Hot Stuff

Image found here: Sex in the American College

Disclaimer: if you don't want to read about the craft of writing erotic scenes, come back next week. These posts will not themselves be pornographic.

This is the second post inspired by my Wednesday night Grub Street class, "Go Deeper, Baby: Writing Meaningful Erotica" with instructor Sue Williams. Please note that I really plan to respond to yesterday's comments IN the comments thread, but my computer yesterday wouldn't let me. Le sigh.

So! Yesterday you got some quotes from the experts, today let's talk specifically about craft.

Sue says that you need three elements for a scene to be especially resonant: feeling (emotions), thought (intellect), and sensation (the five physical senses). If the reader learns what a character is thinking, feeling, and sensing in a given situation, well then, the reader is right there with the character, and that's what good writing is all about, isn't it? This should of course also apply to writing about erotic encounters: if you shy away from the "good stuff," if stay on the surface because it's hard to write about or because it's embarrassing, then neither you nor the reader will really connect with the characters (no matter what they're doing). Get in there. Bring out the feelings, thoughts, and sensations of the moment. And maybe you don't have to use all five senses in the scene, but I think you should at least consider all five. (People don't write about smell often enough.)

Consider your meter and line-length. (Line length, you horndogs.) A longer sentence can build momentum and longing. Short sentences can reflect faster action. How are your characters breathing in a given scene? Could they say the lines you've written, in that moment? Is she holding her breath with anticipation, thereby able to let a long line play out smoothly? Is he hyperventilating, only able to let out short phrases?

Don't be afraid to be direct in your language. There's nothing worse than a bad euphemism. (Well, unless you're trying to be funny. Sex can be funny, just make sure you're only writing it that way on purpose.) Also, don't feel any obligation to be graphic. If you write your scene well, and then write, She reached for him, well, we all are going to know which part of him she reached for, aren't we?

The last craft suggestion is one I'm going to quote directly from Sue because she says it so much better than I ever could: "An orgasm can be hard to show-not-tell because it's a charged, internalized experience, which is not easy to communicate. One helpful technique can be to show the sensation through other objects. Put the power of the climax onto the way a desk bumps against a wall, the way floorboards squeak or the way fingers clutch at blankets... this communicates the inner pleasure more powerfully."

Finally, here are the writing prompts I promised yesterday. My favorite part about these? They don't have to be remotely sexual if you don't want them to be. They're just particularly interesting if there is a sexual component.

1. Write a scene/story in which one of your characters tries something s/he's never experienced but always secretly longed to do.


2. Write a scene/story in which one of your characters decides to break social rules for the sake of a powerful experience or encounter.

As Sue would say in her lovely British accent... have a go.

And once again, please enter my contest and spread the word! The winner gets my amazing fudge recipe AND a lovely SIGNED chapbook of flash fiction and essays on writing, and you get extra entries in the competition if someone comes by and says you sent them...

Let's [Write] About Sex

Art by Deanna Staffo, found at the Baltimore City Paper

Disclaimer: if you don't want to read about the craft of writing erotica, come back next week. These posts will not themselves be pornographic.

So, last night was my superbly awesome Grub Street class, "Go Deeper, Baby: Writing Meaningful Erotica" with instructor Sue Williams. I'm going to make this a 2-part post, so that I can just share some lovely quotes from the experts today, and we can chat more tomorrow.

From Sue Williams:

"Erotica is art and/or literature that arouses, or seeks to arouse, the reader."

"The more loved and understood our characters are, the more they encourage self-acceptance and reflection in our readers. And that's meaningful, baby."

"Meaningful sex does not have to be clean and pure."

"Desire is often more arousing than sex itself."

From Susie Bright:

You don't have to be doing it to write about it: "Consider how many overweight, chain-smoking, clumsy reporters cover sports with complete devotion. No one asks them if they are great athletes, or if they have even the smallest interest in physical fitness."

From Steve Almond's

How to Write a Sex Scene, the 12-Step Program:

"Real sex is compelling to read about because the participants are so utterly vulnerable. We are all, when the time comes to get naked, terribly excited and frightened and hopeful and doubtful, usually at the same time. You mustn't abandon your lovers in their time of need. You mustn't make of them naked playthings with rubbery parts. You must love them, wholly and without shame, as they go about their human business."

