When Nothing Is Lost, Novel Writing and Henry James

If you’re looking to enhance your storytelling, consider this advice from novel writer and essayist Henry James: Be a writer on whom nothing is lost.

James’s style in Washington Square (1880) reveals characters and story more by telling about them than showing them in scene and dialogue. Yet, the author clearly knows the people, setting and era, and knows how to present them in a way that has broader thematic appeal.

In the craft essay "The Art of Fiction," James advises, "Write from experience, and experience only …” He then adds, "Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost!" However, there are two important caveats: It’s better to write from experience than with it (think fiction versus reportage), and if a writer is to be someone on whom nothing is lost, he or she must have first closely observed the world in order to gain that experience, and must have analyzed with some accuracy the experience gained.

The triad of experience, observation and analysis is similar to Bob Dylan’s description of the creative process as involving observation, imagination and experience. If we merge Dylan’s insights with James’s, we have the following:

• Mine your past experiences, and look for new encounters.
• Don’t just see what you’re looking at; observe it.
• Analyze what you observe, and consider how it applies to the world at large.
• Write from your experience not with it by letting your imagination create the fiction. Washington Square is based on the true story of a jilted heiress whom James heard about through a friend.

For more on Henry James and his work, visit PBS. Also see Henry James’s "The Art of Fiction" at Washington State University.

What story are you writing that could benefit from the wealth of your experience, observations, analysis and imagination?

Happy writing!

Flat Screen, Flat Scene: When a Scene Doesn't Work

I recently read part of the first draft of a novel where a 30^th-birthday dinner  was to end in conflict. This one didn't. The scene was well-written and the characters distinct, but the scene was flat as a newly tarred driveway. Why? No tension.

A scene can lack tension for various reasons. In this case, it was because none of the characters was allowed to react to the discomfiture of a main character when someone inadvertently reminds him he was away from his wife when she was dying of cancer. Actually, it may be more accurate to say everyone's reactions to the moment were subdued. It made the scene and the characters appear dull, one-dimensional.

Conflict should be palpable

The other reason there was no tension was that the protagonist's own emotions were muted. What did he really feel? How would he show that? How would others respond to his pain, especially his daughter-in-law, whose birthday they were celebrating? Would she feel empathy? Would others sense something is wrong but not be sure how to respond? What about the man's date—does she long to reach out to him but can't because he won't accept her love? What about his son? Does he feel guilt because he was with this mother when his father wasn't? Since he's a doctor, was he complicit in his mother's passing?

In this case, the universal lack of response drained the life out of the scene. Yet, characters—I like to call them people—long to get out of their shells if we'll let them. We don't need permission to write the truth; it will set us writers and our characters free.

Tip: The fix in a case like this is to revise by re-visualizing, re-visioning the scene, if we can use those words as Natalie Goldberg did in Writing Down the Bones. Start with a clean sheet of paper or a new document, and close your eyes. Allow the scene to materialize, and watch each person respond. This will deepen the scene and broaden it. For more on this technique, see the post "Stephen King to the Rescue: Using Imagery to Bring a Story to Life." And see the August issue of The Writer, the magazine archive piece by Stephen King called, "Use Imagery to Bring Your Story to Life."
    

Learning to Think: A Study on Plot

It's amazing the thoughts that come while waiting for the commuter train before dawn. To keep awake and distracted from the chill, I pulled out The Vagrant Mood, essays by Somerset Maugham, the chapter on Kant, whose  goal was to "teach his students to think for themselves" and who didn't like it when "they busied themselves … to write down his every word." And then I thought about plot.

Rather than knowing all that will happen in a story from the get-go, it's more important to consider the story as you go along, to retain a balance between having a plan and knowing that plans change—most often and best because of what happens within and among the people in the story. This is the organic approach.

Road to Milano

As Peter Selgin notes in 179 Ways to Save a Novel, writers often wonder how far head to plot. The query is similar to when a writer states with great authority (and misguided control), "I have to get the character to do this, or that." Here, the control factor is likely too rigid, as Selgin notes, as if plot were "a separate process, an independent act of volition—a verb that we force into our stories, rather than a noun that grows out of the process of writing them." Usually, the real question is how much a writer needs to know about what happens next. The answer, as Selgin notes, is "not that much."

Learning to think while writing is key, to bring a mindfulness to the process, because plot, especially in novel writing, isn't knowing all that will happen in a story from beginning to end, but knowing that things of consequence must happen to make a story a story and that even if nothing of apparent consequence happens, the piece must be written well enough, and usually better, to truly make it a story.

Word for Words — Literally

Last week my writing workshop examined one paragraph in the manuscript of a novel. After we took the paragraph apart, one person asked, "So that means every word counts?" I considered the question for maybe a second. The answer is, yes, every word counts, or should.

Many factors mitigate against this maxim—the plethora of writing venues, lack of time, lack of scrutiny before content is released for consumption, lack of knowledge of what makes for good writing, to name a few. But that last factor can make the biggest difference, not so much in the sense of good grammar and punctuation, though these are essential. But more in the sense of writing as art.

How can you tell when writing is art, and how can you elevate it to that level? One way is to slow down, take one section—a paragraph is a good place to start—and play with the words.

To literally see what I mean, select a paragraph—description is a great place to begin—and consider it word for word. Consider the answers to these questions:

• Does each word say what you mean; is it precise?
• What happens when you replace one word or phrase with another, or when you replace a phrase with one appropriately descriptive word?
• Is the order of words within sentences, and the order of sentences within a paragraph appropriate? Not just in the sense that a door should open (the paranormal aside) before someone can walk through it, but also in the sense of impact?
• What happens when you switch the order of the phrases in a sentence, or the order of sentences in a paragraph?

