Reading Like a Writer

It must be frustrating to make a book selection for a workshop or book discussion group. No matter what you choose, the odds are that in a large group of people, most of them won’t like it. As writers, we need to be realistic when we think about the type of book we’re writing and recognize the reality that if a hundred people read the first page, most of them probably won’t want to keep reading. Whether it’s mystery, chick lit, sci-fi, fantasy, paranormal, thriller, suspense, up market, down market, women’s fiction, gay fiction, literary fiction, historical fiction or any of the dozen more categories I’ve probably left out, there is a specific audience for each book.

Less than a week before Kurt Vonnegut died, I bought a signed, first edition copy of Bagombo Snuff Box, his Uncollected Short Fiction. I don’t know why I found it or decided to buy it then, but I’ve considered it a sign ever since. In his introduction, Mr. Vonnegut recounts his story as a writer and as a professor of writing. I like to refer to the following section from the book often, because these eight simple pieces of advice are succinct enough that I can keep them posted in front of me at all times:

“Now lend me your ears. Here is Creative Writing 101:

1. Use the time of total strangers in such a way he or she will not feel the time was wasted.
2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.
3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
4. Every sentence must do one of two things – reveal character or advance the action.
5. Start as close to the end as possible.
6. Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them – in order that the reader may see what they are made of.
7. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.
8. Give your reader as much information as soon as possible. Readers should have such complete understand of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.”

Today, I’m thinking a lot about number seven.

Most successful writers will tell you that reading and reading and reading some more is just as important as writing and I happen to agree with them – happily, of course because I love to read.

One of my favorite things about the retreat I attended recently was that there were book discussions, led by our instructors. We read a collection of short stories, a memoir, a book of poetry and essays and a novel.

It was interesting to note that although there were twenty four retreat participants, the book discussions themselves were attended by only a handful of us. I was lucky. I read a pretty wide variety of books and so I didn’t mind reading any of them, although I might not have chosen them myself. The first discussion was an eye opener. We discussed the short story collection, Jesus’ Son, by Denis Johnson. One of the discussion participants hadn’t read the book, but opened it, looked through it and then closed it. He said he’d seen all he needed to see. Another read it, but said he didn’t like it. He thought it glorified drug use. The truth is that the collection of stories are linked and they are about a period of time in the author’s life when he was mired in drug and alcohol use. The stories reminded me quite a bit of William S. Burroughs or Charles Bukowski, primarily because of the subject matter. What I got from the stories was that they didn’t glorify anything related to substance abuse. In fact, each story had moments of beauty, but we were helplessly on a ride with the author that we knew would not end well. By the last story, the author was in rehabilitation and was cautiously optimistic. There was hope. I read the stories, not as a casual reader, but as a writer and there was some incredible writing, but the participation in the discussion group drove home the point to me that even writers have a very difficult time reading like writers.

The hardest book for me to read, not literally, but from the standpoint of having to make myself read it, was the memoir by Jeannette Walls, The Glass Castle. The writing is good, the narrative structure works, but my confession here is that I’m tired of memoir. So sue me. I’m in the minority because that was probably the most popular reading and it’s been on the New York Times Bestseller List for a very long time.

I also put off reading Housekeeping, by Marilynne Robinson until last, because I’d read Gilead just before getting the reading list and I rarely like to read two books in a row by the same author. Still, her writing is beautiful. It’s a challenge for me because books heavy on description of landscape are usually not my thing. But something happened when I read Housekeeping. I’d been reading critically for a while and although I initially found the description of the glacial lake, the isolated mountain town and the gloomy town somewhat heavy, I got into them as the story progressed. My last post has an excerpt from the book that is all description and through the reading and the discussion, I learned just how effective this can be, when done as well as Marilynne Robinson and to name one of many, Annie Proulx does it.

It had an impact on my writing. Until the retreat, I’d acknowledged the use of this type of description as something writers use to varying degrees, depending on their personal style. I tend to read novels heavy on character, with a lot of internal dialogue, so of course I tend to write in a similar style (I think). The night before I had to do my own reading at the retreat, I wrote a paragraph of description of place at the beginning of the scene I planned to read. It works (I like to think) and it is consistent with my voice and style.

Not every book I read is necessarily one that I’d choose myself, but the longer I read critically, the easier it is to evaluate work on how well it’s written and to admire how a writer handles scene or dialogue or plotting in a genre that’s not my personal favorite. Had I not been reading critically and studying the techniques and styles of writers I might not read for my own pleasure, I wouldn’t have discovered this and improved my own writing.

It’s very likely, I’ll return to Reading Like a Writer, by Francine Prose. I read it last year, but I suspect it will be quite a different book when I read it again.

I know most people don’t read this way. I know that when I finish writing my story, no matter how well it's written, it won’t be one that most people will want to read; no story appeals to everyone. I may be consciously making a decision to write in a way that makes the already slim chances of publication even slimmer.

That’s OK. My eyes are open.

