Writer's Instinct? #amwriting #amreading #StephenKing

Image by Clker-Free-Vector-Images from Pixabay

 

I have a confession to make. I've never read any writing how-to book from beginning to end. Years ago, I started Susie Bright's How toWrite a Dirty Story, but abandoned it about half way through, partly because I found the author's tone patronizing and partly because the smell of ink from that very early POD volume was giving me a terrible headache. The other classic writing texts that are supposed to be on every author's bookshelf – Stephen King and the rest – I've never even opened. I don't own a copy of the Chicago Manual of Style or Strunk and White, either, though my paperback Roget's Thesaurus is definitely the worse for wear.

Sometimes I feel rather creepy about my basic disinterest in studying the nuts and bolts of the writing craft. I recognized the validity of the concepts and the terminology – the narrative arc and the character arc, the “Coming to Death” moment. I know that the writing process should involve internal queries about what the character wants, where a story is going and how it should flower. These are the sort of things I think about when I'm critiquing someone else's work. When I'm writing my own stuff, though, nothing could be further from my mind. Intellectual analysis has little to do with the process. I write from instinct.

At this point you're probably snorting with disgust at my presumption. “She thinks she's got so much talent she doesn't need to study the masters,” you might be thinking. Or, “Right, she was born knowing about characterization and conflict, suspense and catharsis. A regular Mozart of the written word.”

Honestly, I don't think that at all. I do believe I'm moderately skilled at the craft aspects of writing, but that's not due to some fabulous genetic endowment. Rather, it's the product of more than half a century's experience, reading and writing – plus a certain amount of early education.

My life was filled with words from its very first months. Before I could talk (hard to believe such a time ever existed!), my parents read to me, both fiction and poetry. All through my childhood, my father concocted fantastic tales of ghosts and monsters and wrote delightful doggerel that he set to music. He and my mom taught me to read at four years old, and almost immediately I began creating my own stories. I was writing poems by the time I was seven. Nobody ever showed me how. I guess I must have been emulating what I'd read and heard. It just seemed a the natural thing to do.

Reading was my absolute favorite occupation throughout my childhood. My mom had to force me to put my book aside and go out to play. I continued to write all through elementary school, high school, college and graduate school. And of course, I continued to read.

I adored the literature classes I took. There, we undertook the sort of analyses that the how-to books talk about, dissecting tales ancient and modern to see what made them tick. Although I majored in science, I tried to balance my schedule with at least one humanities course each term. I still recall the intellectual thrill I derived from the Shakespeare seminar in which I participated as a freshmen, the high I got from Russian literature in translation course in my junior year.

I still adore a lively discussion about a great book. A few years ago I spent more than an hour Skyping with my brother (who lives half a world away) about Erin Morgenstern's The Night Circus. We specifically set up the call for that purpose, and I enjoyed every minute.

 

So even though I've never deliberately studied the art of narrative, at least as applied to my own writing, I seem to have acquired a significant amount of knowledge by osmosis.

When I sit down to write, I don't consciously identify the “MacGuffin” that drives my story, even though it must be there somewhere. I may or may not know at the outset when and where my characters will experience that moment of total despair, when all seems impossible. If I don't know, I simply trust that I'll recognize the crisis when I get there. The story unrolls in my mind, a journey along a road where some parts may be foggier than others, but with a structure that seems to shape itself around the premise, the setting and the characters, without much deliberate effort on my part.

I do spend a significant amount of mental and emotional effort on the prose itself, trying to capture the elusive nuances of experience in words. I'm also focused on the big ideas that underlie the action, trying to birth the sort of startling, original tale that transfixes me with admiration when I am the reader.

That's what I find most difficult about writing. All the craft in the world won't make up for a ho-hum concept. All too frequently, I have the uncomfortable sensation that the story I'm working on has been written a hundred times before – sometimes even by me. I listen to some of my fellow authors complain about their so-called lack of talent, even as they produces tales so wild, terrible and beautiful that they bring tears to my eyes, and I try not to be envious.

That's something no craft book can teach.

Still, discouraged as I sometimes am, I don't stop writing. Through the combination of nature and nurture, I've absorbed the so-called rules of story structure. They're part of me now. I probably couldn't prevent myself from following them, any more than the Canada geese could abort their annual flight south.

