Category: How to Succeed in Writing

How to Succeed in Writing IX: The Influential Writers, and Other Influences

Rilaly4 Comments

Like any other person who has attempted to create something artistic, an artist’s appreciation of another’s work is limited and unique. An artist’s appreciation of another’s work is similar to an athlete studying game film on a future opponent. After repeated viewings, you understand their modus operandi. You are able to pinpoint what they do well, and their failings, and you’re able to learn from all of them. One author’s ability to characterize may impress another artist in one reading, and another may impress them with their particular brand of engaging dialogue. After another artist gets it, they’re usually bored with it, and they move onto another author. To use the sports analogy once again, the artist can usually spot the stitches on another’s fastball long before the casual observer can. This isn’t what artists are trying to do, it’s who they are. They would love to simply read another’s work and appreciate it in the same manner a casual reader would, but they can’t turn that portion of their brain off. An artist reading another’s work can get so hypercritical and appreciative of the little things another author does to move a story along, or characterize, that they can’t enjoy that simple, little story in total until they have thoroughly explored, and drained, whatever value they believe another’s work has for them.

Most writers will claim that their writing is now entirely free of influence once they’ve found their voice. Some might judge this self-promotion, and others would say it’s just impossible to believe. As any writer who has written a great deal knows, it’s almost impossible to escape influence. Whenever a writer turns a phrase, completes a block or dialogue, or characterizes, there was some influence there. If it wasn’t Chaucer, or Hemingway, that influenced the writer in this manner, it may have been their freshman Composition 101 teacher. If it wasn’t Stephen King, or Faulkner, who taught them how characterize, it may have been a movie or a television show that embedded that particular brand of characterizing deep in their brain. Something, somewhere influenced them in some way they may not know now that they’ve reached their twentieth year of writing, where their writing material that is so fresh, and unique, that they can’t even spot the influence anymore. They may have worked so hard, for so long to achieve a unique voice that they feel they’ve achieved it, and they may have to some degree, but there was a starting point that formed a foundation that is now so embedded in the manner in which they write that they can’t see the influence anymore.

Those who belong to the latter group believe they have reached the pinnacle of individualistic style, that contains no influence. They might dismiss this article as nothing but a point of curiosity, but the new writer wants to learn how we arrived at point D in the process, the following is a list of those influences who lubricated the slide:

10) Brevity. If “Brevity is the soul of wit” no one was funnier than Ernest Hemingway. An economist of words, Hemingway avoided complicated syntax, and it has been determined that seventy percent of his sentences were short, simple sentences.{1} Hemingway was the anti-Joyce (James Joyce) in this regard. Whereas Hemingway “KISSed” us (keeping it simple for we stupid people) with his prose, Joyce dangled complicated, multi-syllabic, and invented words before us, and he often teased us with a carrot on the stick of his words’ meaning. Whereas this may have made Joyce’s fiction wonderful, historic, and transcendent, most of us didn’t know what the hell he was talking about. Whereas most readers need translation, and transports in time via a well-written guide, and a degree in Joyceisms to understand Finnegan’s Wake, Old Man and the Sea can be enjoyed in an otherwise carefree afternoon. This isn’t to say that Hemingway’s prose is not complicated and carefully structured for meaning, but with Hemingway’s fiction, meaning is derived upon reflection and through personal interpretation. The meaning of Hemingway’s prose is established through dialogue, action, and silences —a fiction in which nothing crucial or at least very little— is stated explicitly. He purposely avoided outright symbolism in what he called “the theory of the iceberg”. This theory stated that facts float above water, but the larger, supporting structure and symbolism that build the foundation do so out of sight.

Hemingway“No good book has ever been written that has in it symbols arrived at beforehand and stuck in,” says Hemingway. “That kind of symbol sticks out like raisins in raisin bread. Raisin bread is all right, but plain bread is better.” He opens two bottles of beer and continues: “I tried to make a real old man, a real boy, a real sea and a real fish and real sharks. But if I made them good and true enough they would mean many things. The hardest thing is to make something really true and sometimes truer than true.”

Hemingway was more of a storyteller than he was a writer. The interested reader, who doesn’t have a whole lot of time on their hands, may want to consider reading either the short book Old Man and the Sea or The Short and Happy life of Francis Macomber. The latter is a short story that captures the essence of Ernest Hemingway, and it teaches every writer the greatest principle every writer should employ in their daily activities: Story is sacred and flowery prose is largely self-indulgence.

