Writing Tools
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How different is the effect when seventeenth-century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes describes the passions of mankind:
Grief for the calamity of another is PITY, and arises from the imagination that the like calamity may befall himself, and therefore is called also COMPASSION, and in the phrase of this present time a FELLOW-FEELING, (from Leviathan)
The Murrow passage, with its particularity, evokes pity and compassion. The Hobbes passage, with its abstractions, defines them.
If you write like Murrow, you will sound like a journalist. If you write like Hobbes, you will sound like a philosopher.
The bible for parents of baby boomers was Baby and Child Care by Dr. Benjamin Spock, first published in 1945. In the foreword he writes:
The most important thing I have to say is that you should not take too literally what is said in this book. Every child is different, every parent is different, every illness or behavior problem is somewhat different from every other. All I can do is describe the most common developments and problems in the most general terms. Remember that you are more familiar with your child's temperament and patterns than I could ever be.
Dr. Spock's language is plain but authoritative, his voice wise but modest. He addresses the reader directly, as in a letter, using both "you" and "I," and honors the parent's experience and expertise. No wonder generations of families turned to this voice of the family doctor for advice and peace of mind.
To test your writing voice, the most powerful tool on your workbench is oral reading. Read your story aloud to hear if it sounds like you. When teachers offer this advice to writers, we often meet skeptical glances. "You can't be serious," say these looks. "You don't literally mean that I should read the story aloud? Perhaps you mean I should read the story 'in loud,' quietly, with my lips moving?"
No, I mean out loud, and loud enough so that others can hear.
The writer can read the story aloud to herself or to an editor. The editor can read the story aloud to the writer, or to another editor. It can be read this way to receive its voice, or to modulate it. It can be read in celebration, but should never be read in derision. It can be read to hear the problems that must be solved.
Writers complain about tone-deaf editors who read with their eyes and not with their ears. The editor may see an unnecessary phrase, but what does its deletion do to the rhythm of the sentence? That question is best answered by oral — and aural — reading.
WORKSHOP
1. Read your writing aloud to a friend. Ask, "Does this sound like me?" Discuss the response.
2. After rereading your work, make a list of adjectives that define your voice, such as heavy or aggressive, ludicrous or tentative. Now try to identify the evidence in your writing that led you to these conclusions.
3. Read a draft of a story aloud. Can you hear problems in the story that you could not see?
4. Save the work of writers whose voices appeal to you. Consider why you admire the voice of a particular writer. How is it like your voice? How is it different? In a piece of freewriting, imitate that voice.
Good work has parts: beginning, middle, and ending. Even writers who achieve a seamless tapestry can point out the invisible stitching. A writer who knows the big parts can name them for the reader, using such markers as subheadings and chapter titles. The reader who sees the big parts is more likely to remember the whole story.
The best way to illustrate this effect is to reveal the big parts of a short and deceptively simple children's song, "Three Blind Mice." Sing the melody in your head. Now try to name the parts. Part one is a simple musical phrase repeated once:
Three blind mice, three blind mice,
Part two builds on that phrase and adds a beat:
See how they run, see how they run!
Part three adds three equal but more complex phrases:
They all ran after the farmer's wife, Who cut off their tails with a carving knife, Did you ever see such a thing in your life
Part four repeats the first phrase, "three blind mice," closing the song into a tight circle:
As three blind mice?
We remember songs because of their transparent structure: verse, verse, chorus, bridge, verse, chorus, instrumental, verse, chorus. The delightful sounds of songs may veil the mechanics of structure, but the architecture of music becomes perceptible with more careful listening and knowing how to name the parts.
Which leads me to the dreaded O word, the hellmouth of young writers.
Many writers of the old school were required to hand in outlines with drafts of our stories. Such outlines looked something like this:
And so on.
Here was my problem: I could never see far enough ahead to plot what the third part of section C was going to be. I had to write my way to that point; I had to discover what I was going to say. And so, as a survival mechanism, I invented the reverse outline. I would write a full draft of the story and then create the outline. This turned out to be a useful tool: if I could not write the outline from the story, it meant that I could not discern the parts from the whole, revealing problems of organization.
Although I still don't work from a formal outline, I write a plan, usually a few phrases scribbled on a yellow pad. And here's
another tool I learned: an informal plan is nothing more than the Roman numerals required by a formal outline. In other words, my plan helps me see the big parts of the story.
Here's a plan for an obituary of entertainer Ray Bolger, the beloved scarecrow of The Wizard of Oz:
I. Lead with image and dialogue from Oz.
II. Great moments in his dance career other than Oz.
III. His signature song: "Once in Love with Amy."
IV. His youth: how he became a dancer.
V. His television career.
VI. A final image from Oz.
I constructed this reverse outline from a close reading of Tom Shales's award-winning work in the Washington Post.