And a poem from Susie Bright's How to Write a Dirty Story:

There is no such thing as a person without an erotic story.
I don’t mean a tall tale, or a punch line, or a story about the one who got away.
I’m talking about our personal erotic history, what you might call our “sexual philosophy.”
Take a look at your own erotic story,
and you’ll see that it’s a motion picture of everything about you that is creative;
the risks you’d be willing to take,
the weightless depth of your imagination,
your attraction to the truth,
and the things that would make you go blind.

Anything you disagree with? Anything you care to add? Come back tomorrow for some more thoughts on crafting erotica, and two lovely writing prompts.

And please don't forget to enter my contest. The winner gets my amazing fudge recipe AND a lovely SIGNED chapbook of flash fiction and essays on writing by Steve Almond -- yes, the very one quoted above. You know you want it.

What happens in Steve Almond's class...

The man. The legend.

... stays in Steve Almond's class. (Unless I tell you about it.)

Last night's Grub Street class was Crank the Tunes, Crank the Prose: Music as the Path to Literary Improvement.

Have you ever wondered whether listening to music can improve your prose? It can. Certified Music Geek will explain how, using actual songs, by actual musicians, as his text. There will be a writing exercise, though it will not involve Steve doing his famous "Freebird" air guitar solo. (Unless the class begs).

There was music. (Not Freebird. Hey, does anyone else think instantly of The Devil's Rejects when they think of Freebird? No? Just me? Wait, you in the back, I saw you raise your hand. Genius movie ending, right? F---in' A.) And there was writing. And it was good.

Steve argued that music has the power to expand your empathetic imagination because music consistently seeks to evoke emotion in listeners in a way that not all literature seeks to do with readers... although perhaps it should. Musicians, he said, have permission to be overtly emotional, to honestly pursue feelings that are nearly unbearable. Writers do not always recognize that this same permission has been granted to them as well.

This does not mean cheap sentimental string-pulling. This means getting at the core truth of emotion. Truth lifts language into beauty and towards song. Not, Steve reminds us, the other way around. Crafting lyrical prose, in and of itself, does not bring you to truth. But if you can let music help guide you to a true and powerful emotion, then you can use that as the basis upon which you can craft something true of your own.

In some ways there was not much else that I can take from the class to pass on to you, because it's all about the music that moves you, personally. Or, about the specific ways in which the music moves you; we can listen to the same song and experience different emotions, retrieve different memories. So, Steve asked us to each think of a song that was specifically evocative to us, for whatever reason. We then wrote... not about the song itself, exactly, but about the song's place in our lives, about how it made us feel and why.

Not all writing need be cathartic... but sometimes it doesn't hurt.

Tell us in the comments which song you would pick. And, what kind of music do you usually listen to while writing, if any?

ETA: Check out the soundtrack to Steve's newest book. In particular, the song "Here Comes a Regular" by Dayna Kurtz. We did a freewriting exercise with that one playing in the background, and DAMN it's good.

How to Start Your Story

Last Monday, I took a Grub Street class called All The Right (Opening) Moves:

We all hear that the opening moves of a story or novel must grab the reader and capture her imagination. But how exactly does that happen? In this seminar, we will look closely at the first two pages of a range of short stories and discuss the strategies they use to immediately activate character and plot. You'll then have the chance to try these strategies out with the opening of one of your fiction projects.

According to instructor Jasmine Beach-Ferrara, there are SIX ways to start a piece of fiction:

1. The Plunge
2. The Wind-Up
3. Aerial View
4. The Rumination
5. The Hook
6. The Experiment

Jasmine explained some of these in movie terms, which I have to admit helped me really visualize and understand the options, so I'm going to pass that along to you.

The Plunge is the close-up view: boom, you're in the middle of the action, in the car with the hero, running down the street with the heroine.

The Wind-Up is the montage: the main event isn't happening yet, but we're getting critical and select pieces of information so that when the main event does happen, we'll be ready for the ride.

The Aerial View is, well, the aerial view. The panorama of the story's environment before we swoop down to street level.

The Rumination is the voice-over, giving you the main character's actual thoughts and ponderings.

