larkin
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There is no requirement to be cheery and uplifting and the vodka belongs in the freezer.
It's a good piece and I am a big fan of crafted, 2 to 8 pagers, but it does cry out for a sense of how it arrived at this point. This should be a seed for 20k words.
Bravo and keep writing.
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I have had a very hard time trying to tow the line on this principal so you can imagine how I felt in finding this article.
Why “Show, Don’t Tell” Is the Great Lie of Writing Workshops
OK, let’s dispense with the obvious—namely, that there is a kernel of truth to the old saw “Show, don’t tell.” Fiction is a dramatic art, and you need to dramatize, not simply state things. The sentence “John was a handsome man” is not a handsome sentence, and though a writer is welcome to use it, she shouldn’t think it will do much work for her. Similarly, in the first workshop I ever took as a student of writing, when someone wrote “An incredible feeling of happiness washed over her,” the teacher said, “First of all, get rid of the ‘washed over’ cliché, and second of all, if in the course of an entire novel you can evoke an incredible feeling of happiness, then that’s a major accomplishment.”
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But it doesn’t follow from this that a writer should never say a character is handsome or happy. It doesn’t follow that all a writer should do is show. To my mind, the phrase “Show, don’t tell” is a wink and a nod, an implicit compact between a lazy teacher and a lazy student when the writer needs to dig deeper to figure out what isn’t working in his story.
A story is not a movie is not a TV show, and I can’t tell you the number of student stories I read where I see a camera panning. Movies are a perfectly good art from, and they’re better at doing some things than novels are—at showing the texture of things, for instance. But novels are better at other things. At moving around in time, for example, and at conveying material that takes place in general as opposed to specific time (everything in a movie, by contrast, takes place in specific time, because all there is in a movie is scene—there’s no room for summary, at least as we traditionally conceive of it). But most important, novels can describe internal psychological states, whereas movies can only suggest them through dialogue and gesture (and through the almost always contrived-seeming voiceover, which is itself a borrowing from fiction). To put it more succinctly, fiction can give us thought: It can tell. And where would Proust be if he couldn’t tell? Or Woolf, or Fitzgerald? Or William Trevor or Alice Munro or George Saunders or Lorrie Moore?
And yet day after day we hear “Show, don’t tell.” And there’s real fall-out. I see it constantly among my students, who are nothing if not adjective-happy. Do we need to know that a couch is a “big brown torn vinyl couch”? We are writing fiction, not constructing a Mad Lib. Yet writers have been told to describe, and so they do, ad nauseum. It’s like the sentence that was popular in typing classes—“The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dogs.” Well, this is a good typing sentence (it contains every letter of the alphabet), but it’s a bad fiction sentence.
If you ask me, the real reason people choose to show rather than tell is that it’s so much easier to write “the big brown torn vinyl couch” than it is to describe internal emotional states without resorting to canned and sentimental language. You will never be told you’re cheesy if you describe a couch, but you might very well be told you’re cheesy if you try to describe loneliness. The phrase “Show, don’t tell,” then, provides cover for writers who don’t want to do what’s hardest (but most crucial) in fiction.
Besides, the distinction between showing and telling breaks down in the end. “She was nervous” is, I suppose, telling, whereas “She bit her fingernail” is, I suppose, showing. But is there any meaningful distinction between the two? Neither of them is a particularly good sentence, though if I had to choose I’d probably go with “She was nervous,” since “She bit her fingernail” is such a generic gesture of anxiety it seems lazy on the writer’s part—insufficiently imagined.
—Joshua Henkin
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Actually the idea of many tiny cold feet running across my spine sounds good.
If you are influenced by a film, reduce the story to its most basic.
The first Alien and the Thing. Humans caught in a closed environment with an alien creature. The less you see the more frightening it is.
I wouldn't touch the word zombie or vampire or wooden stakes because you are then beholding to the legacy of stories that had come before.
You can still do a story about a vampire but you must make it over and make it yours.
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The Forest Gump factor?
Probably, but perhaps they should be peripheral.
