like to write description, you'll want at least to name what kind of bar: a lounge in an airline's VIP area? A funky honky tonk joint? Something sleek and upscale? Are there views of the skyline through huge windows, or are we in a windowless basement space? The smells and atmosphere can have an influence on what is happening.
The point I want to make here is that the setting is important as a point of reference for the reader, but setting is never only backdrop—it is not only a sketch to orient the reader (although I'm certainly willing to grant the existence of counter-examples that break all the rules)—but also an important source for deepening your prose and exploring your material. This is an example of "process" (drafting, working for yourself the writer) in contrast to "product" (revising with an eye and ear toward guiding the experience of a reader). By expanding and exploring the setting, you may well get new ideas and new material. You'll increase the richness of your imagined world. Keep in mind that even if you are writing about June, 2015 in heartland United States, you are still creating a world. My June 2015 and my heartland and not yours: and remember, by the time your work gets published, even if it's this fall, your setting will already be in the past.
Here is a sample from one of the projects for this class. In this scene two sisters have made a long drive south for a funeral. The main point of view character, Dana, is observing the small southern town as she drives in. Almost immediately, she begins to superimpose her memories of the place on the present town. Then, toward the end of the passage, she comes back to the now. What we readers get is a thickening of our understanding of the character and her past. I'm especially fond of the street-visible DJ:
They passed miles of chain-link fence crowned with ferocious barbed wire that seemed to corral only dense vegetation. Like all military establishments, there was hard-edged order to the base whose remembered entrance had acquired two massive siblings, all manned by rifle-toting, white-helmeted MPs.
The town of childhood, with its quaint federal brick library and two banks of the same ilk on diagonally opposite corners, was unrecognizable. The coffee shop and the crab shack were gone; Woolworth's had long ago met its demise. Once a local radio station broadcast from a storefront on the main street, the disc jockey visible behind three turntables. A speaker above the door relayed music, news and commentary to the street where people paused to watch. The DJ had always waved or nodded....[Now she] saw a stubbornly grim terrain drawn by interminable transience and poverty. Why plant flowers or paint a pretty trim for a two-year stay? Every fast food franchise and convenience was represented. In a dilapidated strip mall a huge wooden sign in the form of a fierce red and gold Chinese dragon curled around the door of the cliché sailor's tattoo parlor. Bars, auto-body shops and big box store billboards interspersed with a lingering farm and, finally, Navy housing.... This is where she came from, this and all the other thises like it.
Exercise Two: Go back to the first description of the setting in your narrative. Without looking at what you've already written, write a page in more detail than you probably need. Lay it aside, come back and cut away all but the best details. Now go back to what you wrote first and compare the two. Can you combine the best parts?
Exercise Three: If you have a scene that has been giving you trouble, or that you've put off writing, think about its setting. As an experiment, try changing the setting. What happens to the people when they are out-of-doors instead of indoors? Having a meal together in Red Lobster instead of on the telephone? Met by chance in the supermarket instead of one having specifically sought the other out at his office? If some changes seem to be underway, go with them. You can always change it back later.
Exercise Four: Write a short dialogue for two characters (or take one you've already written). Write it once as a phone conversation; once as a written exchange (e-mail? texts?); and once face to face. Which works best for this scene? What can you take from one and use in the one you prefer?
Beginnings
T.S. Eliot's "East Coker" (the second of the Four Quartets) begins
In my beginning is my end. In succession
Houses rise and fall, crumble, are extended,
Are removed, destroyed, restored, or in their place
Is an open field, or a factory, or a by-pass.
"In my beginning is my end," not an original idea with Eliot,
but I find it full of resonance through the entire Four Quartets and much of philosophy and religion.
I tend to get philosophical at the end of things. This is the last of these sessions I'm writing. You still have two papers coming back, but it is a kind of ending, and thus I'm ready to talk about Beginnings.
The snippet from T. S. Eliot (see below for a little more of it) has good images for thinking about revising, it seems to me. The things we've built so carefully in our narratives get torn down or fall apart and are replaced by entirely different things. In real life this can be sad and destructive, but in writing, it is far more often a positive process. Some writers, it is true, find their best ideas and language in the first go. If you're that kind of writer, ignore me. For most of us, though, the best is a combination of what comes free and fast with inspiration and a lot of painstaking tearing down and rebuilding.