The Hook is the incredibly high-voltage, dramatic, intense scene (followed by a screen that says "four hours earlier..." at which point the story backs up and begins at the beginning).

And The Experiment is just a way of saying that, if you're going to do something really weird and novel with your fiction, you should signal that to the reader up front. Like Memento starting out with footage of a Polaroid photo developing and being shaken in reverse: the whole movie is comprised of scenes patched together in reverse-chronological order, which could leave a viewer feeling confused, tricked, or blindsided if not handled properly. So, there's a funky device used right up front, letting the viewer know s/he should expect something extraordinary.

Note that these are styles you can use to start your story, they're not about content. It's easy to picture "the plunge" as starting at the moment of conflict but this need not be the case. You can zoom in close to the narrator before or after the moment of crisis as well. This is only about the method in which information is delivered.

And, of course, there are lots of ways to combine these elements. I think my first novel starts with a kind of plunge-rumination: you're right there, getting my main character's thoughts at the precise moment she realizes that she has a real problem on her hands. (But it's not an extended rumination, like, say, the first page of Lolita; we quickly move on from her thoughts, but stay close alongside her.)

WHICH STYLE DO YOU WRITE? Have you ever tried other methods for the same piece? I tried out the wind-up, the aerial, and the experiment for my in-class exercises, and I think my current short story is really going to benefit from "the experiment" method in particular.

Other students read variations of their openings out loud, and in some cases seemed clear which style worked better (and often the runner-up method seemed like it would work quite well later on in the piece, so it certainly wasn't wasted effort), but in other cases our opinions were mixed. But I think it's easy to forget that we have choices. Try out one you've never done before. I think you'll be pleasantly surprised.

Oh, and just for fun, check out the 100 Best First Lines of Novels as chosen by the editors of American Book Review. I gotta say, #4 does nothing for me, but I think I'm in agreement with all the rest...

Show and tell: not just for elementary school.

Poster by eypril

Today we continue our discussion of my Monday night class at Grub Street: The Rules of Writing: How to Use Them & When To Break Them, taught by Joan Wickersham.

Show, don't tell.

Man, you just hear it EVERYWHERE, don't you? But what the heck does it really mean? Yes, it's way better to have your character's brow furrow and his face get red and his jaw clench than to write, "Then he got angry." But, if taken too literally, you're not allowed to say "he brushed his teeth" because you instead have to describe the picking up of the brush, the running of the water, the application of the toothpaste... I'm already boring myself here.

How do you find the happy medium?

Joan rewrote the "show, don't tell" rule as: Show and tell. Show what needs to be shown, but don't neglect the possibility of narration, and don't fear the unexpected.

Let's consider a few examples to make this point. (Ha! Showing!)

First, let's take the start of Hemingway's short story, The Snows of Kilimanjaro. Pure dialogue. A man and a woman. He is talking about "how it ends" and "the odour" and she is telling him not to talk. Large "obscene" birds fly and land around them. She asks if she can do anything, and he says maybe taking off the leg... or just shoot him.

Joan said, and I agree, that this is as close to pure showing as you can get. What isn't being said here? That the man is dying of gangrene, the vultures are circling, and he's pushing away the woman who loves him. By showing instead of telling, there's a certain mystery and immediacy to the story (it's like you're sitting next to them), a prolonging of the moment (it's 3 pages in before Hemingway confirms your suspicions by saying it's gangrene in the man's right leg), and the reader is given the ability to discover for him/herself what is going on. Hemingway's not out to confuse you, he's out to shock you. To let you have that moment of realization on your own.

In contrast, there's the scene in Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice (sans zombies) where Darcy is asking for Elizabeth's hand in marriage. There's almost no dialogue at all. Instead, we are told what Elizabeth is thinking as the narration follows her thought process. Now, there's certainly some showing (e.g. we see Darcy pacing before the proposal instead of reading "he was agitated") but mostly it's just one character's internal voice about how arrogant this jerk is. Why does telling work here?

