And here’s Part 2 of my talk to the Annapolis Chapter of the Maryland Writer’s Association, in which I get into more of the practical details of self-publishing and marketing one’s books.
November 28, 2013 Leave a Comment
April 22, 2013 Leave a Comment
April 18, 2013 1 Comment
Action is Character
Celebrated crime author David Corbett has a wonderful post over on Joanna Penn’s blog about writing character and especially how character is revealed by action. Check it out. It’s one of the best pieces on character I’ve seen.
I’ll leave it to you to enjoy Corbett’s entire post, but I’ll at least set out for you the five principles that Corbett outlines–emphasizing that they are principles, meaning guidelines that can be applied in myriad ways, not paint-by-number instructions.
First, character is revealed by someone’s need or want. Someone has to be in motion toward some good he wants to get, or evil he wants to avoid, even if it‘s only Bertie Wooster lying in bed wishing he didn’t have to lunch with his Aunt Agatha.
Second, character is revealed when someone, usually after formulating an imperfect plan for achieving his want, runs into difficulty. Obstacles. Conflict. We wouldn’t have a story or a character if Coraline in Neil Gaiman’s eponymous fable didn’t find herself trapped with her “other” mother.
Third, character is revealed when someone exhibits a (seeming) contradiction. As when Flannery O’Connor’s protagonist Hazel Motes in Wise Blood cannot get rid of the thought of Christ no matter how hard he tries to dispel it.
Fourth, character is revealed when something unexpected happens, when the character makes a mistake that renders him vulnerable. Think about when David realizes he married the wrong woman in Dickens’ David Copperfield.
Finally, character is revealed when we realize that there’s more to the character’s predicament than meets the eye. When it’s clear that the character has a secret. As when in The Great Gatsby Nick Carraway goes to lunch with Gatsby and discovers that he associates with gangsters.
What I find marvelous about these principles is the way in which character is revealed more by action–pursuing some want, running into obstacles, trying to overcome them– than by soul-searching. This doesn’t mean that the interior monologue prevalent in so much literary fiction, not to mention in Shakespeare, is unacceptable; it means that even the interior monologue must focus on real patterns of the character’s action, and not just the articulation of emotion, if it is going to succeed.
I also liked how Corbett argues that the reasons why these principles are so important is because they go to the heart of who we are as human beings. Human beings, after all, are characters in stories.
Because I write fiction so much in the comic mode, it’s also interesting for me to think about how these principles are applicable to writing comic characters. I hinted at one such application in mentioning P.G. Wodehouse’s Bertie Wooster. But each of us will have to work to find out how these principles are applicable to the characters we are trying to depict.
Please share with us whatever triumphs, or problems, you experience in this endeavor.
P.S. Corbett has a new book out on this topic: The Art of Character. I for one am looking forward to reading it.
March 22, 2013 Leave a Comment
Free Indirect Speech, Part 2
“Lily, the caretaker’s daughter, was literally run off her feet.”
This opening line from James Joyce’s short story, “The Dead,” is an example of free indirect speech, narration that indicates a character’s internal thoughts and feelings without the use of quotation marks or “he said, he thought” reporting. But how does this line take us inside Lily’s thoughts?
It comes down to the one word “literally.”
As Hugh Kenner points out in his little book, Joyce’s Voices, the use of “literally” in this sentence has no literal reference. Lily, that is, is not literally run off her feet. She’s simply tired from having to go back and forth all the time answering the door. But “literally” is just the kind of word that Lily would use within her own thoughts. We can imagine her muttering to herself, as she runs for the tenth time down the hallway to the door, “I’m literally run off my feet!” It’s a figure of speech, hyperbole in miniature, that Joyce captures in what seems, at first blush, like plain vanilla narration.
What is the effect of free indirect speech?
That of bringing the voices of one’s characters into the narration itself. In free indirect speech, writes James Wood, the narrative “seems to float away from the novelist and take on the properties of the character, who now seems to “own” the words. The writer is free to inflect the reported thought, to bend it around the character’s own words.”
And in so doing, the author makes his narrative voice disappear.
“It was well for her she had not to attend to the ladies also.”
That’s not Joyce-the-Narrator’s voice. That’s Lily’s voice again, Joyce’s narration having taken on the properties of her character.
Free indirect speech is not the only narrative technique there is, but it’s a delightful one to employ, and one we often encounter in our reading without registering it.
What books or short stories do you know that make good use of free indirect speech?
March 20, 2013 Leave a Comment
Free Indirect Speech, Part 1
Let’s distinguish between what critic James Wood calls (1) direct or quoted speech; (2) indirect speech; and (3) free indirect speech. Here are samples of each:
Direct or Quoted Speech (from Anthony Trollope’s The Way We Live Now)
“Of course I love you,” he said, not thinking it worth his while to kiss her. “It’s no good speaking to him here. I suppose I had better go see him in the city.”
Indirect Speech (from Evelyn Waugh’s Put Out More Flags)
For the third time since his return to London, Basil tried to put a call through to Angela Lyne. He listened to the repeated buzz, five, six, seven times, then hung up the receiver. Still away, he thought; I should have liked to show her my uniform. [emphasis added]
Free Indirect Speech (from James Joyce’s short story, “The Dead”)
Lily, the caretaker’s daughter, was literally run off her feet.
Direct or quoted speech is just that: the flagging by quotation marks of the actual speech of one’s characters. The example from Trollope’s The Way We Live Now also has an element of indirect speech…
Indirect speech is the author’s narration reporting the internal thoughts of the characters. The emphasized line from the passage from Waugh’s Put Out More Flags tells what his character, Basil Seal, is thinking, as flagged by the author’s use of “he thought.” The first person “I” (“I should have liked…”) is not directly quoted; it is reported by the author within the context of “he thought.”
In free indirect speech the internal thoughts of the characters are indicated without the use either of quotation marks or mechanisms such as “he thought.”
But how? Consider the famous first line from Joyce’s “The Dead.” What is it about this line that takes us inside the thought of Lily?
Think on it–and we’ll return to this tomorrow.
* See the first chapter, “Narrating,” in James Wood, How Fiction Works (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2008).
March 14, 2013 Leave a Comment
The Great American Production Line
The other day I mentioned the distinction between technological thinking and philosophical thinking, and how our culture in general, and electronic media in particular, are dominated by technological thinking. Now we are seeing that technological thinking is seeping into the creative act of writing books.
In a piece today on Page-Turner, the book blog of The New Yorker, Betsy Morais surveys several companies who are trying to streamline the process of writing a book by breaking it down into a set of component parts and then finding the best way to make those parts work together at maximum efficiency. As on a production line.
So a writer will farm out his book to an editor even while the first draft is in progress, because the immediate feedback at the gestation stage will help the writer create a product that will better satisfy his target audience. Guy Kawasaki created his recent book on self-publishing, APE, in just this way–and apparently to great success.
But Kawasaki’s book was a “how-to” book. It strikes me that this kind of test-marketing during the gestation stage of a book would work best with a product that is itself technological in nature. But what if you’re writing The Great American Novel?
The first draft (at least) of a work of fiction or creative non-fiction is not a group project. At this stage the writer has to work out for himself how to make the most of his material (language) with the tools at his disposal (the principles of his craft and the habits he has gained so far in applying them). This act of creativity is, in large part, an exercise in philosophical thinking, and no one can do philosophical thinking for you.
Even if they could, why would you want them to? Isn’t this supposed to be your vision?
Bring in the A-Team (mentors, editors, beta-readers, writing groups, spell-checkers, marketers) either before or after the gestation period. But achieve the discipline necessary to leave the gestation period itself alone.