When the story grows to any significant length, the writer should label the parts. If the story evolves into a book, the chapters will have titles. In a newspaper or magazine, the parts may carry subheadlines or subtitles. Writers should write these subtitles themselves — even if the publisher does not use them.
Here's why: Subtitles will make visible to the busy copyeditor and time-starved reader the big parts of the story. The act of writing them will test the writer's ability to identify and label those parts. And, when well written, these subheads will reveal at a glance the global structure of the piece, indexing the parts, and creating additional points of entry.
In 1994, the courageous American editor Gene Patterson wrote an article for the St. Petersburg Times titled "Forged in Battle: The Formative Experience of War." The occasion was the fiftieth anniversary of the invasion of Normandy. Patterson fought in World War II as a young tank platoon leader in Pat-ton's army. His mini-epic begins in medias res, in the middle of things:
I did not want to kill the two German officers when we met by
mistake in the middle of the main street of Gera Bronn.
They somersaulted from their motorcycle when it rounded a corner directly ahead of my column of light armor. They scrambled to their feet, facing me 20 yards in front of the cannon and machine gun muzzles of my lead armored car, and stood momentarily still as deer. The front wheel of their flattened motorcycle spun on in the silence.
This passage introduces a meaty memoir of war. Five strong sub-headlines index the body of the work:
A Man of the 20th Century Lead with the Heaviest Punch From the Georgia Soil Senseless Dying Two Certainties about War
Notice how the reader can predict the structure and content of Patterson's essay from these subtitles alone. They divide the story into its big parts, name them, and make visible a movement of theme, logic, and chronology that readers can perceive and remember.
WORKSHOP
1. Shakespeare's plays are divided into five acts, each divided into scenes. Read a comedy
and a tragedy, such as As You Like It and Macbeth, paying attention to the structure of the play and what Shakespeare tries to accomplish in each of the big parts.
2. Find the longest piece you have written in the last year. Using a pencil, mark it up according to its parts. Now label those parts with headings and subheadings.
3. Over the next month, pay attention to the structure of the fiction you read. Notice the point where you begin to perceive the global structure of the work. After you finish the work, go back and review the chapter titles and their effect on your expectations as a reader.
4. Listening to music helps writers learn the structures of composition. As you listen, see if you can recognize the big parts of songs.
5. For your next story, try working from an informal plan that plots the three to six big parts of the work. Revise the plan if necessary.
Journalists use the word story with romantic promiscuity. They think of themselves as the wandering minstrels of the modern world, the tellers of tales, the spinners of yarns. And then, too often, they write dull reports.
Reports need not be dull, nor stories interesting. But the difference between story and report is crucial to the reader's expectation and the writer's execution. Bits of story — call them anecdotes — appear in many reports. But the word story has a special meaning, and stories have specific requirements that create predictable effects.
What are the differences between report and story, and how can the writer use them to strategic advantage?
A wonderful scholar named Louise Rosenblatt argued that readers read for two reasons: information and experience. There's the difference. Reports convey information. Stories create experience. Reports transfer knowledge. Stories transport the reader, crossing boundaries of time, space, and imagination. The report points us there. The story puts us there.
A report sounds like this: The school board will meet Thursday to discuss the new desegregation plan.
A story sounds like this: Wanda Mitchell shook her fist at the school board chairman, tears streaming down her face.
The tool sets to create reports and stories also differ. The famous "Five Ws and H" have helped writers gather and convey information with the reader's interests in mind. Who, what, where, and when appear as the most common elements of information. The why and the how are harder to achieve. Used in reports, these pieces of information are frozen in time, fixed so readers can scan and understand.
Watch what happens when we unfreeze them, when information is transformed into narrative. In this process of conversion:
Who becomes Character.
What becomes Action. (What happened.)
Where becomes Setting.
When becomes Chronology.
Why becomes Cause or Motive.
How becomes Process. (How it happened.)
The writer must figure out whether a project requires the crafting of a report, a story, or some combination of the two. Author and teacher Jon Franklin argues that stories require rising and falling actions, complications, points of insight, and resolutions. While novelists invent these movements in a story, nonfiction writers must report them. In the 1960s Tom Wolfe demonstrated how to match truthful reporting with fictional techniques, such as setting scenes, finding details of character, capturing dialogue, and shifting points of view.