There's the issue of focus: let's face it, we don't CARE what words Darcy uses here. It's a rotten proposal, and we care more about what's going on in Elizabeth's head during his speech than we do about the speech itself. (And, if you want to get really fancy, Austen is in a way showing that Elizabeth has probably tuned out the exact words of the proposal herself, due to the way it is being presented.) There's also the issue of pacing: just as Hemingway slows down the discovery of the gangrene, Austen speeds up your discovery of Darcy's arrogance. Because we don't need leisurely discovery, we need to understand the fallout afterwards.

Here's my own theory as to what both excerpts have in common: both writers make you avert your eyes from the key subject matter of the story. In another class I took, the instructor said that a the in-class writing assignment crafted by one student worked so well because the most heartbreaking material was handled with restraint. This understatement, this avoidance of telling the reader the heart of the matter so that s/he can bring his/her own emotions to the book rather than having them supplanted by the writer's experiences and expectations, is in my opinion what makes the pieces work. The heart of the story is that a man is dying... wait. Don't reveal it right away. The heart of the scene is that this proposal is garbage... don't quote the proposal. In the case of William Maxwell's novel So Long, See You Tomorrow, there's a scene where the author shows the pain a boy has felt by being ripped away from his home by showing only the things he has been forced to leave behind. The author shows restraint by taking the boy out of the scene. And I think the passage pretty universally knocked the class on its collective butt.

It's all about pacing, and focus, and not robbing the reader of the most vital experiences in reading. Now... go forth and experiment.

Breaking the rules

Last night's Grub Street seminar, The Rules of Writing: How to Use Them & When To Break Them, was taught by Joan Wickersham. The class was originally a lecture given at Grub Street's Muse and the Marketplace writing conference (that's the link for the upcoming 2010 conference), and I can see why so many people loved it... how nice to be told that it's okay to break a few rules while you're stressing over your pitch and wondering if you're making a fool of yourself* networking!

The class boils down to this: it's all about what you can get away with.

Joan gave us six rules to be debunked (or at least clarified and mitigated):

1. Show, don't tell.
2. Write what you know.
3. Maintain consistent voice & point of view.
4. Write every day.
5. Write for the market.
6. Read great books.

Joan used to follow the rules, until she realized that these rules, taken at face value, were impeding her ability to write a publishable book about her father's suicide. She tried first person and third person narratives. She showed. She kept things properly chronological. And it wasn't working. She finally let go of the rules, and nine years after she started, The Suicide Index finally got an agent, a publisher, and became a National Book Award Finalist.

Here are Joan's rewrites of the rules. (I'm going to put off discussing #1 until tomorrow, because it's the most nuanced rule of the group, and deserves a post of its own... especially since I think a lot of authors get worked up about it).

1. Show AND tell. [Come back tomorrow for details.]
2. Write what you care about. Or, write what you know: don't fake it, don't imitate.
3. Discover and maintain the internal logic demanded by your piece.
4. Write even if you don't feel like it.
5. Write for yourself, and your Ideal Reader.
6. Read everything. Read the books you need.

These all make so much sense, don't they?

If people only wrote "what they know" in a literal sense, we'd have nothing but fictionalized memoir in the bookstores. But if you care about something, you can do the research, and you can tell the emotional truth of how your characters would behave in a previously unimagined situation. Jane Eyre was originally published with the title Jane Eyre, an autobiography, and when Charlotte Bronte released her 2nd edition with a dedication to Thackeray, a writer she deeply admired, a rumor spread that he was the REAL subject of the novel, and that his governess had written it. Charlotte cared about what she wrote, and she convinced everyone that it was something she "knew."

Not every story needs to be unrelenting in a single point of view or voice. Think of Hemingway's The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber... he gave the POV of Francis, of Wilson the hunter-guide, and of THE LION THEY WERE HUNTING. It's what the piece demanded, and he pulled it off. Joan's memoir about her father has an emotional arc in "index" form because straight chronology wasn't doing the story justice. Be true to your work.

Not everyone can or wants to write every day. Not everyone can write while traveling or home for the holidays, and it doesn't make you less of a writer. Just be sure that you aren't waiting for inspiration to strike before you sit down to work. Be sure that you're trying, more often than not.

What market? It takes so long to publish a book that any market we see will probably be gone before we are able to cater to it. Make your own market. Write for yourself.