Beginnings of long prose narratives have always seemed to me especially dangerous to fix too soon. A brilliant first line of a poem may stay unchanged from the earliest draft, and similarly the beginning of a short story. But the longer the piece, it seems to me, the more likely your beginning is best written when the whole thing is drafted. Then, having had your own experience of your work, you can concentrate fully on how you want the reader to come into it.
Teachers and books on writing often talk about how you need a good "hook" to catch the reader. It's common sense advice, but I believe it's usually something to think about once you have your whole piece laid out in front of you. Personally, I often begin drafting by writing a lot of back story and description of places. Sometimes I cut all this away, but often I keep it and use it—only not at the beginning. In fact, frequently the very last thing I polish and evaluate is the opening of a book. The beginning you read in one of my novels, then, may well be the last thing I wrote. There are writers, on the other hand, for whom that first sentence starts the book rolling. Part of your job as a writer is to figure out what works best for you.
Exercise Five: Look over four or five of your writing projects, including at least one from several years ago. Do you remember when you wrote that beginning? Read the beginnings—first lines, firs paragraphs. Can you remember your typical process? Where did your idea come from for that beginning? When did you fix on it? Do you still write the same way?
Exercise Six: Just for fun, draft three beginnings for stories or articles or books you've always thought you might write. Even if you feel you're going to be working on your present project for the next fifteen years, try imagining what else you might write. Sometimes, in fact, that first line can be a stimulus to a whole work, even if the first line itself is eventually superseded or supplanted.
I'm experimenting with writing a mystery novel this summer. I keep telling myself it's an experiment—I think to keep my own pressure off, and to have some playfulness about my drafting. The flip side of that playfulness, though, is that I sometimes found myself making fun of my main character. In the end, I can't really write about someone I don't take seriously, so I've been going back to the beginning often as I draft, usually trying to get the voice right for my main character.
I started out in third person and quickly moved to first. Then, I tried to get the narrator a little less involved in her aging and wrinkles. Then I played with her discovery of feminism (the story is set in 1970). Finally, I realized I needed to have the murder, or at least her learning about the murder, front and center.
Here are several of the beginnings, with the date I sketched them out. Need I say they are very rough and may never see the light of day beyond this pedagogical appearance?
April 14, 2015
She was sitting in the Florida room of the house in Long Beach wishing she was in New York. She had been trying to read the newspaper and generally obsessing over things she was dissatisfied with herself for obsessing about. Like her face in the mirror and being past forty and no longer remarkable looking. Like jealousy for her daughter studying and having fun in London....
5-14-15
My second reading of The Feminine Mystique ruined me as a visual artist. I read it when it first came out in 1963, but at that point in time I was dealing with the trauma of having a teen-age daughter and didn't get it. I reread it after she finished college and a lot of things had happened, in the world and to me. I suppose the second reading should have made me give up panty hose and make up and give myself fully to my art, but instead, I looked at my painting–standing in my own studio over the garage at our house in Long Beach–and I saw a hobby. Maybe the difference was just that my first reading, I hadn't turned forty yet, and now I had.
I was sitting in the Florida room of the house in Long Beach wishing I was in New York. I had been trying to read the newspaper and generally obsessing over things I was dissatisfied with myself for obsessing about.
6-19-15
When I read about the murder, it was only to me what it would be to you: a story, something to consume not to waste brain power on. Not to try and understand. Entertainment, you see? At that point, March 1970, there was only a suggestion of foul play, and I was more interested in the fact he was an accountant like my husband Lennie, or rather, like Lennie before he decided to change his life. So I didn't even read it well or long. I went off on thinking how we were all changing our lives, or wanting to, at the beginning of the seventies, or at least those of us young enough and envious of the youth enough to think we deserved a change too.
June 24, 2015
When I read about the murder, it was the same to me it would be to you: a story, not something to think about. A North Shore man had died, and the papers were now hinting at foul play. I hadn't even read the original notice, and at that point, March 1970, I was more interested in the fact he was an accountant, like my husband Lennie, or rather, like Lennie before he decided to change his life.
I went back to gazing out the window at the fog on the deck thinking how everyone wanted to change. At the beginning of the seventies, that was what you did, even my solid Lennie. Everyone young enough or envious enough of youth. I was stewing in the desire for change and aware of my lack of direction. Lennie had become a math teacher at a high school in Jamaica, Queens. Our daughter Shelley who had been a youth rebel in college had decided to go off and study Victorian Literature in England.
I'm sure there will be more versions. The point is that I have been retooling, redirecting the voice of my heroine: making her smarter, more interested in the world, more someone I (and I presume a putative reader) would be interested in spending some hours with.
