A Holistic Milestone

After a super stag night, Colin wonders how he will make Norwich by noon.

Nathan Bransford has posted a brief novel-writing masterclass which is well worth a read.

I've been contemplating something similar, from a more holistic pov, just as a reminder, a milestone, a snapshot, so's I'll have something to chuckle over and comment on in a year or two. (Hello future solv! Hope you've finally got somewhere with the writing you lovely jejeune fool!)

So I shall take a brief sabbatical from the rewrites and spend some quality time with my maggoty companions.

1) Emotional topography:

The interwebnet-a-tron is burgeoning with top techniques for writers. But what purpose do these techniques serve? WHY should I control pace or know my characters inside out or plot or temper my exposition?

Primarily, everything unites to provide the reader with a set of emotional reactions. (Emotional response is more visceral than intellectual response.)

Make 'em laugh and make 'em cry, etc. Has there ever been a great novel which has failed to provoke emotional response?

2) Interest:

We haven't suckled on the teats of the N400 for a while eh?

There's a measurable and demonstrable response within human beings (also known as readers) which suggests that we grow bored if we're not presented with enough stimulae, and that we become stressed if we're presented with too much. It's why we have cookies/breadcrumbs/candy bars/gold coins. It's why we have reveals/reversals/twists/turns. It's probably why everything.

Bob McKee suggests that the full-length novel defaults to a minimum of three acts because three major reversals is the minimum required to sustain a reader's interest.

3) Change:

Lump your expositions and developments and reversals and denouements all under this leathery N400 umbrella! Change demonstrates that the narrative is heading somewhere. If the reader does not believe that the narrative is heading somewhere, she will go elsewhere. Change ensures that the protag's path is not straight, which is lovely because why read on when the end is predictable? Change creates dynamism and prevents stagnation. And, as the N400 indicates, the ramifications of meaningful change must be ramped up incrementally. (I mean to do another post on this because I wonder, under this provision, how it might be possible to open with a momentous change.)

After a super hen night, June wonders how she will make Norwich by noon.

4) Expectation:
Change creates expectation. My fave exponent is the countdown, a (tired) staple of the Russell (Tiberius) Davies plot which defies the viewer to leave her armchair because we all know that after ten and nine comes eight and somewhere at the end things will climax. You don't even need the numbers; there are more sophisticated forms of countdown. I remember seeing a rather disturbing cartoon in which a woman began to strip. The imagined climax is her naked right? But, when she was naked, she removed pieces of skin and bones and organs until she was just a hand with nothing more to pluck. I have also seen guys on their lunch breaks watching a cleverly looped striptease in which a woman sheds garments endlessly. It's amazing to observe just how long a person will watch this animation, long after they have sussed that it's looping. Another sophisticated form of countdown is the chase. In fact, you could probably take the title of every gameshow ever televised and label it 'expectation'. Well, maybe not Celebrity Squares.
Typically, the countdown will contain mini countdowns, or it will be replaced with a smaller countdown. Perhaps all expectation is a countdown?, in that space is charged because a resolution is expected.

5) Charged Space:
To that end, I'd suggest that all a writer needs to know about plot is that it should be a string of charged spaces created by hooks, organised for maximum effect. Yay for contentious statements!

6) Truth:
The honesty of an observation, a remark, a description; the most essential and evocative thing required to not simply elicit an emotional response, but to elicit the most accurate, precise, appropriate emotional response with sincerity and conviction. The ability to reveal the truth is what makes the difference between a good response and a great response. Holly Lisle reckons that writing should be painful; that an author cannot hope to move the reader if she cannot move herself. When the author discerns that insightful truth, she will feel it deeply. Research shows* that, in our day-to-day lives, words account for only 7% of human communication. So what is really happening? What is really going on beneath the surface? How are we actually making sense of our surroundings? What is the truth that we are discerning? Why does that person scare us? Why does that tree fill us with glee?

Anyone have any thoughts to share? I am going to eat fish.

*From Introducing NLP by Joseph O'Connor and John Seymour. Of human communication, 38% is afforded to voice tonality, and 55% to body language.

Truth

Truth - Kamini Baghel.

Probably more than any other thing, Hemingway was always banging on about truth.
He distrusted similes and he distrusted adjectives. He demanded the mot juste.
But what did he mean?

With my ms typed up, I drew breath and plunged back into it, beginning at the beginning, performing major surgery, renovating crumbled chunks of plot, hammering and sweeping, and something occurred to me.
In those portions of chapters which remain from long ago, I discovered clumps of adjectives.
Curious, I thought. Looks like I'm hiding from something; looks like I've constructed these little bunkers of adjectives to protect something.
Beneath those clusters of adjectives, I had buried the truth; likely, I had been unable to find the truth and so chose to hide this fact from my reader so that he would not notice.
The truth, as Hem referred to it, is the cleanest, most functional and succinct essence of a thing; it is the perfect observation - the bare heart of the thing we are attempting to convey.

If we consider the truth in this way, we find answers to so many questions.
Remember the old 'What's wrong with adverbs?' discussions we used to have?
Easy!
He walked slowly.
No he didn't.
He ambled.
Adjectives, like adverbs, can needlessly clutter and extend a sentence.
Needlessly is an adverb. However, without it, the meaning of that sentence isn't complete as I intend it. Ergo, it is right.
(N.B. Always looking to remove adverbs: ... can clutter and prolong a sentence? [Both inferred as needless?])
It's one of the simplest ways to spot the first-time author. Their opening paragraph contains six adverbs, and each adverb is unnecessary because, with a little more consideration, the author would have found the perfect verb - the mot juste.