Read what you need to. Reading nothing but the greats will probably depress and discourage you, anyway. Read bad books to learn from others' mistakes. Read books similar to your own to learn about the genre, or AVOID those books so you don't feel like you're crowding your own work out with someone else's voice. Just read.

As I see it, the rules are intended to help you avoid confusing and frustrating your reader, and to get you to write more. If the reader ISN'T confused, if you ARE writing, then it's all up for grabs.

Any questions? Are there any rules you won't break, or rules you love to hate?

* I'm sure you're not.

So what IS minimalism/maximalism?

Photo by Frantisek Staud

Did you read yesterday's More/Less post and not know which camp you fell into... if any? You are not alone.

Minimalism and maximalism are fluid and overlapping. Take the above photo as an example: is the desert a minimalist image or maximalist? It's minimalist because, well, there's nothing but sand. And it's maximalist because of the great expanses of that sand, the sheer enormity of it, and the way the wind can make that sand into waves, the constant motion of the surface...

Sometimes it's easy to figure out. Let's take a look at why instructor Tim Horvath chose Raymond Carver as the captain of "Team Minimalist" and David Foster Wallace as the captain of "Team Maximalist":

I am sitting over coffee and cigarette's at my friend Rita's and I am telling her about it.

Here is what I tell her.

-from Carver's Fat (short story)

If it's odd that Mario Incandenza's first halfway-coherent film cartridge -- a 48-minute job shot three summers back in the carfeully decorated janitor-closet of Subdorm B with his head-mount Bolex H64 and foot-treadle -- if it's odd that Mario's first finished entertainment consists of a film of a puppet show -- like a kids' puppet show -- then it probably seem ever odder that the film's proven to be way more popular with the E.T.A.'s adults and adolescents than it is with the woefully historically underinformed children it had first been made for.

-from Wallace's Infinite Jest (novel)

Most of the differences will probably leap out at you immediately, but let's compare and contrast a few points:

• Sentence length. Duh.
• Paragraph length. In this section, Carver's paragraphs are only a few words long. The Wallace paragraph (that's just the first sentence of it) ends up taking most of a page.
• Descriptive language. Carver tells us "coffee and cigarettes." If Wallace wrote his own version of the first story, he would likely tell us which brand and flavor, and possibly the historical origins of the coffee and cigarettes in question.
• Vocabulary. "I am telling her about it" vs. "...woefully historically underinformed children..." And it's not just the length of the words, it's the combinations: if Carver wrote his own version of the second story, there is no way he would put two adverbs and an adjective in front of the word "children."
• Punctuation. You'll tend to see a lot more semi-colons; em dashes -- ellipses ... and (parentheticals) in maximalist prose.

There are pros and cons to each method:

There's sometimes an air of mystery in minimalist prose. By choosing not to describe every single thing in a story, it leaves more room for the reader to bring his own experiences to the table (I know what coffee is, but "Bolex H64" gives me no useful information at all, it's just a label). And authors can use ambiguity to their advantage to tell a story that leaves the readers thinking. Of course, if they get it wrong, the reader just ends up confused from too little information.

The language of maximalist prose has the potential for cinematic clarity and vividness. There's more flexibility to create different rhythms when you're not limited to short words and short sentences. But if the author gets it wrong, the reader may end up exhausted, or worse, bored.

Please note that these are extremes. Like our desert, certain pieces of writing can be both min. and max. And I think the ability to play with both in the same story gives a writer a lot of power. If Carver suddenly described some item in extravagant detail, you would bloody well notice. And if Wallace dropped in a sentence with only 6 words, you'd stop dead exactly where he wanted you to.

Who are your favorite min. and max. authors? Who did you hate? Can you identify where they went wrong for you, or are you still at a loss?

And, for extra credit, here's a contest entry in BoingBoing's genre mash-up competition that highlights some of these issues: David Foster Wallace does Hemingway's Hills Like White Elephants. Enjoy!

More/Less

A World of Opposites by *hotburrito2

Last night I took yet another fabulous seminar at Grub Street, this time taught by author Tim Horvath. This one was entitled, More AND Less: Varieties of Minimalism and Maximalism. Here is the class introduction:

... do we side with Blake, who said, "The road to excess leads to the palace of wisdom," or William of Occam, who stated, "entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem," translated as "Entities should not be multiplied unnecessarily"? What is necessary? Why do writers choose to seek out excess or simplicity as sources of wisdom? Does each of us have an innate tendency or affinity for one or the other, or can we locate our inner minimalist and maximalist? Can they get along -- can they be reconciled, divvy up the turf, work together or alternate shifts?