Who do you write for? How wide or limited do you imagine your audience to be, and how does that make you feel?

Writing a Great Scene, Part II With Andrea Dupree

Andrea Dupree, MFA serves as the Program Director for Lighthouse Writers Workshop and interim Director of Liberal Studies at the University of Denver’s University College. Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in The Writer’s Chronicle, 5280, Virginia Quarterly Review, Confrontation, and elsewhere.

She received her MFA in creative writing at Emerson College in Boston, and her BA in English and Political Science at the University of California, where she graduated Phi Beta Kappa.

And she is funny. She’s really funny, so of course I loved her sessions.

Andrea taught Writing a Great Scene: Part II at the Lighthouse Writers Getaway last week. The workshop complemented Writing a Great Scene: Part I, where we used movie deconstruction to analyze narrative structure. In this session, we analyzed four excerpts from great books and followed each exercise with writing our own scenes.

In the first exercise, we looked at a scene from Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping. I’ll excerpt the first two paragraphs that we examined here:

“After four days of rain the sun appeared in a white sky, febrile and dazzling, and the people who had left for higher ground came back in rowboats. From our bedroom window we could see them patting their roofs and peering in at their attic windows. ‘I have never seen such a thing,’ Sylvie said. The water shone more brilliantly than the sky, and while we watched, a tall elm tree fell slowly across the road. From crown to root, half of it vanished in the brilliant light.

Fingerbone was never an impressive town. It was chastened by an outsized landscape and extravagant weather, and chastened again by an awareness that the whole of human history had occurred elsewhere. That flood flattened scores of headstones. More disturbing, the graves sank when the water receded, so that they looked a little like hollow sides or empty bellies. And then the library was flooded to a depth of three shelves, creating vast gaps in the Dewey decimal system. The losses in hooked and braided rugs and needle point footstools will never be reckoned. Fungus and mold crept into wedding dresses and photograph albums, so that the leather crumbled in our hands when we lifted the covers, and the sharp smell that rose when we opened them was as insinuating as the smell one finds under a plank or a rock. Much of what Fingerbone had hoarded up was defaced or destroyed outright, but perhaps because the hoard was not much to begin with, the loss was not overwhelming.”

Andrea read the entire scene (a bit longer than this excerpt) aloud and then we read it to ourselves and noted the details. We noted the sounds, sights, smells, tactile details and sounds. We talked about transitions into and out of the scene and then we wrote for fifteen minutes. I wrote a scene for the new story I’m working on. This particular exercise was a particularly valuable one for me because detailed description is something I tend to skimp on.

In the second exercise, we read an excerpt from Tobias Wolff’s memoir This Boy’s Life to analyze the character arc. I won’t excerpt the scene here, but for those familiar with the story, we read the scene where the main character is given a .22 rifle by his mother’s boyfriend. The scene describes ever escalating desires in the character: first he wants the rifle, once he has it and isn’t supposed to handle it when no one is home, but just wants to clean it, then he needs to carry it around, eventually he’s aiming it out the apartment window at people and finally, he ends up shooting a squirrel. We discussed this scene in great detail and the idea of character’s wants and desires. We followed the discussion with a writing exercise and wrote about a character who wants something tangible very badly and either does or does not get it.

As Kurt Vonnegut said in his Creative Writing 101 Tips, “Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.” This is a great exercise and a great reminder to make sure that we’ve done that within our own work.

We then read the Ernest Hemingway short story Hills Like White Elephants. It’s a very short story and is a conversation between a man and a woman sitting in a train station café. What we can pick up from the dialogue – although it’s extremely subtle – is that the relationship between the two has changed, that she has become pregnant and he wants her to have an abortion, although he will not say so and she wants him not to want her to have an abortion. She will also not say so. It’s a wonderful example of the use of subtext. I loved this exercise. We talked about how frequently people really do say exactly what they mean and how uninteresting dialogue is when we don’t show this natural tendency for people to talk around things. We talked about how dialogue is not limited just to words, but is reflected in setting, gestures and silences. We followed the discussion with a writing exercise and wrote about an argument (real or fictional) between two people where the true feelings of the characters are not expressed.

Hmm – this was a great sanity check. Now and then, when we read a conversation where each character’s thoughts are clearly laid out it does seem a little contrived. Unless it’s a therapy session where each is honestly laying out thoughts and true feelings, we as human beings tend to rarely say what we’re thinking. It occurred to me that this is especially true within close relationships.

For this discussion about writing great scenes, we analyzed: sensory details, a character’s nature being at odds with his/her appearance, the art of not saying (or subtext) and changes through action. I think all writers tend to be stronger in some areas than others and prior to sitting through this workshop, I think I minimized the importance of thinking about each and every one of these aspects of scene. They’re all important and by looking back to these four exercises and doing a sanity check on scenes I’ve written, I’ve been able to improve them quite a bit.

Do you tend to skimp or go overboard in certain areas? What are you working to improve in your own scenes?