Narrative requires a story and a storyteller. In this scene from Reading Lolita in Tehran, Azar Nafisi narrates a surprising moment in one of her secret literature classes:
I ask, Who can dance Persian-style? Everyone looks at Sanaz. She is shy and refuses to dance. We start to tease her and goad her on, and form a circle around her. As she begins to move, selfconsciously at first, we start to clap and murmur a song. Nassrin cautions us to be quieter. Sanaz begins shyly, taking graceful little steps, moving her waist with a lusty grace. As we laugh and joke more, she becomes bolder; she starts to move her head from side to side, and every part of her body asserts itself, vying for attention with the other parts. Her body quivers as she takes her small steps and dances with her fingers and her hands. A special look has appeared on her face. It is daring and beckoning, designed to attract, to pull in, but at the same time it retracts and refracts with a power she loses as soon as she stops dancing.
This passage moves me every time I read it. I may be a stranger to the author's gender, religion, culture, country, and political system, yet for the seconds it takes to read these words I am transported. She puts me in that room, where I stand in that circle of Iranian women, seduced by the dancer's charms.
South African writer Henk Rossouw combines story and report to good effect. With a single sentence he moves us to another time and place, and to a desperate experience:
When Akallo Grace Grail woke up, she could feel the cool night air on her face, but she couldn't move. Most of her body was under sand. Where was her gun? If she'd lost it, her commander in the Lord's Resistance Army would beat her up. As she dragged herself out of the shallow grave, everything that had happened that day came back to her.
To learn why the life of this African woman deserves special attention, Rossouw explains how she made the journey from "hell to college." To help us grasp the rigor of that journey, Rossouw turns from story to report mode:
In sub-Saharan Africa, only one-quarter of the students enrolled in postsecondary education are women, according to a World Bank estimate from the mid-1990s. About 60 percent of African women live a life that consists of working the land and raising children. Ugandan women bear an average of 6.8 children, and early marriages are encouraged, with rural women marrying as young as 14 years of age. Uganda awards 900 scholarships each year to help women get into college: 10,000 women apply for them, (from the Chronicle of Higher Education)
By combining story and report, the writer can speak to both our hearts and our heads, creating sympathy and understanding.
WORKSHOP
1. Look at the newspaper with the distinction between reports and stories in mind. Look for narrative opportunities missed. Look for bits of stories embedded in reports.
2. Take the same approach to your own work. Look for stories, or at least passages in stories, where you transport the reader to the scene. Search for places in your reports where you might have included story elements.
3. Reread the conversion list for the Five Ws and H. Keep it handy the next time you research and write. Use it to transform report elements into the building blocks of a story.
4. The next time you read a novel, look for the ways in which the author weaves information about politics or history or geography into the tapestry of narrative. How can you apply these techniques in your own work?
Novelist Elmore Leonard advised writers "to leave out the part that readers tend to skip" and to focus on what they read. But which part is that? He condemns:
Thick paragraphs of prose you can see have too many words in them. What the writer is doing, he's writing, perpetrating hoopte-doodle, perhaps taking another shot at the weather, or has gone into the character's head, and the reader either knows what the guy's thinking or doesn't care. I'll bet you don't skip dialogue, (from the New York Times)
Leonard must have my reading habits in mind, the thousand times I've looked down a gray pillar of text to find the airy white space that ventilates dialogue. Human speech, captured as dialogue on the page, attracts the eyes of the reader and, if done well, advances the story.
Consider this scene from Michael Chabon's novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay:
She turned now and looked at her nephew. "You want to draw comic books?" she asked him.
Joe stood there, head down, a shoulder against the door frame. While Sammy and Ethel argued, he had been affecting to study in polite embarrassment the low-pile, mustard-brown carpeting, but now he looked up, and it was Sammy's turn to feel embarrassed. His cousin looked him up and down, with an expression that was both appraising and admonitory.
"Yes, Aunt," he said. "I do. Only I have one question. What is a
comic book?"
Sammy reached into his portfolio, pulled out a creased, well-thumbed copy of the latest issue of Action Comics, and handed it to his cousin.
In many ways dialogue defines a story because its power drags us to the scene and sets our ears to the action.
Reporters capture human speech with a purpose different from novelists. They use speech on the page not as action but as an action stopper, a place in the text where characters comment on what has happened. This technique has different names in different media. In print an effective bit of human speech is called a quote. Television reporters tag it a sound bite. Radio folks struggle under the awkward word actuality — because someone actually said it.
The St. Paul Pioneer Press covered the sad story of Cynthia Schott, a thirty-one-year-old television anchor who wasted away and died from an eating disorder.
"I was there. I know how it happened," says Kathy Bissen, a friend of Schott's from the TV station. "Everybody did what they individually thought was best. And together, we covered the spectrum of possibilities of how to interact with someone you know has an illness. And yet, none of it made a difference. And you just think to yourself, 'How can this happen?' "
The writer follows advice often given to new reporters: get a good quote high in the story. A good quote offers these benefits:
• It introduces a human voice.