Tim argued, and I agree, that this is an issue at the heart of the act of writing; that all writing and editing comes down to adding or subtracting words from the story. Inhaling and exhaling.

I am a minimalist. Reading the agent blogs, I felt like the only person on earth who was struggling to add words to get to the 80-100K word count sweet spot. I love editing and dread first drafts. My all-time favorite writer is Hemingway. By contrast, the writing of David Foster Wallace makes me angry; I mean I actually physically start to feel vibrating rage. His novels are just longer versions of the kind of detailed garbage I wrote when I was in 9th grade, and hadn't done the reading for the assignment, but needed to snow the stupid teachers so I'd still get an A. It's self-indulgent, if not outright masturbatory, and I don't understand why people think it deserves acclaim. I just. don't. get it. He can take his footnotes and shove them.

Whoa. Sorry. That just came out.

Despite these obviously strong feelings on the subject of minimalism, my all-time favorite living writer is John Irving, who gets no charge whatsoever out of authors like Hemingway (yes, I realize that many people hate Ernest more than I hate DFW) and instead prefers the more luxurious Dickensian writing. I enjoy Tolkien's epic fantasies and Stephen King's 500-page oeuvres. And when I was writing my own novel, I kept wondering, "How is that that I enjoy so much reading this 'extraneous' material, the scenes that don't necessarily move the story forward but that certainly shine more light on the characters and settings... and yet when I try to write it, it feels like needless 'filler'?"

Now you know why I signed up for this seminar within minutes of reading the course description.

In class we read excerpts of work by "Team Minimalist"* and "Team Maximalist."** We talked about the elements that made each piece lean more towards one side or the other -- vocabulary, punctuation, sentence/paragraph length, use of descriptive language and imagery, even subject matter. And then we did an exercise, writing the same scene in each style.

This, my friends, was extremely cool. You need to try it.

I was amazed by how little the "voice" of each piece changed between versions. I was impressed by how each version clearly had stylistic benefits to offer.

And I think that, as an exercise, the technique has great potential for rough drafts. Write against your usual style: minimalists might be able to extract more information about the story they are trying to tell (that they may not have even realized was missing from the first version), or perhaps they will discover a single vivid and vibrant sentence that must be retained for the final draft. Maximalists may find themselves forced to focus more closely on the heart of the scene, and be able to use that knowledge to make the overall piece even more targeted and rich.

WHICH ARE YOU? Do you tend to read the same style that you write? And, if you try this "same scene, two styles" method, please report back on how it goes for you! I think this may be my new technique for getting unstuck/defeating writers' block.

* Captain: Raymond Carver; Players: Amy Hempel, Frederick Barthelme,

Mary Robison, Sandra Cisneros, Marguerite Duras, Cormac McCarthy of The Road; Hall of Famer: Samuel Beckett; Coach: Gordon Lish.

** Captain: David Foster Wallace; Players: Rick Moody, Salman Rushdie, Nicholson Baker of The Mezzanine, Annie Dillard, Normon Rush, Cormac McCarthy of Blood Meridian; Hall of Famer: James Joyce; Coach: Paul West.

Obsessive Writing

Course description: Most good writing -- whether fiction or non-fiction -- arises from a writer's obsessions. In this session, we'll discuss how to explore our obsessions on the page, without falling pray to self-absorption or sentiment. We'll start by looking at the work of Nick Hornby, Calvin Trillin, and other obsessive writers, and proceed to a broader discussion of passionate attachment.

Course conclusion: Embrace your crazy. People want to read it because, deep down, they are muzzling their own.

I love Steve Almond.

Here are some of his wise quotes from the evening:

"Obsession is passion plus self-destruction."

"The path to the truth runs through shame."

"Style is produced by the dogged pursuit of truth."