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I ran my short story Americano through SmartEdit. (1,943 words)
Adverbs:
really-4 only-2 carefully absolutely heavily personally certainly (1 each)
Selected Repeated Words:
Owen-16 #1 the protagonist's name, Donna-15 #2 the secondary character's name, that's-10 #5, I'm-9 #7, it's-9 #8, like-8 #10, when-6 #18
Clichés:
Oh my God (the only cliché)
Dialogue Tags (Real ones, not just nearby words where there was no dialogue tag):
said (3)
Sentence Start List:
I-14 He-12 The-10 I'm-7 Owen-7 That's-6 Yes-5 Now-5 It's-5 My-5 She-5
Then I ran through my latest novel, A Time When it All Went Wrong through SmartEdit (the 18 chapters that have been posted). It has 70,470 words. What's most notable:
Adverbs with usage counts 10 and over:
really-49 only-44 probably-38 exactly-37 actually-36 especially-18 mostly-14 finally-11
Repeated words that aren't names or titles with usage counts 200 and over:
like-373 when-260 it's-253 that's-237 going-210 don't-210
Redundancies:
absolutely sure (2) and four others I used once each
Monitored words:
that-851 then-284 just-182 ("that" is 1.2% of the words in this story, and includes the 237 "that's" as well)
Possible profanity:
12 swear words with a total of 29 uses; the most popular are hell and shit at 7 times each, but if you add bullshit and shitty it ups the "excrement" family to 10 times.
Dialogue tags (again, real ones):
said-402 asked-152 told-65 replied-52
Sentence Start List (125 and over):
I-931 We-222 He-203 You-173 The-167 Todd-149 That's-133
Very interesting. I'm definitely going to have to look for "that" "then" and "just" in this story and decide what can be excised.
Colin
That impresses me as being nothing short of a vivisection.
Definition: Vivisection, the activity or practice of doing scientific or medical experiments on live animals.
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Failing is very important because it calls for self examination that will promote real growth.
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I have to say that the word processor is a miracle.
I can rattle stuff off like spelling things out on a WeeGee board.
Then go back and reconstruct and craft individual sentences and paragraphs.
Very often I will write important things out of order but you can then move them around and keep what's best.
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Avoid all cliches like the plague!
Exception: Used in dialog to to show how out of touch the character is.
There is another kind of cliche.
"He had the body of a Greek god, the bluest eyes perfect six pack and the blondest hair."
To make your character human and believable they need a few flaws. One of may favorites is a chipped front tooth. Things that may present them with conflict or hardship.
In physical descriptions, leave some things out for the reader to plug in for their own preferences.
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Do I ever love this piece. He is my avatar's namesake.
I just happen to post this very piece on another site the the censor application replaced all the words. "Fuck" with the word "Love" which ruined Mr. Larkin's poem...
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My quick guess is to start completely over using either the same characters, or their descendants in the same or changed set and setting and treat it as a completely new story. It should be "Stand Alone" as much as possible. Refer to the past rarely.
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The writer's workshop or journalism school can be the first step in acquiring the concept of broad appeal for the purpose of being made acceptable to a money generating audience. Here is where you will find the formulaic writer, the topical and the political writers that serve the system. This should be an anathema to the creative writer.
But if it money you want, you will serve the corporate monolith.
FH is right. The other issue is telling your story and earning your readers one at a time. You can do this by presenting an idea or point of view that resonates with specific individuals.
The corporate machine has no time for crazy artists and writers with less than a popular point of view, but there are readers in the wilderness that will want to read your work and maybe be reassured through understanding and kinship.
The other problem not mentioned above is that there so few readers out there in the first place. This is what compels us to push the envelope. this contributes the flood of dedicated wank-media.
We have a struggle on all sides...
There is nothing wrong with education, formal or otherwise but being a writer is one of the few professions that does not require any credentials. All you need are readers.
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I agree entirely.. Vonnegut's primary concern is the reader.
Just like Alfred Hitchcock, his most important concern was not the story or the producers, it was the audience.
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How many ways can you eat a BigMac?
People often say that about writing explicit sex scenes. I think that this assessment is exactly wrong.
They are overlooking one very important thing. It usually involves 2 different people. Even auto-erotic masturbation can be much more than the act itself.
Sexual fantasy is the genesis of creative thought. That is why we write in the first place.
I place a great amount of value on internal emotions during a planned or spontaneous coupling. A character can come out of a sexual encounter totally changed.
A person/character's sexual temperament is an abstract representation of the whole person and you can't really know them without seeing how they behave sexually.
How they behave sexually with one person can be entirely different from how they behave with someone else and it can have different results. This presents a wealth of story material.
So it is not as simple as eating a BigMac.
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Those names have the feel of a very trendy, contemporary setting and they are also pretty middle-class white.
It sounds like the author was looking for the coolest names that appealed to him/her.
