Be Specific!

Be specific. Make the mundane memorable.

I've been on a binge of nonfiction reading this summer, which is odd since fiction is usually my go-to summer read. But the heart wants what the heart wants, and this summer, my heart wants nonfiction. I am reading it first for the content, but it's hard not to read with one eye on the writing style, which has ranged from the highly academic, loaded down with the kinds of words and sentences found in an Ivy League senior thesis, to warm, simple and intimate, elucidated through anecdote.

The latest nonfiction on my bed table is AN ALTAR IN THE WORLD, by Barbara Brown Taylor, whose personal and connected style really speaks to me. She does occasionally get lost in a wilderness of metaphor, but her ability to ground spiritual things in the real world is powerful and engaging. I realized today that part of her magic comes from being specific.  Here's the sentence that pointed me in that direction:

While I was a cocktail waitress I once spilled a whole Singapore Sling down the back of an Australian woman's red fox coat.

 I read this sentence several times. It seemed so exotic and interesting to me. Then I stepped back. This was no adventure on the high seas. What was she really saying? "One time when I was a waitress I spilled a drink on a customer." BORING!  But make it specific and it's almost like a travel brochure. We visit Singapore and Australia and go fox hunting in England all in one sentence, and suddenly this mundane bit of narrative is rich and textured.

For most of us, specificity belongs to the realm of revision, until we're practiced enough for it to become second-nature. On a first draft, you're capturing ideas and broad strokes. It's not the time to linger over every word and wonder "Is this specific enough?" But when you revise, look for those places where you have chosen the overly general word. Then take it further. Not just a waitress, a cocktail waitress. Not just a drink, a Singapore Sling. Not just a customer, a woman. What kind of woman? An Australian woman. Where was the drink spilled? Down her back. What was she wearing? A coat. What kind of coat? A red fox coat. Bam. Be specific and the mundane becomes the memorable. A rose by any another name may smell just as sweet, but it will affect your reader differently.

White Space - The Impact of Paragraph Indents

When I was in elementary school, I learned about paragraphs through nonfiction writing.  We learned that a paragraph had a topic sentence, supporting details and a conclusion.  I don't remember how or if I learned about using paragraphs in fiction, other than the rule that a new speaker means a new paragraph.  

When I became a teacher and started working with the Lucy Culkins writing curriculum (which I've mentioned here before), I learned some good basic rules for paragraph breaks in narrative, rules I was probably following without even realizing it.  When there is a change in time, place or speaker, or when a new character enters the scene, you generally start a new paragraph.  

Of course, since narratives are about people, and people don't follow rules very well, the rules can only get you so far.  On my last round of revisions for SPARROW'S SECRET HEART, I found myself obsessing over the impact of paragraph breaks, the way that white space at the end of one line and the beginning of the next affected the rhythm and pacing of a scene and changed the emotional focus.  I realized paragraph breaks are a way to create beats.  

Just as a book is made of chapters and chapters are made of scenes, scenes are made of beats.  "Beat" is a term I first learned in theater.  According to Wordreference.com, a "beat" is "the smallest unit of action in a scene. ... It involves a shift in the action, thought, or emotion of the actor."  (I invite my theater and acting friends to chime in here with better, more nuanced or experience-driven explanations).  

Are you on a late revision round and running into a moment that's just not working?  Maybe it's time to look at the beats and the paragraph breaks.  Within the rules, there's some wiggle room that just might make the difference.

Zoom In, Zoom Out - The Big Picture and the Details

I think being a writer must be a lot like being a camera person.  You have to know where to focus, when a close-up is needed and when to pan out.  We have to keep this in mind not only from the audience's perspective, but also from our own perspective.  

Sometimes we have to step back to look at the shape of the whole thing.  Does our plot structure serve our story?  Are the scenes in the right place?  Is there a build both to the plot and to the character arcs?  Is there a strong, clear climax and turning point?  What about the pacing?  Are some scenes too long or too short?  Is there a mix of rapid action with occasional moments to breathe?  To spot these things, you have to zoom out.

How do you zoom out?  An outline or synopsis can help.  For me, I always reach a point where I have to print out the whole manuscript, let it rest, then read through it all and have others read through it.  I've also found that the Scrivener program is a great tool for looking at the big picture shape of a longer manuscript.

Still, you can't keep your distance all the time.  Attention to the details is what brings the story to life, what makes the world you've created and the characters in it feel real.  For that, you have to zoom in.  Look at the shape of each individual scene.  Think intently about word choice.  Clear out some of those verbs of awareness.  Find strong language to use instead of placeholders (those words or phrases that come most quickly to us, do the job and hold the spot but are ultimately weak or overused).  Pay attention to the rhythm and pacing of individual words, sentences and paragraphs.  Does the language slow things down when the action should be galloping forward?

