Earlier this week, I had a discussion about writing with a student. English 101. She's been having trouble working through the mechanics of her compositions. She showed me one of the pieces she worked on and we went through it sentence by sentence with me offering at least two or three alternatives for each one. What she seemed to have trouble with was making up her mind about which option to choose, like there was a right answer.
There is no right answer beyond complying with the grammatical rules. Gut instinct makes up for the rest. That's the basis of style.
Look in your closet. Look in your friend's closet or your parent's closet. What do you find? Pants. Shirts. Shoes. Sweaters. These are fundamental items of clothing. Among them are different variations. Jeans versus slacks. T-shirts versus button downs. Boots, sneakers, and sandals. Everyone takes these basic elements of clothing, finds the differences that appeal to them, and then makes those differences their own, absorbs them into an aspect of their personality.
The same thing goes for writing. The rules of grammar are the foundation. You spice things up with your vocabulary and use of imagery, and sometimes by breaking a rule or two every now and then. And you experiment.
Experimentation is never easy, but it's how your find the style that works for you.
Been steadily working on the novel with only Saturday and Sunday giving me a hiccup. I was at a friend's barbeque on Saturday and had a family dinner on Sunday, so those two events combined didn't foster much writing time for me.
One thing that I've changed since the last update on Eat the Rich was my daily page quota; I'm trying to get in three pages a day instead of two. Hey, it'd be great if I could get in fifty pages, but there's only so much that I can do.
I've always said that the first draft of anything is the one that sucks the big one. It's a philosophy that won't die any time soon. Weaving scattered images into a coherent story out of seemingly thin air isn't easy, so three pages a day is a fair pace for me. Like I said in my Numbers post, you've got to keep a perspective on things. A few pages a day doesn't sound like much, but they add up over time.
Steinbeck says you should try to write just one page a day. I wonder if he'd call me a workaholic.
If battle and self-revelation are the climax, then the new equilibrium is synonymous with the denouement. In this stage of the story, the hero uses what he's learned through self-revelation and applies it to the world. In essence, everything has gone almost back to normal, but the hero has been changed.
Full Metal Jacket has equilibria on a more somber note than what some people might expect, but that's only because of the nature of the climax in each half. Just as the story of Oedipus ends in tragedy due to his negative self-revelation, Joker's story in Full Metal Jacket reflects how he changes by the end.
In the Parris Island segment, he has completed training but is still passive enough that Pyle kills Hartman. As such, Joker completes recruit training with uncertainty, knowing that he's not fully prepared for the life of a Marine. Later, in Vietnam, he accepts the role of violence in his profession, cemented by his killing of the sniper.
Joker completes his tale with one of the iconic lines of the film: "I'm in a world of shit, yes, but I'm alive."
This last week, I got to page thirty-four on Eat the Rich. Thirty-four pages doesn't seem like much. It's definitely not a novel, more of a novelette. It's still a notable mark, and here's why.
A novel is usually a minimum of forty thousands. The industry standard is more like eighty to a hundred and twenty thousand words, and I'm aiming for an even hundred grand. If I'm over or under that count, that's fine. It's just a target to aim for.
The point is this: in the last two weeks, I've reach either twenty-five percent for the minimum forty thousand words or ten percent for the preferred hundred thousand. Either way, that's a god chunk of the project. If I keep at it, I know I'll get to the end of the draft.
If you're feeling like you haven't accomplished much in your own writing, remind yourself that, little by little, the numbers add up.
In the last installment of Truby's Plot, I wrote that the battle is the climax of the story. In truth, it's only half of the climax, the physical side of it. The other, more psychological side is self-revelation. Self-revelation is the point in the story where the protagonist finds out what's wrong with him. In other words, he has a revelation about himself.
There is a right and a wrong way to execute self-revelation, and it largely has to do with subtlety. Being a physical event, the battle has to be overt. There can't be any second guessing over whether or not it's the climactic confrontation between the hero and the opponent. Part of the reason, I think, is because it needs to show the audience that they have in fact reached the climax of the story, but also, say, how many fistfights have you seen that are cloaked in subterfuge? Not many, huh?