Names are pretty important in a story, especially how one character's name bump's up against the other names. How it rolls off the tongue can count. Is it a hero or a villian (figuratively)
I am guilty of stooping to using the Baby-Name-Book online.
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Back when I was originally working on Ashes of Fate, which is the story in which I faced this problem, I wasn't worried so much about the transgender aspect as I was about keeping the pronouns consistent and logical to the reader. I've handled it with my best instincts whenever it came up, and I didn't receive any complaints about how it was done, so at least it wasn't appalling. :)
I've since done significantly more research into the subject in the hopes that I would portray Peter, my transgender doctor in Ashes of Fate, more convincingly. At the time I was writing it I had recently ended a relationship with my trans girlfriend,(for reasons completely unrelated to her gender identity) and I knew that she was going through a tremendous amount of pain and anxiety in regards to her dysphoria. I've since become an advocate for transgender issues, and hope to bring more awareness to the struggle they go through to be accepted.
At the time, I was concerned about pronouns. Now I'm concerned about people, and pronouns be damned. :) But I understand that it is a daunting thing to approach when you've never felt the way they have. I still have to ask questions of my trans friends every time I decide I'm going to write a new section that deals with one of my trans characters, just to make sure I'm portraying the emotions correctly, or as well as I possibly can.
We are not talking about two queens hurling fem pronouns at each other.
We are discussing a character who is on a gender borderline. The switch could be fleeting, gradual or abrupt. I think that you have to make up a set of rules that apply to that character and they should be decipherable to the reader.
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Most of my stories are cathartic. I am in each of my stories in some form and there are times when it is almost too painful. The scene in Act Two of Wicked Boys when Jeremy hears his father speaking of how proud he is of the boy was agonizing for me to write. I think those are the moments when a writer's work is most realistic. Sometimes, it has to hurt.
Can you imagine a work without any of those moments? Those elements are crucial in making a story worth reading. Without them, zzzzzz...
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It depends on the character and the circumstances. If it's in the personality of the character to do so, then so be it. The narrator in third person viewpoint should not, though, if he or she is not a character in the story. The omniscient narrator is neutral and profanities would violate that neutrality. An exception might be if the narrator is a participant in the story simply by narrating, even if he never makes an appearance in the story in any other capacity.
Agreed especially concerning a omniscient narrator. It can also be like turning up the volume. If you do it too much, it is no longer effective. The rule should always be authenticity.
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How would you handle a character that can change its gender when you don't want to reveal that it is technically without gender? For instance, a character is playing one role at one point but plays a different role in the next, but the genders are different. How do you handle the pronouns? Do you refer to it as 'she' when it's female and 'he' when it's male? And when it is finally revealed to the audience that it's without gender do you start calling using the pronoun 'it', or do yo stick to the pronoun that comes with the role.
Shape shifters are confusing...
I posted a story under transgendered on Nifty. Keep in mind that I don't know anything about dresses, make-up or breast implants and I did not intend to go in that direction. In short the story is about femininity emerging naturally in a boy, living with his mother. The story isn't so much about the central character as much as it is about the reactions of the people around him over a period of time, which were mixed to say the least.
When the main character got to the crossroads of life in deciding about a transformation, that is where I ended it.
I got letters wanting me to continue it but I couldn't because I didn't understand enough to be sure that I was authentic. I wrote about what I did know anything more would be fraud. I offered the story up to whoever wanted to carry it on.
I hope this helps
I used masculine pronouns from the beginning. When he entered into sexual experimentation that was positive and non-judgmental I gradually began using feminine pronouns.
If the sexual situations were abusive hostile, I kept the masculine pronouns as an example of cruelty between boys
In neither of these two cases where the choice of pronouns the result of affectations but instead were internally descriptive.
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Do you ever get so emotionally overwhelmed by a story that you find yourself on the edge of tears?
Yes!
Does it hurt so much you just want to hit save and go play a game with no emotional stakes?
No, because it is those times that you must go through it or lose it. You can't get it back.
What I'm writing now- I feel like the ink might as well be blood & tears.
I use a word processor.
It might just be the best thing I've ever done if I'm tough enough to stay in the saddle.
Hold on, you will not die..
Sometimes, very rarely a story concept come along that tasks us to push ourselves to the very edge and be more than we were at the start. I don't know. Maybe it's a God thing and I am too spiritually blind to see or even hope to understand it.
It is your muse so thank god you got one, most people don't. what you have cannot be summoned, it just happens!