This dance between big picture and details is all about balance.  Zoom in.  Polish.  Zoom out.  Assess.  Zoom in again.

What tricks or tools do you find useful in shifting perspective on your story?

Three Tricks to Strengthen Your Word Choices

Here are a few nuggets I learned from Wordstock's Teacher as Writer workshop. You may already know these tricks of line editing and revision, but they raised the bar for me.

Verbs of awareness: "Saw", "heard", "thought", "felt", "tasted", and similar words are verbs of awareness. They point out the presence of the protagonist as separate from the reader and thereby distance your reader from the action. They draw attention to the process of noticing. When we see something, we don't think in our heads, "I see that." Instead, we register the thing itself. Often, writers use verbs of awareness in order to avoid what many of us see as one of the seven deadly sins of writing - the verb "to be." Teacher as Writer instructor Joanna Rose radically suggested we should embrace the verb "to be" as a means of removing verbs of awareness and making the sensory experiences of our characters more immediate. For example:

"I saw the monster rise up out of the lake. I heard its horrible groans. As I turned and ran down the path, I felt the brambles scrape my cheeks."
OR
"The monster rose up out of the lake. It let out a horrible groan. I ran. Brambles scraped my cheeks."

For those of us who are teachers, verbs of awareness are a great scaffold while we are helping students build their skills at incorporating sensory details. But the language is even stronger when the scaffolding eventually goes away and there's nothing left between the reader and the sensory experience itself.

Redundancy: Look for places where you state the obvious. For example, if you've placed your characters inside a truck, you don't need to say, "I leaned against the truck window." "Window" alone will suffice. When you start getting good at the infamous skill of "show don't tell," you'll find redundancies popping up all over the place. If you show us the character speaking in an uncertain manner, for example, you no longer have to tell us they said something "uncertainly." Once you start looking for these, its amazing how many you'll find. It helps to have another pair of eyes looking, too.

Latin language vs. Saxon language: This was both the trickiest and most transformative concept for many of us at the workshop. Words with Latin roots, often multi-syllabic words, tend to create emotional distance. When a scene calls for emotional weight and gut-level power, the simple, usually mono-syllabic, punch of saxon-derived words has a stronger impact. For example:

"Humanity imbues astrological bodies with narrative."
OR
"We tell stories about the stars."

Feel the difference? For all the juicy fun of high-blown academic language, sometimes simple, blunt words are the strongest.

The distance provided by latinate words can come in handy for humor or irony. The cutting, sardonic tone of writers such as Charles Dickens, Edith Wharton and Jane Austen often comes from the juxtaposition of latinate commentary against ugly, base truth. However, if you find that a scene you're writing just isn't having the emotional impact it should, maybe there are some latinate words getting in the way.

These three tricks have given me some new tools for fine-tuning my writing. What are some of your favorite, straight-forward revision or editing strategies that bring out the emotional punch by polishing your writing craft?

Fearless Revision

"What if I rewrite the whole thing in first person?"
"What if I cut this chapter entirely?"
"What if death is the narrator?"
"What if there are 4 different narrators?"
"What if I write it as a blog?"
"What if she turns into a hippo instead of a moose?"

There was a time when I revised like an ancient, nearsighted clockmaker, turning over every word and phrase, tinkering with the minutest mechanism, making miserly revisions as if each change cost me and each letter was crafted from grains of diamond dust. I love treating words with so much affection and care, but I'm thankful that I have finally developed the courage to make more fearless revisions, skydiving, bungee-jumping revisions, the kind of revisions that change the entire landscape of a manuscript.

My whole critique group seems to have entered this phase of development together, which makes it ten times more exhilarating. When one of us announces, "I think I'm going to cut that whole section and move the important parts here instead," we cheer, we exult. It feels like we've all gone cliff-diving together.

Perhaps the support and safety of this long-term critique group has given me the foundation of confidence to take those plot-shattering leaps. Or maybe this liberation comes with writing novel-length pieces. Perhaps it's a function of exposing myself, over a period of time, to multiple critiques. Or maybe being in the habit of writing has made the words less scarce and therefore less precious, the process less like mining gold and more like cultivating a garden.

What is the most fearless, radical change you've ever made in a piece of your own writing? How did it affect the story?

If you've found yourself saying, "What if I ....?" or "I wonder what would happen if ...." then I challenge you to grab the hands of some fellow writers and take that vigorous plunge! What have you got to lose?