Writers: Advice - Plotting, Characters, Dialog, Sentences, Scenes, Hemingway!

 This may be a bit of a hodgepodge, a little cleaning out of the YouTube list of videos to watch and what is coming through my email.

You will find a varying sense of tone, but writing is hard enough not to have some humor. I know I need it - my self-editing skills are a bit of a joke. Almost as much as my writing skills.

Read! Read! Read! then Write! Write! Write! That is my biggest takeaway from  P. D. James, The Art of Fiction, No. 141 (Paris Review). But reading with purpose can ruin a story - just beware of that.

Pay attention to what you see that makes you feel - per Hemingway.

Empathy, get at the emotions in clear language. There is in me still that Midwestern reticence about emotions. It is not a good excuse for you, who is not an old man. Remember, Hemingway also came out of the Midwest.

Have I shown empathy? Do I get emotions across? Well, I am pondering that still. Work to do.

The Wallstrait Wall of Writing Wisdom - I may never get published here, and that might not be a bad thing so long as they keep adding to this page.

Remember, there are no shortcuts to getting published. Unless you know someone in publishing. Or you have a lotta social media followers. Or you played baseball or used to be in the mob or something. With only several hundred exceptions, there are absolutely no shortcuts to getting published.

Murakami & unique scenes:

Hemingway & sentences:

Dialog:

Breaking down the different kinds of dialog - plot driven to witty:

KH called when he was about halfway through my latest version of "Theresa Pressley Attends Mike Devlin's Viewing". He said there was a lot of back-and-forth, exposition. When I heard "exposition", I was crestfallen. I had my characters telling stories, commenting on the stories told, and just talking. I did not think that as mere exposition, which I think of in terms of info dumping. He went on to say it could be a play. Well, plays depend on dialog. There are no big action scenes in "Theresa Pressley" - no gun battles, one act of violence - it is a series of arguments confronting the effects of actions taken, of emotions felt, which seems to me the province of dialog. I have not yet heard from him regarding the balance of the story. 

Plotting:

 P. D. James, The Art of Fiction, No. 141 (Paris Review)

INTERVIEWER

A number of modern novelists and playwrights admit that they have trouble inventing plots. I remember Tom Stoppard saying this one day. Many dispense with plot altogether and write novels in which nothing in particular happens. In the detective story the plot is all. How do you plot your stories after you have got the setting? Do you start writing immediately?

JAMES

No. Not for months. I think many people don’t know how to plot and can’t tell stories anymore. Some writers could do it but don’t want to, they wish to be different. But there is a tradition of strong narrative thrust in English fiction and all our great novelists of the past have had it. For myself I believe plot is necessary, although it would be easy to write a book without it. In the thirties, the so-called golden age of the detective story, plot was everything. Indeed what people wanted was ingenuity of plot. You couldn’t have an ordinary murder; it had to be done with exceptional cunning. It was the age when corpses were found in locked rooms with locked windows and a look of horror on their faces. With Agatha Christie ingenuity of plot was paramount—no one looked for subtlety of characterization, motivation, good writing. It was rather like a literary card trick. Today we’ve moved closer to the mainstream novel, but nevertheless we need plot. It takes me as long to develop the plot and work out the characters as to write the book. Sometimes longer. So once I’ve got the setting, I begin to get in touch with the people, as it were, and last of all the clues. With Devices and Desires I had fifteen notebooks—I went back to the original setting and took notes about the sky, the landscape, the architecture, the local people . . . It is a curious process—I feel that the characters in the story already exist in a limbo outside my control, and what I’m doing over the months of gestation is getting in touch with them and learning about them.

I have been trying to write unlikeable characters for over a decade. It fits into my being a moral leper. However, it seems to me that being likeable gets a little obnoxious. Lincoln Michel's What's Not to Like about "Unlikeable Characters"? makes several points that left me feeling that I am onto something.

When I think of the characters I love from literature, they’re all unlikeable. I have always preferred the buffoons, fuckups, jerkwads, oddballs, lunatics, egomaniacs, halfwits, and sad sacks to your morally upstanding and psychologically healthy citizens. Characters like Charles Kinbote, Merricat Blackwood, Ignatius J. Reilly, Emerence, Sula, Ahab, and the many unnamed and unhinged yet unforgettable narrators. The Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, Gallants and Goody-Two-Shoes of literature have rarely compelled me. Such characters tend to be bland and repetitive. Their actions predictable. Their thoughts routine. Isn’t the whole point of literature to see things from different points of view? To experience the consciousness of characters who are unusual or at least unlike us?

***

Only the third interests me in literature. Let’s call 3) “compelling” characters to distinguish from the former uses of “likable.” Compelling characters can be likable in the sense of psychologically healthy and morally upstanding people you’d want to be friends with. It’s possible. Though, for me, such characters need to be at least a little weird or unusual. To have that je ne sais quoi that makes me go hmm, okay, oui. The reason compelling characters are rarely likable is that—as I’ve argued before—all likable characters are alike; each unlikable character is unlikable in their own way.

 ***

The preference for “likable characters” is often given moral and political import. You must have good characters and correct anything bad they do in the text so the reader knows what is good and bad. While I’m skeptical fiction is the place to instill morality, writers ironically undermine this mission. They make their heroes indistinct yet get to have freedom and fun while creating their villains. The villains then become the compelling characters. If you are worried your readers will identify with the “wrong” traits, this seems like a backward way to do it. 

How to spot bad writing:

I am feeling we all need to be revolutionary, to say things our way, or else why write?