Creative Writing - Phase Eight

It’s all about the fiction we write.

But first, I want to repeat something I did at the beginning of this: Each Phase is here to help you help yourself; to step up your writing a notch or two, perhaps give you new twists on old ideas, and perhaps snap you out of a “writer’s cramp” [I dislike the term writer’s block].

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To write fiction, is to write a story with imaginary people and events. While authors sometimes write fiction based on real events or people, the form’s underlying quality is that it springs from the author’s imagination. In this section, I will show examples of several things that have previously been discussed.

First Person: The “I” tells the story. First person is the only POV where the narrator is an active character in the story being told.

Example: I stand at the window of this great house in the south of France as night falls, the night which is leading me to the most terrible morning of my life. I have a drink in my hand, there is a bottle at my elbow. I watch my reflection in the darkening gleam of the window pane. My reflection is tall, perhaps rather like an arrow, my blonde hair gleams. My face is like a face you have seen many times. My ancestors conquered a continent, pushing across death-laden plains, until they came to an ocean which faced away from Europe into a darker past.

James Baldwin—Giovanni’s Room

In first person everything must be experienced through the narrator. This means the narrator doesn’t necessarily know how other characters feel or what other characters know. To do so, would include dialogue, scene action, and a narrator’s subjective opinion.

Here is another example:

It had grown dark that we could see the passage of light through the sky from the lighthouse at Cape Heron. In the dark below the cliff, the continual detonations of surf sounded. And then, as she often does when it is getting dark and she had drunk too much before dinner, Mother began to talk about improvements and additions that would someday be made on the house, the wings and bathroom and gardens.

“The house will be in the sea in five years,” Lawrence said.

“Tiffy the Croaker,” Chaddy said.

“Don’t call me Tiffy,” Lawrence said.

“Little Jesus,” Chaddy said.

“The sea wall is badly cracked,” Lawrence said. “I looked at it this afternoon. You had it repaired four years ago, and it cost eight thousand dollars. You can’t do that every four years.”

“Please, Tiffy,” Mother said,

“Facts are facts,” Lawrence said, “and it’s a damned-fool idea to build a house at the edge of a cliff on a sinking coastline. In my lifetime, half the garden has washed away and there’s four feet of water where we used to have a bathhouse.”

“Let’s have a very general conversation,” Mother said bitterly. “Let’s talk about politics or the boat-club dance.”

“As a matter of fact,” Lawrence said, “the house is probably in some danger now. If you had an unusually high sea, a hurricane sea, the wall would crumble, and the house would go. We could all be drowned.”

“I can’t bear it, Mother said. She went into the pantry and came back with a full glass of gin.

I have grown too old now to think that I can judge the sentiments of others, but I was conscious of the tension between Lawrence and Mother, and I knew some of the history of it.

John Cheever—Goodbye My Brother

With Second Person, the “you” tells the story. Second person is not a common POV in fiction because the “you” intrudes into the reader’s space, asking them to accept the character and his/her experiences as their own. (Pay attention to how advertisers use the second person to sell their stuff.) This is a very tricky style for a novel, and it is difficult to sustain for long periods of time, but it can be interesting and persuasive for shorter pieces.

Here is an example:

Let me open it up for you.

There’s a gift in your lap and it’s beautifully wrapped and it’s not your birthday. You feel wonderful, you feel like somebody knows you’re alive, you feel fear because it could be a bomb, because you think you’re that important.

When you open the wrapping (there’s no card), you find a bowl, a green bowl with a white interior, a bowl for fruit or mixing. You’re puzzled, but obediently put four bananas inside then go back to whatever you were doing before: a crossword puzzle. You wonder and hope this is from a secret admirer but if so, you think, why a box? What are you to learn and gain from a green and white fruit bowl.

This is when you think about the last lover you had and feel bad about yourself. This is when you stand with your pencil poised over the crossword puzzle and stare at the wall.This is when you laugh aloud, alone, to yourself, at something funny he/she said once about crossword puzzles and feel ridiculous for still being able to be entertained by this lover of yore who slept facing the wall and wanted less than you wanted.

You want a lot.

Aimee Bender—Bowl

With Third Person, the story is written about a person, place, or thing. Similar to first person in its scope, third person limited closely follows the thoughts and actions of one-character inhabiting that character. The difference between third person limited and first person: ‘I’, in first person is replaced by “he” or “she” in third person limited, thereby removing the narrator in the story being told.

Another example:

Nothing was changed in the town except that the young girl had grown up. But they lived in such a complicated world of already defined alliances and shifting feuds that Krebs did not feel the energy or the courage to break into it. He liked to look at them, though.There were so many good-looking young girls. Most of them had their hair cut short.When he went away only little girls wore their hair like that or girls that were fast. They all wore sweaters and shirt waists with round Dutch collars. It was a pattern. He liked to look at them from the front porch as they walked on the other side of the street. He liked to watch them walking under the shade of the trees. He liked the round Dutch collars above their sweaters. He liked their silk stockings and flat shoes. He liked their bobbed hair and the way they walked.

Ernest Hemmingway—Soldier’s Home

Now I want to take you to Third Person Omniscient.

The story is told by a single, distinct, unnamed narrator (person or author) who can dip into the thoughts of any character involved in the story. Often referred to as God’s POV, and this POV gives the writer free license to explore the story on so many different level.

While omniscient narrators can dig deeply into a character’s thoughts, as in the previous examples, they can also use their own voice to fill in any background information/details (time, place, and characters) of the story or offer up objective observations. Omniscient narrators can put themselves outside the story as a passive observer free of the character’s thoughts.