Carver9) Images. Raymond Carver was also a minimalist. Most of my favorite writers were. Carver employed evocative and provocative images to tell a story. Short stories were his forte. The short story Feathers captures the essence of Raymond Carver, better than any of his other stories in my humble opinion.

Carver’s stories, and poems, focused on misery and dirty realism. His characters were low class, beer drinking, hardworking, slobs that readers can’t help but picture in stained tank-tops. Carver claimed that he was inclined toward brevity and intensity. His writing focused on sadness, loss, and alcohol in the everyday lives of ordinary people — often lower-middle class or isolated and marginalized people.

8) Characterization. John Irving engages in the flowery prose of his mentor Charles Dickens, but he does so (for the most part) effortlessly. Irving is not a minimalist in other words. Irving’s John_Irvingworks teach us, more than any of the authors listed here, to work your tail off to hide your effort. One read through his magnum opus The World According to Garp teaches us that it shouldn’t be a chore to read through one’s work. No other authors listed here, save for maybe Hemingway, hides his brilliance better than Irving. The reader gets to know Irving’s characters in what I call a “Holy Crap!” manner. Irving doesn’t use physical characteristics to describe characters, and he doesn’t use the inner voice techniques that most of us do, yet the reader learns their characteristics in a story after story and a passage after passage manner, until we know them so completely that we say, “Holy crap, this author’s brilliant.” I realize this methodology is borne of the “show don’t tell” basic of storytelling, but in my humble opinion, no one does it better than Irving.

Irving has chapters of setting, primarily in the Northeast, and his settings can appear a bit laborious at times. Unlike all of the authors on this list, there can be large chunks of Irving’s narrative where nothing happens, as he frames you up for what’s about to happen. Irving does “a story within the story” as well as anyone in the business. As I said, though, Irving achieves his stature in the world of literature through effortless characterization.

It appears, unfortunately, that the drive to tell a story no longer drives Mr. Irving. His more recent books have become more and more political. Some could say that Mr. Irving has always been political, and if you read A Prayer for Owen Meany and Garp again, you’ll see that. If that’s true, he used to be a lot more subtle. Story used to be sacred to him, and politics used to be a secondary concern to him.

It’s almost become a cliché that writers of my generation claim Irving as a primary influence. Like most clichés though, there’s a reason claiming Irving as an influence has become so prevalent among those in my generation. It’s because he has achieved the bestseller list through almost effortless, beautiful writing, and by not conforming to current norms. Irving just does what he does, and we have all accepted this to a degree that he can do whatever he wants, and we’ll all greet him with open arms. Claim King or Koontz as an influence, and artistic writers will dismiss you with a yawn; claim John Grisham, and they’ll dismiss you with a laugh; but Irving has managed to keep a foot in both the literary and best-selling world, and he does it with rich, rewarding, and effortless characterization.

7) Asides.  Some may dismiss Chuck Palahniuk as a splatterpunk writer that engages in shocking prose that grosses out and titillates the reader. It is true that Palahniuk goes for the jugular in much of his writing, and some may say too often, but anyone that has read, or seen, Fight Club (they’re strikingly similar) knows that Palahniuk (almost) always has a story to tell amid the chaos in his works.

PalahniukPalahniuk may have some of the best, most interesting vignettes and asides in the business today. He is heavily influenced by Stephen King, as evidenced by his heavy use of refrain style use of repetition, but one should not mistake this influence as outright mimicry. Palahniuk has carved himself quite a niche in the literary world, with works like Fight Club, Choke, and Rant. Rant proved to be especially valuable to those writers on the lookout for a new way of telling a story. While the style is not unprecedented, Palahniuk used it in such a unique manner that those that have read the story considered it revolutionary.

Chuck describes his style of writing as “transgressive” fiction. Transgressive fiction, as defined by Wikipedia, “is a writing style that focuses on characters who feel confined by the norms and expectations of society and who break free of those confines in unusual and/or illicit ways.”

After the novel Lullaby, Palahniuk began writing satirical, horror stories. His work is big on unusually dark and absurd philosophical asides that are so farcical that the reader can help but think of them as true. These asides are non-fiction factoids within his fictional works that, according to the author, “Are included in order to further immerse the reader in my work”.” {2} This author hates metaphors and similes. This author loves to mess around with the traditional styles of storytelling to presumably keep it interesting for him and us. Some of the times this methodology works, as it did in Rant, and some of the times it doesn’t, as it didn’t in Pygmy and Tell All. His forays into illogical, but fun, splatterpunk writing, works in most of his books, but anytime a writer puts their stock in shock they are going to try outdo themselves every time out, until they produce a book like Snuff in which the novelty of the over-the-top shock wears thin quickly.