It's the creative process, it is what you signed on for. You have nothing to complane about and a lot to be grateful for.
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Explitives, in a manner, describes the character through their dialog. Explitives can also be a descriptive modifier.
I think they are important.
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The word, "Suddenly"
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I heard that the New Yorker magazine has an editor just for commas..
I have a bad habit of misspelling tons of words and then let the spell checker drop in a wrong word without me noticing. I also omit crucial words and when re-reading, I don't see the missing word and keep reading as if it is there. This is a good reason for an editor.
All of these things can be fixed almost mechanically, but perfect punctuation and perfect spelling doesn't make it a good story.
What most of us need is a good reader. Someone who likes you and likes and understands your work. Someone who can tell you that they like where the story is going or says, this character is weak. They might tell you where to trim it down or to fill it out.. they tell you how your readers will feel when they read your story.. This is what is really important... Everything else is secondary..
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Avoid all cliches like the plague!
Exception: Used in dialog to to show how out of touch the character is.
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So Owned
in Flash Fiction
Posted
So Owned
by Larkin
I answered the phone. "Hello."
The voice on the other end said, "Who's this?"
I said, "It's Jimi, who's this?"
Then the voice said, "Don't you know who this is? I know who you are."
The voice sounded sort of sly and sneaky but I just couldn't tell. Maybe it was some fake pretending that he knew me.
The voice continued. "So what are you doing?"
I didn't like being fooled and confused at the same time. I said, "Um, where do I know you from?"
The unidentified voice said, "Oh, around."
I said. "Are you sure you mean me?"
He answered. "Yeah, I know who you are."
An image came into my mind. "Wait a minute, are you that kid with the two dogs?"
When he laughed, and said no. That gave him away. I never heard anyone laugh like that before except him. It was the kid I met on the North End on the boardwalk. I met him and went to his house and we.......
"Oh, I know who you are. You're Ricky. How did you find my phone number?"
He instantly became familiar. Ricky answered my question. "It wasn't hard. How many Littlewoods live in Oakhurst? Your Mom or someone answered a few times so I kept trying until you answered."
I was really glad that he called me. When I left his house, I was sure that he written me off as a useless little scrub.
I asked him: "So why'd you call me?"
On the other end there was a pause and then he said, "Oh, I don't know, just bored I guess. I was looking around for you and I was wondering why you didn't show up again. I thought you were a cool little dude."
Well he knew just what to say to make me feel good all over. I didn't think anyone liked me and then, I meet this older kid and he says all these nice things about me. Unfortunately, his complements got me all tongue tied, making me sound so stupid on the phone.
He asked again: "So how come you didn't come back?"
I stumbled on my words, "I, I don't know."
He continued, "Why don't you come over and we could hang out?
I said, "I don't know?"
He wasn't satisfied with my answer. "Oh, I know, you think I'm an asshole and you didn't have the balls to tell me to my face, right?"
I hadn't given him any reason for him to think that. "No, no way, I thought you the coolest. I just figured that you thought I was a wimp. Honest, Ricky!"
"Would I be calling you if I thought you were a wimp, which you are anyway. I called you because I liked you."
He laughed again. "Oh, I know, you got all scared of me because I got all physical with you. That doesn't mean that I'm gay, ya know."
I know it sounds stupid but I had pushed that incident to the back of my mind until he brought it up. "I didn't think that you were gay, it was just a surprise, I mean, it didn't bother me or anything."
Just talking to him and talking about what we did began to fill me with the strange impulsive excitement that I had felt when I was there. He was holding me and was all over me and I was sure something intense was going to happen and maybe I wanted it to.
The tone of his voice was serious. "So, are you sayin that because of that, you don't want to come over and hang with me?"
He put me on the defensive. "No, Ricky, I want to come over. Honest."
He said, "Oh, ok, so if I let you come over, I have to be all polite and not do anything dirty like you're a girl, which you look like anyway, well just forget it!"
I was still on the defensive. "Ricky, I don't care, honest. If you let me come over, you can do anything you want and it's not going to bother me, I promise."
He was still testy. "Well, considering it's my room, I will, thank you very much! Shit, I'm all nice to you and make you my best bud and then you act all snotty like you're a little bitch. I got other friends, ya know."
All I could say was "I'm sorry", but for what, I didn't know.
He quickly said, "Hey Jimi, I just get pissed off for no reason sometimes. Listen, I really want you to come over. You and me could have a good time just playing around."
I said, "When can I come over?"
Ricky answered "How about now?"