That last one's quite good, isn't it? If you tell the story, and if you follow your obsessions (and the characters follow theirs), the language will follow. Or how about this:

"The obsessive narrator provides bias at the cost of perspective." This, of course, is why we read, isn't it? We don't require an unreliable narrator, per se, but in a good story with strong characters, "there are in fact two stories: the one they think they are telling us, and the one they are telling. Good fiction is about this discrepancy, and about what happens at the point of collision."

What does obsession mean in fiction? It means that when your story starts, the reader is asking the questions, "Who do we care about? And what do they care about?" And it means that the author should answer those questions as quickly as possible.

We don't read to get a mere slice of life -- "if you want to give your readers a slice of life, set up a web cam" -- we read to see the slice of life where everything happens: the moment where the narrator's perspective collides with a contrary reality. If the narrator isn't obsessive, where's the tension?

Most of the written excerpts provided in class to illustrate these points are too long to reproduce here, but I can provide one short opening sentence by Calvin Trillin (mentioned in the course description!) from his book Feeding a Yen (the essay is called "The Frying Game"):

No, I do not believe it's fair to say that for the past 15 years I've thought of nothing but the fried fish I once ate on Baxters Road.

Twenty-nine words. Instantly, you know who you will care about in the story, and what he in turns cares about. You know that he's obsessed, kind of embarrassed about it, but still not willing to abandon the obsession... after all, why would he, when he can talk about the food in question with you, dear Reader?

Ah, but what if a character is too obsessive? The narrator above clearly has some self-awareness, heck, even Humbert Humbert got introspective once in a while, in his own damaged way... but some characters have so much intense focus, so little perspective, that it would exhausting for both the writer and the reader to try to sustain that voice through an entire novel.

Consider, then, the "deeply invested observer." Ahab's Ishmael. Gatsby's Nick. A narrator who sees, and understands, and maybe even identifies with the most powerful character in the story... but ultimately can provide a little balance.

One of the best compliments I've gotten about my first novel was a comment that the book was reminiscent of Moby Dick because of the way the main character exhaustively sets forth certain details of her work as a graphic artist.* She's a name nerd, and she's a font nerd. She cares passionately about typeface and the etymology of names. Could this being boring as hell if done badly? Of course. As Steve said last night, "without Ahab's obsession, Moby Dick is nothing but a treatise on rendering whale blubber." But these are the things Dani obsesses over, and so they are incorporated into how she views the world. I hope that if you care about her, you'll start caring about these things right alongside her.

WHAT ARE YOUR OBSESSIONS?

WHAT ARE YOUR CHARACTERS' OBSESSIONS?

And, WHO IS YOUR FAVORITE OBSESSIVE NARRATOR OR AUTHOR? We've established that I enjoy the obsessions of John Irving and Stephen King, but I'll also give a shout-out here to Scott Sigler, whose sci-fi novel The Rookie actually made me want to go watch more pro football. I don't care about football. I root for the Eagles 'cause my dad's from Philly, and that's as far as it goes. And yet, Sigler's infectious love for the sport and his story about a futuristic lethal pro football league starring both human and alien players (take a moment) made me want to learn more. He got people so fired up that one reader got a tattoo of the team logo from the novel. Seriously.

Embrace the crazy, people. It works.

Tomorrow: Santa Claus, Pippi, and other amusing childhood tales

* For anyone who hated Moby Dick and thinks this is a horrible criticism, please note that my novel is a zippy 60-70K words, not 215K like Melville's oeuvre. I promise you won't get bogged down.

Character is plot

Did anyone else read this week's New York Times Sunday Book Review of John Grisham's new collection of short stories? The one that said, "This illuminates a central problem with Grisham’s fiction: plot rules. His novels promiscuously reverse the writerly adage “character is plot,” to the point that plot often becomes the main character, leading the human characters around by the nose when necessary."*

Next question: am I the only one who'd never heard this "writerly adage" before?

Because I'm thinking it could have saved me a decent amount of time.

The last big sticking point in revising my first novel was thinking that something else had to "happen" in Act 3. Thanks to a Novel Development class (taught by Audrey Beth Stein), I realized that the problem was in fact that I didn't know what my main character's final emotional arc was (although I knew where she had to end up). Once I got a better sense of what was going on in her head, I didn't need to contrive for anything major to "happen." Her voice guided me, and the action revealed itself.

