Month: October 2023

The worst writing advice ever is Show, don’t tell. It’s like saying Gas, not brakes. You need both, and you need to be able to manage how you choose which pedal to emphasize. 

There are books that are chewy and dense, filled with ideas. Novels about social change, novels about questions of justice, novels about great historical trends that continue to play out. And there are books that are mile-a-minute, that suck you in and just won’t let go. “I couldn’t put it down,” we say. And even within either kind of book, there are moments that move more quickly, and moments that draw back.

There’s no “right pace,” there’s only decisions about how we control pace. There will be times when we want to be quick and immersive, and times when we want to be more deliberative and abstract. There will be some genres, like mysteries and romances, where we’ll skew toward speed more often than not; there will be other genres, like novels of social criticism, where we’ll skew toward deliberation.

If our craft is up to the task, our readers will be doing what the characters are doing. When our characters are arguing, our readers are tense. When are characters are doing something, our readers are feeling it. When our characters are observing, our readers are observing. When our characters are pondering, our readers are pondering along with them. Thinking is always slower than feeling; ideas take us out of scene and make us do more work.

Here’s a quick thought about the kinds of tools we have at our disposal to make a passage faster and slower.

Imagine this as a series of sliders. If you mash them all the way to the right, it feels faster. If you push them all the way to the left, it feels slower.

Vocabulary—short and simple words read quickly. Long and specialized and unfamiliar and esoteric words read more slowly.

Syntax—Simple declarative sentences read quickly. Longer and more qualified sentences, especially those with lots of internal punctuation (like this one) that require you to remember a root structure, read more slowly.

Plot Adjacency—scenes that are about the core character and their primary dilemma move faster; digressions and secondary/tertiary characters and subplots require us to keep track of more things.

Chronology—linear and relatively close-sequenced chronology is familiar. Chronological jumps, flashbacks, long absences, a narrator from the future commenting on the narrative present: all of those slow a passage down.

Activity—if the scene is about people doing or talking, it’ll go quick. If it’s about people thinking, making connections, remembering, taking stock… so will we as readers.

I was at a talk recently in which the author spoke unambiguously about the importance of pace and tension. All good, but he’s an extrovert author of political thrillers, and he wasn’t able to reflect on the importance of different paces for different needs. It’s like a drag racing driver on a Formula 1 course—he’s just gonna go through a wall in pretty short order if he doesn’t do work that’s in a straight line.

All of this is like drivers’ training. It’s not enough on its own to know where the pedals are and what they do, it takes a lot of practice to be able to use them without lurching. But it’s a starting point, and I think that it makes something that a lot of writers do by feel into something maybe more learnable and controllable.

Nora and I were at the members’-exhibition open house last night at Stone Valley Arts, here in Poultney. We knew about a third of the artists, including two of the folks in our current writing group (Thanks, Melissa! Thanks, Burnham!). We snacked, we chatted, we looked at the work.

The organization of the show was interesting on its own terms. It’s different from a craft fair, in which every vendor is geographically segregated from every other—Dave’s turnings over here, Nic’s stonework over there, and so on. At this show, each participating artist had work in three or four different locations around the two rooms, commingled with the others. But it wasn’t just a dumping ground. There was a logic to the organization. 

The first thing that drew my attention to that decisionmaking was a painting in one corner that had an oval-pear form at the lower left which closely mirrored the oval-pear form of a woodturning below it. The exhibition designers had clearly seen that formal connection and emphasized it through adjacency. We viewers then saw something more than we’d have seen without that decision.

The editor plays a lot of roles over the development of a project, but the work of critique lies somewhere in the second half of the project. The work of the first half includes: 

• Encouragement and identification of what’s going well
• Deadlines and check-ins
• Expansion of opportunities
• Negotiating the writer’s intentions and the readers’ desires
• Identification of themes and organization of the work to amplify/reinforce those themes
• Preliminary thoughts on form—what kind of a thing IS this, and how is it arranged?