6) Pace and Formula. No writer, in modern fiction, displays the virtues of pace better than Dean Koontz. I challenge anyone to read the first half of his book Intensity and say that this man is not in the upper echelon of thriller writers today. Koontz knows all he needs to know about architecture, gardening, and all the other minutiae of his Southern Californian locale to make his setting interesting, but Mr. Koontz can cause a reader to flip pages on pace with any of the great suspense/thriller writers of our day. He may also be the safest writer on this list.

Dean-KoontzWhy is Koontz safe? He strives for the mainstream. His books have mass appeal to most age groups and both genders. He is a publisher’s dream in that he knows how to knock out a best-seller on an annual basis without offending anyone. If you’re a writer who seeks the formula to mass appeal, and the bestseller list, I can think of no better author to read … this side of James Patterson. That having been said, there is a formula to Koontz’s writing. How can there not be in a catalog that lists 112 titles, with twenty-eight bestsellers among them, without an inoffensive formula? A formula is good to some degree. To some degree, a formula will provide a reader a solid foundation of comfort that the author can shatter in the pages that follow. There is a formula, and a relative level of comfort that Koontz readers have come to expect, and while we should try hard not to dismiss Koontz on this basis alone, it’s difficult not to do so. All of his characters are much too safe. His female characters are incredibly and consistently intelligent, and his male characters are “safely” reliant on the female’s intelligence and ingenuity … Even his bad guys are safely bad. Then, Koontz exasperates whatever problems his works have in this regard by trying to be funny. His humor is so safe, conformist, and pedantic that it almost seems to be self-effacing, nerdy humor, until one reads enough Koontz to realize that this is this man’s sense of humor.

If you’re looking for edgy, offensive, different material that most people are uncomfortable reading, Koontz probably isn’t your guy. He does write some edgy material, but he doesn’t do so on a consistent enough basis. If one were to gauge mental health by a writer’s fiction, Koontz would likely score higher than any of the authors listed here, but that has resulted in less dangerous, less angst-ridden material. He’s mainstream, and there’s nothing wrong with that if you’re looking to write mainstream fiction. One of the other exceptions to this rule, aside from Intensity, was the novel Life Expectancy. These two books are the must reads in Koontz’s catalog for any writer seeking the edgy and different.

5) Writing fiction. What can be written about Stephen King that hasn’t already been written? If you are a writer that hasn’t read King yet, you’ll probably want to get on the train. He’ll teach you the good, the bad, and the ugly of writing. While it’s almost impossible to read everything he’s done, most writers have an extensive King library. If they don’t, they should probably have at least ten of his books.

KingKing has it all, and most honest, seasoned writers will begrudgingly admit that he has had an influence on them at one point in their process. If The Stand is too long for you, then the writing community will require you to read Misery, Gerald’s Game, It, or any of his classic, early works like The Shining. Some artistic writers may scrunch their nose at King, because he is so ubiquitous, but his influence on modern fiction cannot be denied in just about every novel written after 1990.

Some say that King invented the common man horror, but many say that almost every piece of fictional horror involves the common man. King did work the working joe into his fiction more than most however. As stated earlier, King builds horror through repetition. He usually has a nickname for his monster that gets repeated often enough that the reader feels a horrified endearment to the monster. He also may have not been the first to work music into his horror, most notably nursery rhymes, but he did it more often and with more mastery than most, and it influenced a generation of horror writers.

4) Hodge Podge. As written in the introduction of this piece, writers read other writers in a unique manner. There are so many varied ways that a writer can reach point D in the process that attempting to catalog all of the influential writers, and their influential moments in fiction, would be book length, and very few readers would be interested in all of the ways in which this writer achieved that point. So in the interest of interest, we will try to whittle these moments down to a few of the most prominent. In the area of the influentially absurd humor, there have been few that captured it as well as Robert McCammon did in Gone South, or Gary Shteyngart in his work Absurdistan a book that was heavily influenced by the monumentally influential book A Confederacy of Dunces John Kennedy O’Toole.