Writing beginnings is helping me think about where the story is going.
***
Last week I asked people who had time to take a look at the beginning of one of our class members' novel. If you haven't, and still want to, it's at "The Disturbance." This is, of course, totally optional. Since it's a beginning, I thought it might be worth including here a few things responders said. I'm shortening them and editing for general insights about beginnings, particularly of book length works.
One class member wrote:
"'The Disturbance' is mysterious and thought-provoking. Opening the chapter with background on Daudi and a scene with Stephi was interesting but I was really pulled into the story when Daudi physically stepped into Keisha's world, the mental health wing. The action, to me, began at the nurses' station when interesting characters, patients, speak out and misbehave. I read faster when Dr. Close encouraged electric shock and the announcement was made to 'stay in your rooms.' The two sisters caring for each other, in earlier years and now, is realistic and pulls at my emotional heart strings because this could be me."
That reader is suggesting that the story begin in the most important setting, the mental hospital itself, and perhaps save some of the backstory for later. Another class member wrote (in part):
"While I liked the images of birds [in the prologue] they had little to do with the heart of the story. That Keisha had lost the freedom of birds and their elemental beauty is clear....What works in the passage is the description of the bus and the approach to the hospital. I love medical scenes so that worked extremely well but I'd shorten my sentences and perhaps have fewer descriptions. The dialogue between the sisters works. I was concerned the the man whom Keisha suspects is following her was actually lose in the hospital. It would be good to know what set off that alarm.
"The description of depression was credible as was the description of the whole hospital MO. For me the hospital scene is much more interesting than the home scene of the child with the scarves."
Again, there's a concern with too much back story. One responder said she'd start with “Clearwater County Medical Center, last stop.” She says that as a reader, she wants to be inside a scene immediately.It occurs to me, too, that the imagery of the birds at the very beginning might work better from the point of view of one of the characters later in the story as he or she is riding that bus to the hospital.
Finally, a third class member wrote a practical suggestion for establishing a lot of characters in a novel or other long narrative.:
"What I am about to say—it might not work for you. I had so many characters in my novel that I came up with a 'long shot...'a long shot that showed the main characters strung out along a mountain. The whole chapter was just about their conversations with each other. I have used it in a couple of classes over three or four years, Anyone who ever heard it or read it, always remembers it."
Which struck me as an excellent lead in to today's....
Main Assignment
At the beginning of your story, or early on, write a scene in which the setting acts as a context for your characters. Create a moment that includes (from the narrator's or other character's point of view) a setting that includes several to many of the people in the story. A long shot (or establishing shot or wide-angle shot), a term from film, shows people and objects in this way. A long shot is an image of the Grand Canyon that then tightens to show three people and a donkey toiling up a trail. It is a shot of the Empire State building with cars that roughly identify the decade of the setting, then goes into the window of an office building to show the Board Members of a corporation having a meeting.
Once place and possibly time are established by description (the characters on the mountain above were young people hoeing rows of corn on a summer day), put the people into the scene, with at least brief passages identifying them. If you get interested in this (dinner party, softball game, class room, base camp at Mount Everest) keep writing!
Extra: Some Beginnings from this Class
I have one final set of remarks about beginnings. Here are several more beginnings from members of this class. The first two are the openings of stories for children. Note how the first one immediately brings in the reader with something disgusting—always a plus for hooking children.
Also, the plot gets presented immediately.
It was a fresh herring bagel on a clean white plate that greeted Pete's sleepy eyes that March morning. His mother patted the smooth feathers on his head and handed him a pungent glass of fresh-squeezed eel juice. It was cold and fishy, just how he liked it. Pete placed the glass down on the hardwood table, almost on top of the newspaper, when a bold and underlined headline caught his eye....
The next beginning is also for young readers, but for older ones. The older the young reader, it seems to me, the more you will use the same techniques you'd use for any reader. I was told when I wrote my first book for children that the only thing that distinguishes children's books is that the main character is a child. I think there are probably other things as well: shorter length, certain limitations on language, possibly a hopeful ending (but this isn't always true). At any rate, what I love about this beginning is simply the voice that is telling the story, which is another way of saying we are meeting an interesting fictional human being we would probably not have met without literature:
Uncle Wes nicknamed me Lightning Lexie when I was little because I struck fast and left a disaster. My West Virginia birth certificate, dated thirteen years ago, has Lexie Aracoma Boling, signed John W. Vaughan, MD, written in messy, cursive writing.