As in the following two examples:

The houses were left vacant on the land, and the land was vacant because of this. Only the twelve tractor sheds of corrugated iron, silver and gleaming, were alive; and they were alive with metal and gasoline and oil, the disks of the plows shining. The tractors had lights shining, for there is no day or night for a tractor and the disks turn the earth in the darkness and they glitter in the daylight. And when a horse stops work and goes into the barn there is life and a vitality left, there is a breathing and a warmth, and the feet shift the straw, and the jaws chomp on the hay, and the ears and eyes are alive. There is a warmth of light in the barn, and the heat and smell of life. But when the motor of a tractor stops, it is as dead as the ore it came from. The heat goes out of it like the living heat goes out of a corpse. Then the corrugated iron doors are closed, and the tractor man drives home to town, perhaps twenty miles away, and he need not come back for weeks or months, for the tractor is dead. And this is easy and efficient. So easy that the wonder goes out of work, so efficient that the wonder goes out of the land and the working of it, and with the wonder the deep understanding and relation. And in the tractor man there grows the contempt that comes only to a stranger who has little understanding and no relation. For nitrates are not the land, nor phosphates and the length of fiber in the cotton is not land. Carbon is not a man, nor salt nor water nor calcium. He is all three, but he is much more; and the land is so much more than its analysis.

John Steinbeck—The Grapes of Wrath

After lunch they were both overwhelmed by the sudden flatness that comes over American travelers in quiet foreign places. No stimuli worked upon them, no voices called them from without, no fragments of their own thoughts came suddenly from the minds of others and missing the clamor of Empire they felt that life was not continuing here.

F. Scott Fitzgerald—Tender is the Night

The following is something that Alice Munro, author of: Train—Dear Life and several short story collections has to say about story structure.

“A story is not like a road to follow, it’s more like a house. You go inside and stay there for a while, wandering back and forth and settling where you like and discovering how the rooms and the corridors relate to each other, how the world outside is altered as well as being in this enclosed space, whether it is ample and easy or full of crooked turns, or sparsely or opulently furnished. You can go back again and again and the house, the story, always contains more than you saw the last time. It has also a sturdy sense of itself, of being built out of its own necessity, not just to shelter or beguile you. To deliver a story like that durable and freestanding, is what I am always hoping for.”

I want to touch bases on three different areas in fiction (again). I say again, because you can never allow yourself to think they are unimportant to worry about. Repetition is the key to understanding your craft. You can moan, groan and bellyache all you will, just as with what you have finished looking over—but you must never lose sight of the importance of these skills to help you improve your technique, your style of writing.

These areas are: Setting – Dramatic Dialogue – Vocabulary. At the end of these, I will give you five choices of what you should experiment with in your writing.

Setting:

Just like character, setting is an important aspect of the story. You should create a clear picture of where the story takes place for your reader. Let’s say you are writing a story set in a New York City apartment. Describe the apartment as if your reader is blind and needs all the details to create a mental picture. Are the walls cracked or smooth or raw brick? Has it been painted recently (paint has that specific odor)? Is the apartment musky? Do the walls smell of wet plaster from a leaky pipe or flowers or a wet dog? What would some of these details tell the reader? How does the setting affect the story or the characters? How does the setting propel the story? Knowing these details will help create the story’s context, grounding the characters and reader in a specific time and place.

Dramatic Dialogue:

Dialogue includes everything that is said by characters in a story as well as gestures accompanying those statements or questions. Good dialogue is more than simply words spoken by characters. It should work on many levels; moving the story forward, revealing details of the characters in the process, and coloring the themes, such as: drama, fantasy, comedy, and the like.

Vocabulary

Words are the building blocks of writing, and as writers, you should know this by now (and I mean that saying even before you came here to read what is given you). But this doesn’t mean the more complex words you use, the better your writing will be. Write naturally and in a familiar voice with words you know. It is sometimes better to use a word you know rather that one you don’t (and generally if you don’t understand it, neither will the reader). Feeling comfortable with your own vocabulary is a good tool for better writing. If you want to expand your vocabulary, the best ways to do so naturally are to read (there is that key word again—read) widely and have a dictionary close at hand.

“You expect far too much from a first sentence. Think of it as analogous to a good country breakfast; what we want is something simple but nourishing to the imagination.Hold the philosophy, hold the adjectives, just give us plain subject and verb and perhaps a wholesome, nonfattening verb or two.”

Larry McMurtry—Author of Lonesome Dove – The Last Picture Show, Terms of Endearment and Horsemen, Pass By (more well known as the film Hud with Paul Newman). I mention all these novels because McMurtry is a diversified novelist. He also wrote several serial novels. McMurtry refused to allow himself to be typed-cast as a one genre-type author.

Just something for you to think about.

Now, as promised, five writing exercises for you to contemplate writing. Choose which one suits your fancy.

1) Write about someone telling a lie. Every time it gets stagnant, make the lie bigger.

2) Choose a personal real-life story and write it as you would tell it. Don’t censor yourself; just “talk” it out on the written page.

3) Write about a specific place from your early childhood to early teen years that means a lot to you. Focus on the sensory details—what you can see, hear, touch, smell and taste. If you have trouble remembering some details, make them up.

4) Write a piece of fiction about a portrait (no, not a painting) of someone you know nothing about. Think to yourself: what would he/she want more than anything else in the world. What is preventing him/her from getting it? What is he/she going to do about it?

5) Since I am retired, I can say I no longer have one, but many of you do, and this could prove to be an interesting write (fiction, just remember that). Write about the worst boss you ever had.

Coming next, science fiction.