Taking the time to hear and see each word, phrase, sentence and paragraph is a great way to learn to write better, because you've slowed down long enough to listen to the words, phrases, sentences, paragraphs, theme, motifs, characters, dialogue—and how they work together, or don't. And you're teaching yourself. That's a great way to always be learning (the price is right, too).

Collaborative, Multigenre Writing Is King (and Queen)

Lately, we've been hearing more and more that multigenre writing isn't the taboo it used to be, an approach that may work even better in collaboration. This week we have a guest post from Nikoo and Jim McGoldrick, authors of the May McGoldrick historical novels and Jan Coffey thrillers.

Here's their take on what makes collaboration and multigenre writing work.

AMA: So, who are May McGoldrick and Jan Coffey?

N&J: May McGoldrick, a historical romance writer, is a diligent and industrious professional. Jan Coffey is a bit neurotic, because she writes suspense thrillers. To be honest, May and Jan are really both the same people. We (Nikoo and Jim) have been collaborating as May McGoldrick on historicals and as Jan Coffey on thrillers.

AMA: Tell us a bit about what it's like to write in more than one genre, as more than one character and with more than one author—phew, that's a lot of hats!

N&J: First of all, we should tell you that we started setting our early stories in the 16th-century period because we had some academic background in the time period. Write what you know, they told us. But writing historical novels as May McGoldrick, we’ve always tried to create new stories, new characters, and new problems for our heroines and heroes to overcome. To do that, we’ve pushed ourselves to stretch into areas where we have needed to learn new things. We have to admit that if we only wrote about what we knew, we never would have written about murderous lairds, or covens of Highland women, or cross-dressing artists, or children with physical handicaps, or promiscuous English queens! Those things are just not a part of everyday life in the McGoldrick household.

AMA: So, what's your secret to having such a broad range?

N&J: The solution for us is research, imagination and mind-set. While in the mind-set of the historical writer we read Britain magazine. Research is a seductively pleasurable pastime that takes us, mind and soul, out of our daily life—and away from the writing we should be accomplishing for that day. It places us smack dab in the world that we are researching.

AMA: How does this work when you're May McGoldrick?

N&J: When we are May McGoldrick, writing a historical set (for example) in 1760’s England, we read things like James Boswell’s London Journal of 1762-1763. As May, we study about the wool industry of the 1500s and watch the History Channel (actually, though, it doesn’t have to be the History Channel. Any show with ruins will do.) In planning and plotting out our stories, we do about 20% of our planning upfront and 80% of it as we write. In May’s stories, the writing tries to capture some of the texture of the historical period. As a result, her scenes are sometimes longer than those of her contemporary counterpart, who finds that short scenes keep the pace of a story rocketing along.

AMA: What happens after the first draft, when you want to really ground the story?

N&J: In revision, we find that we need to shift our gears a little, too. As May McGoldrick, we live by the Webster’s Ninth Collegiate Dictionary and the Oxford English Dictionary and their references to the dates that words came into use. For example, are you able to say that a character was “mesmerized” by another character. F.A. Mesmer, the early hypnotist, was not alive until the 18th century; it just won’t do to use the term in the 1500s.

For more about May McGoldrick, Jan Coffey, and Nikoo and Jim McGoldrick visit Jan Coffey.

Stephen King to the Rescue: Using Imagery to Bring a Story to Life

I just read an article that has literally changed my writing life. I was stuck on a plot problem and couldn't figure out how to resolve it. The problem? I couldn't imagine what happened. Since I like to inhabit my work, it's more accurate to say I couldn’t see what had happened. Not what should happen, but what had happened, and I couldn’t see it. Why? I hadn't taken the time to imagine it.

As providence would have it, I was in Starbucks waiting for a friend and catching up on reading when I came across an article in the August issue of The Writer. It was a magazine archive piece by Stephen King called, "Use Imagery to Bring Your Story to Life." And life is what every writer wants, and what every story and the people who populate it need.

Here are snippets from the piece and observations to accompany them:

• "… the most important thing that film and fiction share is an interest in the image…" — without image there is no story, at least none that's memorable
• "…story springs from image: that vividness of place and time and texture…" — without imagery, there is no texture
• The difference between ideas and images? "Ideas have no emotional temperature gradient; they are neutral."
• "Imagery is not achieved by over-description …" In fact, less usually is more.
• "Imagery does not occur on the writer's page; it occurs in the reader's mind."
• "Good description produces imagery …"
• As to the oft-asked question what to leave in? "Leave in the details that impress you the most … the details you see the most clearly; leave out everything else."
• How does this "imagining" occur: "… we must see with a kind of third eye—the eye of the imagination and memory."
• Why do this? "… to write is to re-experience, and as you write, that image will grow brighter and brighter, becoming something that is very nearly beautiful in its clarity."
• Why is this crucial to good writing? "…image leads to story, and story leads to everything else."
• It also benefits you, the writer: "… remember that a writer's greatest pleasure is in seeing, and seeing well."

To borrow another maxim, "when the eye is good the body is full of light," and so is the writing. The point is to see, and to inhabit the scene. To experience it. And experience is the best foundation for writing.

To hone this skill, slow down. And imagine. Make King's writing prompt your own:
Close your eyes and see. Imagine the scene you want to convey. Per King, "You opened your eyes too soon." Close them and try again—give yourself 30 seconds, maybe even a minute. OK. Go ahead."

I recommend The Writer magazine and the article; I certainly recommend the technique.