Hey, It’s OK to Ask Questions When Submitting to Lit Mags (Sometimes) (The Forever Workshop) may be behind a paywall. Being as ignorant as I am, it was both educational and also left me thinking some of this is just plain common sense (and good manners).
The Prayer - Ryan M.B. Munroe (Litro) - a short story that quite blew me away with its subtlety and its punchline. Then, too, I am prone to thinking we all have ghosts in our heads.
From The Mirror Moment in Fiction: A Midpoint Method for Plotters and Pantsers (Helping Writers Become Authors), I learned a technical point unknown to me and one that my stories may lack.
In fiction, the mirror moment is a point—often at or near the story’s Midpoint—when characters are forced into a moment of self-recognition. It is not merely a plot beat, but a reckoning: a pause in the forward motion of the story in which characters must confront who they are, what they have become, and what the cost of continuing forward will be.
I have been working on shorter pieces lately, except for “One Dead Blonde,” and I do not think I clearly have any characters confront what they are. One character is meant to lack this quality altogether. I approached it with two other characters, but it seems more in terms of what they are not. I will need to keep this in mind with “Chasing Ashes,” and if I ever get back to “Love Stinks.” The latter pretty much seems to lack this moment. I have not considered it with “Chasing Ashes.”
Pacing issues keep coming up in the few rejections with comments, so Manipulating the Shape of a Story by Emily Nemens (Poets & Writers) has me thinking about what I might be doing wrong.
Whether it’s mapping the main character’s energy or doing something so old-fashioned as tracing Freytag’s pyramid to map the arc of the plot, if a story has movement, there are going to be peaks and valleys as you chart its shape. There are going to be slopes rising up, and hopefully some coming down, too, because even a happy ending rarely results from a straight line. There might be a cliff—drops nearly straight down are an accepted storytelling convention; sudden ascents are often a sign you’re missing an intermediate scene, or at least an indication you might need to explain the elevator that popped your character right to the top. And an extended flat line? Finding one of those typically means there’s not enough change in a story, whether in plot, character, or emotional tenor.
At a certain point in the revision process, whether coaching my students or staring at my own manuscript, I often encourage these lines to be pushed and pulled and nudged. Most of the time it’s to increase the amplitude. Remember that term from math class? Per Merriam-Webster: “the maximum departure of the value of an alternating current or wave from the average value.” I ask, “Can we push up that peak to something closer to euphoria? What about when something bad happens: Might it be even worse, more devastating? What if your character doesn’t let cooler heads prevail but instead goes fully off the rails?” I’ll admit that when I dispense this kind of advice, I can feel a bit hackish. It’s a Hollywood cliché to ask, “What is at stake?” But it’s also fundamental, because what I’m often really asking is, “Have you made the story consequential enough?”
Mapping while advising is something I just tried out on a recent revision of “Going for the Kid,” but it was more in reaction to K.M. Weiland's The Four-Act Structure and the Circular Shape of Story.
Although we may impose a sense of linear escalation—a straight line beginning at one fixed point and ending definitively at another—this is not an accurate representation of the larger pattern of life. Perhaps most importantly, taken in isolation, this linear approach does not represent a generative pattern of life. It is beginning and ending; it is birth and death. It is not birth-life-death-rebirth.
The circle aspect of a cycle is a more natural fit for any conversation about human development, psychological change, or meaning-making. We understand our history in cycles (indeed, we even refer to some of the ancient stories as Cycles). We understand the natural seasons in cycles. We think of the stages of life as cycles. All life as we know it is a pattern of growth, decline, death, and renewal.
When viewed like this, story becomes less about “getting to the end” and more about participating in a repeating pattern and understanding where one is within the cycle. While linear story models tend to emphasize progress, arrival, and completion; cyclical models emphasize seasonality, renewal, and return. Viewing story as a cycle reduces the pressure for us to “solve” everything, while simultaneously increasing our awareness of the depth and resonance of the larger patterns that hold us.
Although I might have aligned things according to the following:
When the Midpoint is de-emphasized, we get Three Acts. When the Midpoint is considered an equal player, we’re more likely to think of the story in terms of four quarters or Four Acts:
- First Act: 1-25% (ending with First Plot Point)
- Second Act: 25%–50% (ending with Midpoint or Second Plot Point)
- Third Act: 50%–75% (ending with the Third Plot Point)
- Fourth Act: 75%–100% (ending with the Climactic Moment and Resolution)
“Going for the Kid” misses the mark by 73 words in the first act, by 12 in the second; the third just confuses me by not being where I thought it would end (it might go over where I think the third act should end), but that ends the fourth act with two words too many. But it does match with a long comment I received that there is too much front-loaded.
This does not work with “Pieces from a Small Indiana Factory Town,” and neither does a three-act structure. That raises all kinds of issues with revision. Of which I am too tired to deal with now.
I think I have found an explanation of a problem I am having with my writing, particularly my revisions: Embodied Writing: How to Get Out of Your Head and Into Your Story (K.M. Weiland).
The second problem is that the less oriented we are in the physical, the more oriented we are in the mental. This lends itself to over-intellectualization and hyper-consciousness. Instead of embodied responsiveness, we are more likely to lean into mind-based reactivity. As artists, we can begin to focus more on message than theme—on agenda instead of archetype. Instead of asking questions, stories are more likely to shout answers. And these answers—whatever their flavor—are inherently limited by their detachment from the rhythms of life and of creativity.
I have usually described this as my not being able to see the forest for the trees. More feelings, less intellect seems like a great idea for me.
Lessons about the limits of literary fame: Bygone bestsellers (Literary Yard).
sch 3/2
21 Do-It-Yourself Editing Tips by Melissa Donovan made me wince by things that should have been obvious to me and which I have not done.
Edgar Allan Poe’s Mechanical Imagination (JSTOR) reviews another essay and left me thinking that if the following is accurate, then Poe remains the writer for all technological ages.
Tresch quotes Poe’s reflection that “The whole tendency of the age is Magazine-ward…We now demand the light artillery of the intellect; we need the curt, the condensed, the pointed, the readily diffused.” He described himself as a “magazinist,” and worked as a writer, editor, and typesetter.
To many poets at the time, writing could be natural or mechanical, literary or scientific. Poe broke down those distinctions. “Poe’s work took the machine as its subject,” Tresch argues, to “exploit unsettled anxieties about human progress and mechanization.”
What would he make of smartphones and AI?
sch 3/5
No comments:
Post a Comment
Please feel free to comment