Okay, that was Hem's truth. But Hem's writing isn't to everyone's taste. Although his principles all have merit, I personally would prefer to discover the occasional flight of fancy - the stream of consciousness - the sentence which is soused in the narrator's PRS, in the narrator's unbridled passion so that things are slate blue like the lips of a dead angel, round and soft and freckled with the claret blood of discarded life, etc.
Sure, each word still needs to be right; and sure, Hem's warnings about adjectives and similes are worth bearing in mind; but it's your choice, right? It's your style, not his.

I've also made a distinction between the stream of consciousness which I have always derided, and the stream of consciousness which I admire, and which accounts for the bulk of many lit-fic novels.
The first is an excuse for lack of control; it is the unfettered slurry of words spewn upon the page without consideration or understanding - the first thing to enter one's head.
The second is a controlled simulation of the first.
I love it, when the narrator remembers that he was supposed to collect his tie from the dry-cleaners. I love it even more when he remembers this thing just after arriving home to discover his wife swinging from a noose of electric cable. I don't love it when it appears without reason or when it harms the narrative or pace, or when it is there to hide a weakness or to stall.

So my little clusters of adjectives. Sometimes they are right because they come from the narrator's heart and are controlled and are right for the moment. But sometimes they are artificial.
If you fancy experimenting, have a go at describing the painting above using adjectives, and then without, and compare the results. Or, if you were permitted to use only two adjectives to describe the painting, what would they be?

To demonstrate all of this, here's an extract from Ali Smith's The Accidental:

Astrid dreams of a horse in a field. The field is full of dead grass, all yellowed, and ribs are showing on the horse. Behind the horse an oilwell or a heap of horses or cars is burning. The sky is full of black smoke. A bird which doesn't exist any more flies past her. She sees the shining black of its eye as it flashes past. It is one of the last sixty of its species in the world.

Invent or Remember?

Strange Japanese invention #1: Hair noodle protector.

I made something of a momentous discovery yesterday.

I have been mulling over a letter that Gertrude Stein wrote to Hemingway. In the letter, she told Hem that she thought the things he invented were superior to the things he remembered.

Worth taking a moment to think about this.

I'm sure that, in part, my mood board was designed to put this idea to the test.
Anyhoo, the mood board was surprisingly unsuccessful.
Lying in bed last night, I was thinking of the descriptions I had made, of the things I had found in the images, and of the things I had remembered. After a little thought, I found the one description that transformed the scene, and it was something that did not exist in the mood board.
I had inadvertantly hit upon the very reason why my mood board was, largely, a failure, there in the post, an afterthought in brackets!

Under the regulations of the narrator's knowledge and make-up!

It's not enough to find those essential details. The essence of those details needs to be the essence that the narrator (in this case, the protag [first-person]) would find.

But that's not quite right either.

Allow me to refer you, gentle reader, to my previous thoughts on the benefits of a Primary Representational System:
In considering the cases for and against, I gave myself this argument:

Because we each have a PRS, by giving one to our characters, they become more like real people, and we can use their PRS to characterise. However, by choosing to prioritise one RS over the others, we jeapordise our chances of forming any rapport with those readers whose PRSs are different to any given character's.

The argument is a bit messy, because I should have distinguished between narrator and character.
I still contend that characters are better defined through a PRIMARY RS.

However, the narrator is not simply a character. The narrator is the umbilical cord between fiction and the reader's reality. Or, less pragmatically, the narrator is part character and part reader.
As such, to imbue the narrator with a Primary RS is to cut away huge chunks of the reader.

Therefore, I now contend that the narrator should not absorb and regurgitate the world through the sieve of a PRIMARY RS. The narrator should, in reasonably equal measures, see, hear, smell, taste and touch the world. In this way, every permutation of reader RS's is satisfied.

Strange Japanese invention #2: Portable office tie.

So back to Gertude.

I think, what she was telling Hem, was that his employment of a PRIMARY RS (taste) went some way towards the criticisms that were often hurled at Hem: That his writing was sterile. (Not to be confused with clinical!)
This might be because:
When Hem remembered, he did so through the filter of his own Representational Systems.
When Hem invented, he did so with a thought for the reader (and, possibly subconsciously, broke from his filter).
Certainly, it's interesting to see how Hem's band of RS's widened as he matured.

N.B. Piaget once said that people learn most when they have to invent. Particularly interesting if you consider that the reader and narrator learn simultaneously.

Still some way to go with these thoughts. But for now, I have enough to understand why some of my descriptions work well, while others feel wrong. PRIMARY for characters, GENERAL for narrator.

Strange Japanese invention #3: Ten-in-one gardening tool.

Here's a thought to leave you with:
What would happen if you took two of your characters and made them into one?

Mood Board: Coastal Sunrise

I've spent the morning collating all my plot points and notes for the final act and have organised them into chapters and have done lots of research and immersed myself in the textures of the opening chapter. Now I need to compile a mood board to find the essential mood of that chapter.
(I've also added a link to a wonderful colour-picking site - top right under Words > colours.)
So here's my mood board! See how many marvellous little details there are to be discovered, recreated and decanted, and woven together (under the regulations of the narrator's knowledge and make-up)! Ooh, I'm all excited!


For myself ... the problem was one of depiction and waking in the night I tried to remember what it was that seemed just out of my remembering and that was the thing that I had really seen and, finally, remembering all around it, I got it. When he [matador] stood up, his face white and dirty and the silk of his breeches opened from waist to knee, it was the dirtiness of the rented breeches, the dirtiness of his slit underwear and the clean, clean, unbearably clean whiteness of the thigh bone that I had seen, and it was that which was important.

Hemingway: Death in the Afternoon.

N.B. All images taken from public domain (Google images). No watermarks have been removed. No profit is being made from reproduction of images.

Some notes on copyright of public domain images here.