As for horror, there have been few, this side of King, that have been able to capture common man, suspenseful horror as adeptly as Scott Smith did in A Simple Plan and Ruins. Smith’s ability to build to horror in a casually sequential manner is almost unprecedented. The only problem with Smith is that he has only written two books in twenty years, and while there is nothing wrong with the man’s quality, his fans would love a little more quantity. Although Thomas M. Disch’s M.D. was not the greatest horror book ever written, and it ebbed and flowed more than the other books on this list, the work provided moments that have influenced this writer as much as any of the pieces described previously. Some of the imagery Thomas Harris created in the Red Dragon book, and in Phillip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint (not a horror but just as laden with images), have led many writers to pound the table in frustration with their attempts to duplicate their provocative imagery. For various reasons, and in various ways, all of these authors had a huge influence on this writer’s attempt to get to point D.

3) Mood. Nothing influences mood better than music. Listening to music gives the writer a certain setting from which “different” fiction can be achieved. If a writer wants to write a period piece, for example, they can select the music from that era, and attempt to achieve that mindset. This is similar to the attempts that the main character in Richard Matheson’s Somewhere in Time to achieve time travel. In this story, the main character wanted to go back to the year 1912 so badly that he attempted to hypnotize himself into the belief that he was. He surrounded himself with 1912 in his hotel room, and he wore 1912 clothes, listened to 1912 songs, and ended up believing he was in 1912. Music affects me in the same manner. I prefer non-traditional, non-linear music to shake my brain out of the patterns it might fall into in long settings, until I can convince myself that I am non-traditional and non-linear. I, of course, do not make the conscious efforts to do this in the manner Matheson’s character did, but through repetitive listening of certain music, I have been able to achieve something “different” on a number of occasions.

I listen to a wide variety of music when I write, always switching to keep it fresh, but some of my favorites are Mike Patton, John Zorn, and Trey Spruance’s Secret Chiefs. These musicians (not rock stars) create an aura I find conducive to writing edgy, “different” material. These artists, like so many of the authors described above, created something that that seemed impossible before they did it. They are truly skilled in making the listener feel different, and that anything can be accomplished in a certain setting. Miles Davis creates an aura that allows you to focus at times, but his music can be a little too aural at times, and David Bowie’s music can be a little too focused, and this causes me to be distracted when I listen to what his music is doing. The band Pavement can create some chaos in your mind and shake you out of your doldrums, but they, too, can be a little too focused at times for that atmosphere writers need to create.

Everyone’s mom told them that distraction-free silence was conducive to concentration. Yet, every mind works differently, and I have found —much too late for success in school— that I need distraction to achieve focus. It may not make sense to those blessed with normal brains, but I need a Goldilocks amount of distraction —not too hard and not to soft, and not too aural and not too structured— for me to concentrate and focus.

2) Movies.  Most of the best storytelling being done today, we have to face it, is being done in the movies. If a Quentin Tarantino were born in the late nineteenth century, he probably would’ve been a novel writer. He, like all great movie makers of this era, has the storyteller’s bug, but he doesn’t have the patience to sit behind a typewriter/keyboard and compose prose that can take months and years to produce. These storytellers of our era are taking advantage of the technology offered them and telling their stories on screen. One thing movie makers can teach aspiring writers, that reading the Russian authors won’t, is to get to the point. Their audience, our audience, and the audience doesn’t have as much patience for brilliant prose as previous generations. We have a short attention span, and with a few exceptions (David Lynch, Wes Anderson, and Tarantino of late) most movie makers whittle their scripts down to the germane.

1) My writing.  Most readers would consider it egotistical to list “my writing” as the greatest influence on my writing, but that is not the intent. It is only added, because I hold my best writing out as beacons in my career that I want to smash the next time I write something new. It is important that every writer examine what they’ve written on a consistent enough basis that they always try to write better, and different, stories every time they sit behind their keyboard.

{1}http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernest_Hemingway

{2}http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chuck_Palahniuk

How to Succeed in Writing VIII: Insatiable Curiosity

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This is my letter to those of us who have an insatiable curiosity who haven’t achieved anything in the field yet. This is a letter to those who haven’t found their artistic voice just yet but know it’s somewhere between their favorite authors, and the thousands of other books they’ve read and them. Continue that search I say, and if you find it, follow it in any direction it leads you. The path through some odd rabbit holes and dark forests might not make much sense, but all paths eventually lead back to you. It might not make much sense why we a particularly obscure piece of literature by some obscure author interests us, but I advise you to purchase it and see if it pays some artistic dividends.