The Much Maligned Adverb (#amwriting #craft #StephenKing)

“The adverb is not your friend.”

This pronouncement, by Stephen King in his influential little volume On Writing, has inspired floods of red ink. Adverbs—especially those ending in -ly—arouse the irrational ire of critics and editors. “Weak!” they exclaim. “Verbose!” “Unnecessary!” “Outdated!” Some of the more poorly educated even claim that adverbs violate the rules of grammar.

Nonsense.

I’m a writer. That means words are my tools. All words. I’m not about to countenance some pundit (or even a best-selling, highly skilled author) telling me I should jettison an entire class of words just because they’ve become unfashionable.

I understand the logic behind King’s critique. Novice authors frequently overuse this part of speech, describing the manner in which a generic action is performed rather than search for a stronger or more specific verb. Excessive use of adverbs can be a sign of laziness. Certainly, they’re not the best tool for every occasion. A rich repertoire of evocative verbs can be far more effective than a bustling stable of adverbs.

That’s no argument for banning them outright.

Editors argue that adverbs slow prose down, making it less potent and direct. That’s probably true. However, sometimes I want to slow the pace of a paragraph. My personal style differs from the spare, unadorned prose King creates. I learned to write in a less hurried era, when an author could afford to explore her scenes and her characters in a more leisurely manner.

I had the notion that I’d post a few paragraphs from my current work in progress, then strip out the adverbs to show the effects of this edit. What I discovered is that my most recent stories use far fewer adverbs than I expected. I guess the unfashionable status of this part of speech has in fact influenced my writing as well. I also realized that these days I tend to use adverbs to modify adjectives or participles rather than verbs—to qualify or limit descriptions.

In any case, I think removing these adverbs would make the prose less effective. In some cases, it would even change the meaning. Here’s a snippet to illustrate what I mean.

“Would you like to see my drawing, Dr. Gardner?” Alisha offers me a sheet of paper, presumably the picture that so thoroughly captured her attention yesterday. Color explodes off the page, garnet red, cerulean blue, shockingly bright purple. In contrast with its violent hues, the lines of the drawing are delicate and precise. Meticulously rendered gardens and palaces fill the every inch of the paper—arched gates curtained with ivy, marble fountains spilling silvery cascades over velvet green lawns, onion-domed towers soaring toward feathery clouds. I'm reminded of the jewel-toned miniatures painted by the eighteenth century Ottoman masters, until I look more closely. Then it is Hieronymous Bosch that comes to mind. For in the shadowy corners formed by vine-draped walls, and on the lushly carpeted floors of the pavilions, I see tiny beings—not people, no, not with those swollen heads, sharp-taloned limbs and tooth-lined maws— engaged in the most perverse couplings imaginable. Here an enormous penis splits a dripping orifice. There, a long, tri-forked tongue penetrates multiple bodies simultaneously. A fat-assed creature squats and strains above a gaping mouth. A head literally disappears between splayed female thighs while smaller beings perch on the woman's abdomen to gnaw on her pendulous breasts.

My stomach turns. My cunt melts. Both reactions are completely inappropriate in a therapist. I swallow the disgust rising in my throat, ignore the desire smoldering in my sex, and hand the sheet back to Alisha.

~ From “Countertransference” by Lisabet Sarai, unpublished work

Let’s strip out the adverbs:

“Would you like to see my drawing, Dr. Gardner?” Alisha offers me a sheet of paper, presumably the picture that captured her attention yesterday. Color explodes off the page, garnet red, cerulean blue, bright purple. In contrast with its violent hues, the lines of the drawing are delicate and precise. Rendered gardens and palaces fill the every inch of the paper—arched gates curtained with ivy, marble fountains spilling silvery cascades over velvet green lawns, onion-domed towers soaring toward feathery clouds. I'm reminded of the jewel-toned miniatures painted by the eighteenth century Ottoman masters, until I look more. Then it is Hieronymous Bosch that comes to mind. For in the shadowy corners formed by vine-draped walls, and on the carpeted floors of the pavilions, I see tiny beings—not people, no, not with those swollen heads, sharp-taloned limbs and tooth-lined maws— engaged in the most perverse couplings imaginable. Here an enormous penis splits a dripping orifice. There, a long, tri-forked tongue penetrates multiple bodies. A fat-assed creature squats and strains above a gaping mouth. A head disappears between splayed female thighs while smaller beings perch on the woman's abdomen to gnaw on her pendulous breasts.