And last night I went to a seminar called Plotting the Novel (taught by Michelle Hoover), that emphasized the philosophy that character determines plot. The classroom writing exercises included determining your protagonist's primary desire, primary strength and flaw... yep. Once again, I suspect that I've been stuck on my current work-in-progress largely because I don't have a good enough sense of what my (new) main character wants.

For someone who writes character-driven pieces, I can be quite obtuse about this.

I had previously heard the idea that every novel needs to have a "signature": a single sentence that shows the full arc of the novel. Popular examples include: madman goes hunting for a white whale (Moby Dick), poor boy tries to win heart of rich girl (The Great Gatsby), mother seeks to bring her family home for one last Christmas (The Corrections).

But, I'd read some rather weak signatures without realizing they were weak -- beautiful woman marries the wrong man (Anna Karenina) -- and as a result, I hadn't quite understood the full concept. Those first three examples reveal a driving force for a main character, whereas the last example is pretty static. It tells me what she did but not what she wants. Does she want to stay or leave? That's crucial. If you use that signature as your example, as I previously did, you can miss out on the whole point of the exercise.

But in last night's class, Michelle described the signature as the novel's river. Like the river in Huck Finn... when the characters step away from that river, the story falters. It is what leads them physically, and it is also representative of the freedom they seek... the driving force of the novel. It's not a state of being. It's in motion. It's going somewhere, and it can lead you.

And so, I think my six-word summary doesn't really cut it anymore. "Graphic designer is pregnant... now what?" It's cute and catchy, but it doesn't really tell you anything about who she is, or what she wants. The novel's river is this: young woman wants her life to go back to normal after accidental pregnancy. That's what she wants... although of course we all know that's not what she's going to get.

Now, let's go see what it is that my next character wants.

Tell me: WHAT DOES YOUR PROTAGONIST DESIRE?

* Please note that the review also had good things to say about Grisham's talent and potential.

Ruthless Self-Promotion

On Monday evening, I took a class at Grub Street (local creative writing center) called "The Bestselling Author's Guide to Ruthless Self-Promotion," taught by Jenna Blum. Why does Jenna know what she's talking about? Because her debut novel, Those Who Save Us, was published by Harcourt in 2004; four years later, in October 2007, it jumped onto the New York Times paperback bestseller list, and then it stayed there for over a year. The woman hustled.

Now, I'm not going to give away everything I learned in the (3 hour!) class, but I am going to share one big idea: the book business card/postcard. This is something that I firmly believe any writer can do, no matter how shy, no matter how much they think that selling the book isn't their job. Get little business cards or postcards (I like VistaPrint for their low cost and ease of uploading images) with your book cover on it, and whatever other information you think is important -- author contact info, your blog url, the book's publisher and release date -- and hand them out like Tic-Tacs. Today's post over at Pimp My Novel discusses the importance of face time and suggests that authors go make themselves known to their local bookstore proprietors at the very least. I realize that some authors are reclusive enough that even this seems like a big deal. But imagine this:

You go to your local bookstore. You ask to talk to someone in purchasing. You hand them a postcard and say, "I'm a local author, and I've got this book coming out soon. I wanted you to know about it, and I'd be thrilled to sign any stock you might have coming in." If you're more social, I'm sure you can do more, like perhaps asking about doing a reading, but I have to think that even the most retiring wallflower can hand out a card with a picture of a pretty book on it.

"But I'm not published yet," you say. "What good does this information do me?" Well, I'm not published, but I made myself some "writer" business cards with my name and blog address on them. I handed them out at the class on Monday to the other students and to the instructor (although I now know to keep a lot more of them on me at all times). And, I made postcards (100 for free at VistaPrint) just for kicks with a cover that a friend designed for me. No, it won't be the final cover. Heck, it might not even be the final title. But when I get an agent, I'm going to send them to my friends to let them know that I wrote a book, and that it might eventually hit the shelves someday. And then they can eventually take my postcards to their local bookstores...

Writers, how do you feel about self-promotion? Do you have any plans for marketing your book, either before or after it comes out? Share!

ETA: there's some kind of hive mind thing going on today. There's also a self-promotion post over at The Swivet.