I didn’t know any of this when I started, but I ached to express myself in some way. I didn’t know how to express myself, but the desire to do so was enough to guide me passed the heartbreaking critiques I received. I was not the prodigy I thought I was when I first started in other words. I was not a gifted intellect who just needed a canvas, but I was a curious sort who loved processing the data I saw in my otherwise boring days into creative non-fiction. When I started this venture, I tried to hard to spin the stories I had into something gargantuan, but I found the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth far more compelling. It took years to realize that I was never going to be Stephen King, Dean Koontz, or James Patterson, and it took me a little longer than that to be okay with that. Thanks to a couple of articles and books, I discovered that I was a creative non-fiction writer before being creative non-fiction was cool, who reported on the facts, as opposed to an out and out artist who could spin an organic web. 

I knew I was different, yet I didn’t know how to service those variables in a constructive manner. My worldview was different too, but I had no idea how to create a vehicle for it. This mystique I created of being a writer also became counterproductive over time. I wanted to create this world without doing the work. Every time I wrote, I received more evidence that I probably wasn’t as good as I thought.

Some of the people around me were quite generous in supplying notices to bolster this notion I had that I probably wasn’t as skilled as I thought I was. The one key characteristic that carried me through all that was that I had/have an insatiable curiosity. This level of curiosity can be embarrassing at times, as it can override good sense. When I’m involved in a relatively unique experience my curiosity gets the best of me, and while I might know how and why things work, on a certain level, some odd part of me wants to “rework them” with you to understand how we all arrived at that conclusion. It can be embarrassing, because most people provide the A-Z mechanics answer with that “of course” tone. I then share the “of course” tone in my answer, and both of us consider me a little dumber in the process.   

One element of the “of course” findings involved me wanting to be more interesting than I was, but I never quite made that leap. There is an A-Z checklist to being interesting, some have it, most don’t. How do you achieve it, in a room setting, at a Thanksgiving Day dinner? I compensated for my short comings by studying those around me. I developed a mental, A-Z checklist of those characteristics, but I was never able to employ them properly. 

“Why did you talk about that instead of this?” I would ask scintillating conversationalists. “Why would you think anyone would want to know how you roll out a sleeping bag, in a tent, while on a camping expedition? Everyone considered it hilarious, I know, but why did you think anyone would? Why did you say the in the third sentence of your presentation, instead of the more common the? Is it all about how we tell such stories, or provide a hilarious retort? Why do we react differently to two people who say almost the exact same thing?” Some people might add to such a story, others might take a leap from that joke to add one of their own, but I would study and later interrogate the storyteller to try to understand the process of joke telling, storytelling, and what separated them from those who can’t tell a joke or a story as well. I understood it on a macro level, but those finite details of being interesting plagued me. What’s the difference between Jerry and Lou and Daniel and Ron? It’s obvious to anyone paying attention that Daniel has simply checked out. I don’t know what roads he’s been down, but somewhere along the way, he determined that no one is interested in what he has to say. He gave up ever trying to be engaging. He just knew he wasn’t, and for reasons inherent to his nature, he knew he never would. Most entertaining and engaging people don’t put a lot of thought into it, they just have fun, but others learn the process as they go. I am perpetually frustrated by my separation from those who are entertaining, and I discovered that in the process of trying to understand the “it” factor they have, I was trying to understand more about myself.  

I didn’t do any of this for the purpose of developing high quality material, it’s more a byproduct of it. I am curious to a fault, and I write that word fault with the idea that some people who know me well consider me stupid, naive, and stupidly naive. When they explain it to me, I feel stupid and naive, because on some level I knew how it worked, but there is this sense that I want it reworked for me, so I can understand it again, more thoroughly, down to the grains of construction.  

How deep is our sense of curiosity? How deep into the organic grain of construction are we? What do we do with the information we find? Most of it is not useful, in an artistic sense, but organic curiosity often leads to aimless fascination that just might produce a grain of inspiration.   

It’s in these grains of construction that I discovered an individualistic interpretation of what it means to be a writer. A lot of new, and longtime, writers write, speak, and hypothesize about the process of writing. We speak about having post-it notes all around them to capture the ideas of the moment, or a moment, before they forget them. We talk about the tools we use to create, the mood we need for proper creation, the setting, the mindset, and everything that we’ve defined as the characteristics of being a writer, but how do we transport all of that into an interesting idea? 

The best route to developing interesting ideas is to have the most boring childhood imaginable. I don’t know how boring someone else might view my childhood, but I can report that I spent vast amounts of hours doing nothing. With the advent of cell phones, this might be a thing of the past, but I spent those hours doing nothing but thinking about stuff. I rewrote and editing real conversations I had thousands of ways, and I spent so many hours fantasizing that I became the adult and the storyteller I am today.  

