Strategies
Think Small
Some writers have discovered that the way
to enter the realm of imagination is
through
the hidden door of small event.
Ethan Canin is a case in point. In a chapter titled,
“Smallness and Invention” – or what
I learned
at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop – Canin
tells
us some of his secrets he learned on
the
road to becoming a published writer.
Today,
he is a physician, author of “The Palace
Thief,” “For Kings and Planets,” and
other
books and is now on the faculty of
the Iowa
Writers’ Workshop.
In the book “The Eleventh Draft,” edited
by Frank Conroy, Canin explains the process:
“In my creative writing class I decided that
I would write like John Cheever, that I would seek those elongated phrases,
those elided leaps into the world of
ardor
and transcendence and unearthed human
longing
that shone in his stories like gems
beneath
a stream. How far superior this raw
emotion
seemed to me. How much more profound
and
complex a truth.
In Cheever I found rejuvenation, found his
unbridled emotion electrifying. I began
typing
out some of Cheever’s great paragraphs.
I
simply sat down and typed:
It seemed then to be a sense of pride, an
aureole of lightness and valor, a kind
of
crown. He seemed to hold the crown
up to
scrutiny and what did he find? Was
it merely
some ancient fear of Daddy’s razor
strap
and Mummy’s scowl, some childish subservience
to the bullying world? He well knew
his instincts
to be rowdy, abundant, and indiscreet
and
had he allowed the world and all its
tongues
to impose upon him some structure of
transparent
values for the convenience of a conservative
economy, an established church, and
a bellicose
army and navy? He seemed to hold the
crown,
hold it up into the light, it seemed
made
of light and what it seemed to mean
was the
genuine and tonic taste of exaltation
and
grief.
(SOURCE: “The World of Apples,” from The Stories
of John Cheever)
I suppose this was as important an exercise
as I have ever performed.
I discovered two things: first, that Cheever’s
great, epiphanic leaps were almost
invariably
preceded (and followed, it turned out)
by
paragraphs that accumulated small,
accurate
detail. Initially, this seemed like
a profoundly
important discovery to me. I could
absolutely
engage the fever pitch of emotion that
had
seduced me into writing in the first
place,
so long as I balanced it with large
amounts
of pedestrian observation. I went back
to
the stories I had written and added
detail,
surrounded my epiphanies with line
after
line of small-scale particulars.
But this alone did not make what I’d written
much better, and it was here that I
made
my second, although admittedly in Cheever’s
case, unproved discovery: that the
progression
from detail to epiphany is not a technique
used merely for its effect on the reader,
but that this method is in fact how
a writer
discovers his own material.
This changed my writing forever. To put it
another way: I had chanced upon the
discovery
that for the writer it is not moral
pondering
or grand emotion that are the entrance
to
a story, but detail and small event.
The
next story I wrote I started not with
the
feeling of grandeur that had been my
inspiration
before, but with a narrowed concentration.
I began by imagining a single act:
a man
going for a swim in San Francisco Bay.
I
didn’t start with any message in mind;
I
didn’t start with any climactic emotions
swirling around me; I just started
with the
swim. What I discovered was that as
I wrote
these details, as I imagined myself
striding
down to the dirty shore, as I imagined
myself
plunging into the chilly water, stroking
against the hard current, the story
itself
came to me. And it was not the story
I intended.
It seemed to be a story that came not
from
me but from this character, a salty
old guy
who swam in cold water. The amazing
thing
was, by the end I had actually pitched
myself
up to the same feverish swirl that
had been
my old inspiration. The difference
was that
this time the fever was the result
of the
story and not the cause. I remember
that
the story was actually easy to write.
Redbook
published it. And I bought myself a
used
’67 Mustang hardtop that was gradually
becoming
a convertible.
Source: Excerpts from “The Eleventh Draft,” HarperCollins
Publishers, edited by Frank Conroy,
c 1999.
ISBN 0-06-273639-6
* * * * *
Show, Don't Tell
In The Elements of Style, William Strunk wrote: "Prefer the specific to the general, the definite
to the vague, the concrete to the abstract."
Countless editors put it this way: Show, don't tell.
In other words, covering your main points
in your story either skimpily or with
generalities
falls short of the mark and doesn't
get the
job done. You will need a lot of specific
nuts and bolts, anecdotes and quotations
to make your story come alive.
Don't tell the reader about something; show him!
In The Complete Guide to Magazine Article
Writing, John Wilson wrote: Don't tell us Michael Jordan is tall.
Tell us how many feet and inches. Mention
that he ducks when walking under awnings,
looks down on Joe Montana, bumps his
head
in small cars. Don't tell us someone
is nervous;
tell us how many packs of cigarettes
she
smokes, if she paces, fidgets, has
ulcers.
Don't tell us California has a serious
earthquake
problem. Tell us how many earthquakes
the
state has had in the last ten years,
how
many to expect in the next ten. Tell
us how
many lives, buildings and dollars have
been
lost, how wide and deep the fissures
were.
Don't tell us that people suffered,
show
us -- with an anecdote, figure, quote,
or
vivid description.
Some other examples:
Telling: He makes a fortune singing. Showing: In 1991, his gross income from concerts
and albums was $16 million, placing
him on
Forbes magazine's Top Forty list of
highest-paid
entertainers.
Telling: He loves his guitar. Showing: He got shot trying to save his guitar from
robbers.
Telling: He was inconsiderate and rude. Showing: He sauntered in an hour late, sneering,
and spent the next hour blowing smoke
in
my face as he chain-smoked. The ashes
fell
on an unpressed shirt already stained
with
God-knows-what, and his chin stubble
and
sour breath suggested he'd been up
all night.
"Screw you," he snapped, when I asked
if
I might have a follow-up interview
when he
was more rested.
See what we mean? Which versions do you find
more interesting?
Source: Excerpts from "The Complete Guide to Magazine
Article Writing," by John M. Wilson, c 1993, Writer's Digest Books. ISBN 0-89879-547-8.