Just as the writer’s work changes over the duration of a project, so does the editor’s.

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Just so you know, I’m about to nerd out a little bit here. Stick with me.

Music is the space between the notes.

Claude Debussy

I’m just had the first rehearsal of the play I submitted to this year’s Theater in the Woods’ Ten-Minute Play event, in which local writers come up with very short plays that are then performed together in a pair of single-evening shows: half on Friday night, half on Saturday. (Mark your calendars for Friday November 10 and Saturday November 11, with an additional Sunday matinee of three new kids plays, too.) I’ve done that a couple of times in recent years, and it’s a fascinating experience to hand your work over to other readers in live-time.

One of the most common pieces of advice given to writers is to read your work aloud as you revise, to hear the lumpy spots. And you do—boy, do you ever. That’s kind of a normal part of my revision process. Where do I hear the emphasis within the sentence? Where do I hear vowel sounds align? Where do I place the hard-stop consonants that break long phrases into haiku?

So as I hear my plays performed for the first time, I’m not often surprised by how the actors read the words. I’ve done most of the work to let the text read itself. What I wasn’t prepared for, what was really revelatory, was hearing the silences. Hearing how long someone paused between lines. Or within a line. Silences in a conversation, or even a monologue, are the moments where we’re thinking… and I could hear these characters thinking. 

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One of the reasons I love typography (like that little separator we just passed, or the parentheses around this comment) are that they guide the reader to think in spaces and not just in sounds. We steer your thinking with all that stuff that isn’t actually words. We help you slow down, help you hit words harder, help you hear repetition. Just read the score of a piece of classical music sometime… composers offer instructions with the pace and density of an air traffic controller. Every note is guided not merely by pitch and by duration, the stuff on the staff, but also from above, a voice from God to guide us into right thinking about volume, cadence, connection or disconnection with the neighbors. He even offers little endearing Italian murmurs like affettuoso or sospirando, telling us what attitude toward life we should embrace as we play.

Text is filled with breathing instructions. The little channel between the period and the next capital letter (a gulf that’s narrowed over the past decades from two spaces to one as the pace of our lives has increased). The different tools we use to separate non-restrictive clauses—commas, parentheses, brackets, em-dashes, even footnotes—each of which signals a different kind of side trail from the main path of the sentence. One of the tools I rely on far too often: the ellipsis… a foot on the clutch to more gently shift gears, the three little dots that ease our pace as we enter the curve.

We have the word, the phrase, the clause, the sentence, the paragraph. The scene and the act. The novel and the three-novel trilogy and the whole Nancy Drew / Harry Potter / Jack Reacher oeuvre. We are taught to read by a broad taxonomy of spaces, given a chance to breathe and to think and to prepare for what’s next. Even when we binge-watch The Crown, we get to go to the bathroom once every 55 minutes, and use that moment to reflect on the collective tragedies of the last episode before we get into the next one. 

I know better than to even start Lucy Ellmann’s 2019 novel Ducks, Newburyport, its single sentence stretching in a uniform-bordered carpet across literally a thousand pages. (One reviewer said “this book loves itself very much.”) I don’t know how to read that. I don’t know where I would stop by choice and where I would stop by exhaustion and where I would stop from impatience, but I know I can’t stay awake long enough to read a thousand pages. It’s been called an “ambitious” novel, but I don’t feel the need to be caught up in her ambition. The weakness may be mine, probably is. That’s okay. I’ll own that. I’ll opt for the comfort of textual convention that allows readers to THINK they’re ignoring the road signs, even as those signs influence every driving decision. I mean, if I gave you a test to remember every single road sign between here and Rutland, no way could you do that. But you see them, and you use them, even as they (mostly) don’t enter your conscious thought. 

When you’re a reader, ignore all that, the man-behind-the-curtain stuff. Pretend you didn’t see it, let it be invisible. It ought to be. But when you’re a writer, start to look at something other than the 26 letters of the language. Start to see—and to hear—the spaces.