Nothing replaces the human mind, it’s the best device for creative thought ever invented. We shouldn’t need post-it notes, recording devices, or anything more than a well-honed brain. We record that which is memorable, or noteworthy, material. If it is, in fact, noteworthy material, it will stick. It will gestate in your brain, until you have a completed idea of that which you have experienced. In the curiosity regarding the organic grain of construction, the creative mind will eventually understand as well as, if not better than, those who constructed it, for the purpose of rewriting, or reconstructing it with a creative spin. 

james-joyceAre you Kerouac or Joyce?  One style of writing that new writers, and complicated artistes, laud is the Jack Kerouac and James Joyce style of writing called stream-of-consciousness (SC) writing. SC writing is a style of writing that plays out exactly as it sounds: An author sits down and composes 300-700 pages of prose in a matter of months. The SC author does little to no editing and revising, because in the strictest definition of SC writing there are no mistakes in a contextual or conceptual sense. “One error is a mistake, two are jazz,” some say Miles Davis once said. Contextual mistakes, according to those who pursue this form of writing, and the painter Pablo Picasso, are subconscious leads. What could be seen as an errant stroke by some was something to build on for Picasso, Davis, and Joyce and Kerouac when it came to writing. They saw mistakes as the subconscious guiding them down a path they hadn’t consciously considered before. Both of these writers were forced to fight off editors and publishers in the belief that their works should remain as is.

kerouac“I write to entertain myself,” those who adhere to the Joyce/Kerouac style say. “If anyone else is entertained, that’s gravy.” The reason we started writing in the first place was to see if we could take all of our influences and combine them with our inner voices, to achieve stories that would entertain us. Too much editing and revising takes the spontaneity right out of an artistic creation, and trying to make my pieces relatable to all is impossible, so why would I spend too much time trying to correct conceptual and contextual mistakes?

Have you ever read James Joyce’s Ulysses? How about Finnegans Wake? Most normal humans, of adequate intelligence, need a guide to help them understand all of the references and allusions Joyce makes in these works. All of Joyce’s jokes and provocations were “in-house” references that he understood, and that you can understand too…with a reference guide that’s almost as lengthy, but they’re not enjoyable books as a standalone. No one will know what the heck you’re talking about, in other words, when you write in Joyce’s SC manner. You will know, as Joyce and those that lived in Ireland at the time knew, but your reader won’t know. You will only frustrate them. “Can’t you see that A led to B, and C was the result?” Oh ok, they say, now I get it. As frustrated as you were with them, it wasn’t their fault that they didn’t get it. It was yours, and you need to edit and revise more.

Most new writers should be advised to follow the editing and revising school of thought for just this reason. This line of thought suggests that a story matures in the editing process. It suggests that the framework of a story can be borne in the stream-of-consciousness (SC) stage, but that the marrow of a story is created when we go back and live through the story again and again, until we reach the readability stage. This theory also suggests that editing and revising stories gives the author greater objectivity than he can achieve in the creation process. Objectivity gives the author the chance to attempt to read the story in the manner a reader may read their story. It gives the author some distance from the relatively narrow position one is in while creating the piece, and they can correct some of the errors of flow and characterization that may not be apparent in the creative process.

We “editing and revising” writers find it hard to believe that Kerouac and Joyce were able to develop their story, their characters, their pace, and their setting on the fly in the manner they suggest. It just doesn’t seem feasible—no matter how brilliant they may be—that they could make all of the connections, and all of the asides mesh well into a story on the fly, but if you believe the Kerouac myth—that Kerouac created—he wrote his classic On the Road in a drug-frenzied three weeks on a scroll of paper. How much of this myth is true should be left up to historians to debate. What cannot be debated, however, is the fact that Kerouac and Joyce submitted relatively raw pieces of work that achieved historical status. What also cannot be debated is that—if everything they’ve said about their process is true—they should be held out as the exception to the rule that editing and revising are the keys to achieving a complete and readable story.

Most of us are not a “Man of Golden Words”, to borrow a phrase from lyricist Andrew Wood. Most of us write stupid things, bad scenes, flat characters, sloppy sentences, too much setting, unnecessary asides, and our flow isn’t quite right the first time through. We also write “great scenes” that appear foolish in revision. Most of us need advice, a second reader, and a vocal read-through. Most of us are not spontaneous, artistic geniuses, and our work could use a lot of sprucing and pruning. In this refutation, I go back to the organic construction of the grain. I believe that writing a brilliant line, as Hemingway would, requires numerous rewrites, reworking, and shape shifting. If I rework a line seven different ways, I might eventually produce enough material to isolates the germ and protect the interiority of my idea. If you are an artistic genius—and I’m not one of those who claims that no one is, out of spite for not being one—God love you. I wish I was one who could spontaneously create something that appears so simple without having to work so hard at it.