My favorite thing to do is to climb up Mingo Mountain with my dog, Southbound. It's a hard climb especially if it's rained or snowed. At the top is a sandstone rock that sticks out like an airplane wing from the mountain. Here, I can think clearer about things...
The next samples, of adult stories, also work primarily by giving us a voice and a person who will be guiding us through the story. The next one, however, begins in media res, as all the old epics were supposed to, with action and, here, dialogue. This one also neatly gives us a context, a restaurant, which establishes the narrator's job, in a compact few lines:
"I like my coffee strong, buckaroo," Sam said, eyeing my cowboy hat and holster with a silver cap gun tucked inside. He got a kick out of my uniform. I did, too. It was fun to dress like a cowgirl every day—like Halloween without a mask or a trick-or-treat bag. At least I didn't have to wear a ruffled apron and a name badge, and I liked the smell of bacon "I always add an extra scoop of French roast in the pot when I see you parking your truck, Sam," I said, turning his mug over and filling it with fresh brewed coffee.
The next one is perhaps even more going to hang on a character and her voice. It pulls us right in with drugs, sex—and religion!
I originally planned on giving up both pot and booze for Lent. Susan thought I should be realistic about the whole thing and pick just one. That is what she was doing. Lately, Susan's and my thing was that we would set realistic expectations for ourselves. This wisdom, the moderate approach, came from countless hours of secular Mass with Dr. Phil, Oprah, and various self-help books. Useful when you follow their simple, if not simplistic, advice. But then, Napoleon came back. At that point, he became what I gave up for Lent. He has, without a doubt, been the most toxic substance I have injected. (Through the vagina no less).
Here's another extremely personal narrator, who addresses us, the readers, directly with a question. This one, however, is focused on another person (the draft is named "Mary Agnes" for her). It also sets up suspense by indicating hidden traumas. Note some markers of place and time, too—the region is named, and the time is hinted at by the use of the word "Negro."
How was I to know she struggled against fears bigger than both of us since my own stayed safely underground? All I knew was that we were different That's what everybody always said about Mary Agnes and me. We met on the school bus after I moved to her part of town, and I found an empty seat beside her. Her straight, black bangs fell to eyes filled with a dark, brilliant sparkle. She smiled and I smelled coffee on her breath.
As we grew up and moved through hot Appalachian summers, she darkened enough to pass for a Negro and, boys yelled the N word from their speeding cars. Hilarious, we thought, and laughed loudly for them to hear. Hey, you boys, you can't shout anything at us that the two of us care about. Besides, one of us is blonde and freckled.
Finally, one more first person beginning, but one in which the story is central. This one is a shorter piece, and the dramatized scene is the heart of it:
It was a cold Friday afternoon in Manhattan that December, more than ten years ago, and after a week of teaching my charming, energetic ninth-graders from Harlem and Spanish Harlem, I was bushed, and my plan for a brisk walk to Christmas shop at Macy's was suddenly unrealistic.
Just a quick break, I told myself. So I hailed a cab. "Macy's please." Gratefully, I dropped into the back seat and closed my eyes for a six-block nap. "The holidays are upon us," I muttered.
I heard a smile in the driver's voice. "Mine is already in progress." He had a lilting accent I couldn't quite place. The Middle East?
I wasn't tired enough to be rude, so I slitted my eyes open, saw the shoulders of his brown wool jacket above his gloved hands on the steering wheel, and said, "What holiday?"
"Ramadan."
Muslim. I opened one eye. No turban over his neat wavy black hair. Relaxation was already kicking in, and the driver's friendliness seemed to invite curiosity. "I don't know much about Ramadan except that you fast all day and only eat dinner for... how many days?"
"The whole ninth month on the Islamic calendar."
Okay, that's really it!
One last piece of advice: make sure you are getting satisfaction from your writing as you write. There are few guarantees in today's world of publishing, so your own explorations and satisfaction have to be part of the package.
Good luck, and stay in touch!
from The Four Quartets by T. S. Eliot
I.
In my beginning is my end. In succession
Houses rise and fall, crumble, are extended,
Are removed, destroyed, restored, or in their place
Is an open field, or a factory, or a by-pass.
Old stone to new building, old timber to new fires,
Old fires to ashes, and ashes to the earth
Which is already flesh, fur, and faeces,
Bone of man and beast, cornstalk and leaf.
Houses live and die: there is a time for building
And a time for living and for generation
And a time for the wind to break the loosened pane
And to shake the wainscot where the field mouse trots
And to shake the tattered arras woven with a silent motto.
In my beginning is my end....
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