My stomach turns. My cunt melts. Both reactions are inappropriate in a therapist. I swallow the disgust rising in my throat, ignore the desire smoldering in my sex, and hand the sheet back to Alisha.

In my opinion, this snippet is less dynamic than the original. It feels flat. I use adverbs for emphasis here, and to convey nuances of excess. I also intend to convey the fact that the narrator (who is a highly educated psychiatrist) is a highly verbal person who uses words both to comprehend the world and to distance herself from her own feelings.

Your mileage may vary, of course. Each of us uses our tools in different ways. You may strive for the lean, muscular prose of Stephen King and Elmore Leonard and personally eschew adverbs as unnecessary ornamentation.

Do not presume, however, to banish them outright. I want them in my tool box, along with all the other delightful and varied structures in the English language.

And don’t get me started about the universally condemned passive voice!

Valley of Stories

(A version of this post originally appeared on the Total-E-Bound blog, Hitting the Hot Spot. I've reposted it here because it fits so well with my Monday post.)

Near the center of Massachusetts, the huge, butterfly-shaped Quabbin Reservoir practically divides the state in two. Constructed in the nineteen thirties to satisfy the thirst of the Boston metropolitan area, Quabbin figuratively divided the state as well, pitting the rural inhabitants of the Swift River Valley against the city dwellers in the state capitol. Four towns--Dana, Enfield, Greenwich and Prescott--were drowned by Quabbin's advancing waters. The houses of their inhabitants were dismantled and relocated on higher ground. Bodies were exhumed from their graves and reburied elsewhere. Forests were leveled in order to reduce the amount of degrading biological material that would pollute the reservoir. The land that had belonged to Dana and its unfortunate fellows was allocated to neighboring towns. Communities which had prospered in the valley since the seventeen hundreds ceased to exist.

Needless to say, the Swift River Valley is haunted. Even if you don't know the history, you can't escape the sense of mystery as you drive the winding length of Route 202, which hugs the west end of the reservoir. The evergreens that were planted to protect the watershed have grown tall now, shadowing the road. The woods around the man-made lake are home to bears, bald eagles, wildcats and perhaps stranger, more secret beings. On the eastern shore, overgrown dirt lanes meander through the village of Petersham, sending tentative fingers toward the still water.

Ghosts of the dispossessed inhabitants from the flooded towns still seem to hover in the area. They're joined by older creatures from the earlier times when the Algonkian natives fished in the Swift River, grew their corn along the banks, and worshiped the spirits of the forest.

Necessary Madness is partially set in the Quabbin Valley. As I've commented previously on this blog, I almost always have a specific location in mind when I sit down to write a story. Necessary Madness is a M/M paranormal novel that revolves around various psychic powers--precognition, telepathy and the like. I used to live near Quabbin, and had friends in Petersham. It seemed like a natural place for the home of a consulting witch who helps individuals with psi talents to understand and control their abilities.

I'm not the only individual to feel that the Swift River Valley is full of supernatural stories. The movie version of Stephen King's Dreamcatcher features the reservoir as a prominent plot element. The cult horror author H.P. Lovecraft explicitly set his now-classic tale "The Color Out of Space" in the valley before its flooding. A variety of other authors and singers have been touched by the mystery that seems to permeate the place.

Years ago, during a serious summer drought, my husband and I went hiking in the woods around Quabbin. The level of the reservoir was at a historic low. As we followed our way down the hill from the Prescott Peninsula, we found ourselves on what had clearly been a road. Tumbled stone walls marked its boundaries. The tracks worn by cart wheels were still visible. In a normal summer, the road would have been submerged, but now it wound for a quarter of a mile, down to the reservoir's edge. Then it disappeared into the gray water.

We stopped to contemplate this fragment of history, revealed by the vagaries of climate. The air had the sultry weight of a New England August. The silence was complete--no birds, no cicadas, not a breath of wind. We both felt their presence--the souls of the folk who had last used this road almost a century ago.

I wasn't writing then, at least not for publication. Even so, I knew there were stories here to be told. Now that I've ventured into the valley with Necessary Madness, I expect that I'll be returning to explore more of these tales. I hope that the inhabitants won't mind sharing them.