Editing and revising are definitely not the fun part of artistic creation. They are, for the most part, tedious activities that require training and discipline, and training and discipline are not the artistic principles that complicated, non-writing writers want to endure when they think about, talk about, and write about the process of their creations. The Joyce/Kerouac process appeals to them, because it makes them feel more like an artistic genius. Writing should be about writing, they are likely to say. It should be spontaneous, so that it’s still fun, and when they can’t spontaneously create, they tell people they have writer’s block. Writer’s block is a fundamental element of the complicated, non-writer’s writing life, and they all have their processes to help them out of it. True writers, in this writer’s humble opinion, never experience writer’s block. They may have moments in which they are more inspired than others, but to be unable to think of anything to write just seems impossible to those of us who have written so much that we’re now disciplined enough—after hours of exhaustive training—to always write something.

Fruit and Flowers: On that note, for the rest of us who don’t receive divine inspiration for artistic creations, there is a cure: “Paint fruit and flowers!” Flipping through various collections of art, I was surprised to find so many mundane and simple creations by artistic geniuses. Flip through any Van Gogh collection, Picasso collection, or Matisse collection and you’ll find them—relatively boring and mundane paintings of the sky, shrubs, trees, fruit, and flowers. I was shocked at how many of these paintings there were in the anthologies of these artists. Why would such talented artists waste their time painting such seemingly benign and boring paintings? Answer: They were keeping their artistic muscles taut and honed. They were learning the art of using color and contrast, and prominence and shadowing. They were finessing their God-given talent. They were becoming artists, in other words, and they were getting better, and when divine inspiration eventually struck they would be ready for it. Some of the complicated, non-writing writers have this Hollywood image of writers that tells them they need to be inspired to write. These writers know that their best material will occur when the Danube River is just outside their hotel’s window sill at a time when the first storks make their appearance in Petrovaradin. These writers know they can’t be too happy, or too sad, and that they need the finest Colombian coffee scents in their nose to receive divine inspiration. A drafty writing room with Gatorade and Diet Sunkist is just not conducive to inspired writing. They’ll tell you that they have writer’s block, when you ask them what they’re writing.  “Well,” I want to scream at them. “What are you doing about it? Try writing Fruit and Flower stories!”

“That’s easy for you to say,” will be the theme of the “complicated” writer’s reply, “but I can’t write when I’m not inspired.” If I were to see something they wrote that was at the artistic genius level, I would have no ammunition in these conversations, but they’re usually just boobs like me who want to purport some sort of artistic genius persona. They’re usually not writing anything at all. They’re usually just lazy, complicated, non-writing writers. “Write something stupid,” I want to say. “There are fruit and flowers everywhere. You don’t need to write Crime and Punishment every time out, but if you continue to write your Crime and Punishment may fall out from between the cracks.”

Therein lays the key to great writing, in my humble opinion, for if you continue to fertilize the seed with the dung of creating so many pieces that are not worthwhile, you might eventually create a flower. Others (most) will never produce a Ulysses, a World According to Garp or a Crime and Punishment style flower, and they may become so frustrated that they don’t want to continue. Those people probably shouldn’t continue. This isn’t for everyone. It’s for the incredibly talented individuals, and those with incredible amounts of perseverance.   

This may seem antithetical to everything I’ve written over the course of these How to Succeed in Writing blogs, but the question is a vital component to writing fiction, non-fiction, creative non-fiction, and everything in between. Do you enjoy writing, expression, and artistic creation, or do you want to be famous? Have you created a number of good works, but none of them are of the highest quality? How do you handle that? Do you feel like an utter failure, or are you aching for more? If you’re a complicated artiste that hasn’t achieved the fame you believe you should’ve at this point, you may want to give up. Maybe you just weren’t meant to be a writer in the first place. It’s a very important crossroads for you. If you have the temerity to push ahead, there are a number of things that you can do to keep ‘it’ all shiny and honed until you receive divine inspiration.

How to Succeed in Writing VII: Being Authentic versus Being Entertaining

Rilaly2 Comments

The truth is more important than the truth in creative non-fiction. Readers can spot a truth even when they don’t know it. So, the truth is not only imporant, it’s so vital that the writer must know it better than any of the players involved if they hope to write about it. 

Being entertaining is far more important than being honest when writing fiction. That thesis has recently been challenged in a blog written by Diane McKinnon called Writing Authentically. In her blog, Ms. McKinnon suggests that: “It’s better to write it as authentically as possible, and decide not to share it, than to write a sanitized version of it and have it move no one, not even me.”[1] Ms. McKinnon writes that those who have read her “sanitized” versions have found something lacking. “The story’s good, but there’s no emotion in it,” one commenter said. “How did you feel? We want to know,” said another. [2] The insinuation that Ms. McKinnon leaves with these comments is that she wasn’t able to achieve an emotional truth in her piece without, first, writing the total truth of the matter in an original version. She writes that she would never publish the unvarnished truth, for she wouldn’t want to hurt those involved in the truth, but she felt the need to write the truth, so that she could get to the inner core of the matter, before eventually revising the truth out in the final, published, and sanitized version.

How does a fiction, non-fiction, or creative non-fiction writer avoid the truth, is a question I would ask her, even in a sanitized version? For those writers who’ve written for a substantial amount of time and mined their souls to a depth of truth, I don’t know how they avoid the truth. I know my truth, I would argue, and I probably know it better than those who experienced it with me. I feel it incumbent upon me to know the truth, and to study it from every possible angle I can think of, if I ever hope to embellish upon it properly, and I don’t think I need to first create an “authentic” version first to know it better.

My job as a writer, as I see it, is to take the experiences of my life that I’ve found entertaining, and combine them with a degree of creativity to create a fascinating story. As I’ve written in previous blogs, some of the best sentences I’ve ever read were written by the best liars, and for a liar to become a really good liar they have to know the truth. For a really good liar to become a writer they have to know the truth better than anyone else involved. The sentences will reveal if a liar is nothing more than an outrageous liar. We know this, we can read it, and some of us learn to adapt and evolve, until we become so intimate with the truth that we can embellish it and move onto an eventual fabricated story about it. For a liar to become a really good liar, we have to take the truth, combine it with a fabrication, and twist it around so that even those who shared the experience with us begin to question their memory of it. If the liar is going to achieve this optimum level of confusion and believability, they have to eventually reach a point where they twist the truth around so often, and so artfully, and with such conviction, that they accidentally convince themselves of the story about it. After doing this for a significant amount of time, the really good liar learns to channel that gift for lying into something that doesn’t cause embarrassing ramifications or harm to those affected by the lies. They learn that writers tell lies to lead others to true emotions, and a writer can not do that if it’s not true, or truer than true. 

The Lies Inherent in our Character 

When writers write characters we want to write the most entertaining characters that have ever graced an 8 X 11, but for these characters to achieve life-like qualities, we’ve learned that they can never stray so far away from their core that we feel lost within the characterization. Even when we write bad guys, we might achieve some literary distance, but if that character strays too far from our truth, we lose touch with him. That character may be based on that surprisingly uncaring friend we have who is capable of causing some people harm without conscience, and we might even take our characterization of him out to a limb that even he couldn’t contemplate, but for those characters to move us, and others, we need to explore their truth.

Larry David (Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm) states that the show Curb Your Enthusiasm is based upon experiences that have occurred in his life. The difference, says Mr. David, is that the character says and does things that the real Larry David wishes he could’ve said or done. Larry David is writing a character that is the complete opposite of him in these given situations, but that character still has a truth about him with which Larry can identify. He has his character do things that tick people off, he has him do things that are occasionally immoral and spiteful, but he also has this character do things that entertain him, and in doing so he may be saying more about his true character than the real life Larry David that couches his personality to be polite.

A writer who has written at any length, or with any measure of depth, knows the truth. They know the truth better than the truth, and they hope to capture it in the great sentences that are truer than true. I don’t know how a writer can avoid the truth even as they’re disassembling it and recreating it. If it loses its truth, it loses its soul. I don’t know how a writer can write a sanitized version of the truth without complete exploration of it. I don’t know how a writer can write a complete character, a decent setting, or a captivating conflict without exhaustive reflection of the way they see the world, or their truth, and I don’t think they have to write the truth to achieve it.

{1}https://rilaly.com/2012/05/10/how-to-succeed-in-writing-part-ii-the-search-for-the-great-story/

{2} http://nhwn.wordpress.com/2013/01/31/writing-authentically/