The self-revelation is the polar opposite of the battle. It's fighting on an internal level within the protagonist and it has to be done quietly. If the hero comes out and announces what he's learned about himself, then he sounds preachy. You don't want to subject your audience to this. They're not in church. It has to be executed either visually in film or through non-dialogue prose in fiction.
Also, don't assume that all self-revelations must be positive. Yes, there are times when a character learns that he's behaved badly and needs to change his ways, like Scrooge in A Christmas Carol. But there are times when the character either doesn't recognize his flaw, or better yet recognizes it but is unable to remedy it.
Full Metal Jacket is filled with negative self-revelations. It's negative in Parris Island because, in spite of his training, Joker's passive nature prevents him from stopping Pyle from killing Hartman.
The self-revelation in the Vietnam half is a bit of a grey area. On one hand, you could say that it's positive because Joker comes to understand the severity of the war and finally makes the choice to become a fighter rather than a mere reporter. Then again, he's sacrificing his humanity from the first half. Stanley Kubrick solidified this visually. As Joker turns to shoot the sniper, the peace button on his vest is covered from view, leaving the audience to see "born to kill" on his helmet.
I made myself an omelet for lunch today, an it took me back to college. I shared two creative writing classes with a friend of mine named Shirley; one semester of poetry and another for fiction.
In the poetry class, Shirley had presented a piece centering on a diner that served something called the meat-lover's omelet. One of the girls in class giggled because she kept thinking that the poem was about sex. You see, to nymphos, meat translates to cock. The poem was actually about cannibalism.
Later, in fiction, Shirley wrote a story about a woman who killed her family members and turned them into life-sized dolls for a sick tea party. I remember this because one of the characters had an internal monologue describing what it was like to slowly bleed to death in a bath tub.
Suffice to say, Shirley had one gloriously fucked up imagination.
Shirley doesn't write as much as she used to, admitting that her graduating project had damaged her writing mojo. In fact, when I talk to a lot of the English majors beside whom I studied, most of them don't write any more. I never figured out why. Maybe life intervened?
So when I'm having a slow day, I try to remind myself of the college days, the stories that could be written now but just aren't. I try to pick up the load for the others in the gang.
Bon appétit.
My favorite documentary is It Might Get Loud
which shows a meeting between Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin, The Edge of
U2, and Jack White of The White Stripes. The opening image of Jack
White on a farm building a functional electric guitar out of garbage had
me hooked.
The first time I watched It Might Get Loud
was because I heard Jimmy Page was in it, and, being such a Led
Zeppelin fan, I felt it was my duty to watch. But subsequently, I kept
going back and forth through the DVD for Jack White. Though he
discussed music, I think a lot of what he said can resonate for writers
as well.
Man, you know, who says you need to buy a guitar?
This
was the first thing said in the film, right after White made his
garbage guitar. I went to college dreaming of being a writer. I went
to grad school solely for a degree in creative writing. But Falkner or
Steinbeck or Hemingway? As far as I know, they never went to school for
their craft. The learned it on their own and applied their own
techniques and gut instincts. I don't regret getting my degree, but my
point is that all you need to get started as a writer can be as little
as the basic tools of pen and paper.
I
plan to trick both of these guys [Jimmy Page and The Edge]. That's
basically what I'm gonna do. Trick them into teaching me all their
tricks.
I
don't know if White really did succeed in fooling Page and The Edge,
but there's no denying that they're more experienced than he; Jimmy Page's career almost matched the combined years of White and The Edge. Nevertheless, White knows that he doesn't know everything, and in order to improve his skills, he turns to those who know the craft more thoroughly. Writers do this too. For example, Hunter S. Thompson learned how to write by constantly rewriting F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby.
Technology is a big destroyer of emotion and truth. Opportunity doesn't do anything for creativity. Yeah, it makes it easier, and you can get home sooner, but it doesn't make you a more creative person. That's the disease you have to fight in any creative field. Ease of use.
Stephen King said that creative writing cannot be taught. I humbly disagree. I think - and I'd like to think that White would have my back on this - writing can be taught, but creativity can't. If you haven't got a creative bone in your body, then no gadget is going to remedy that. Period.
People know when something's fake and they know when something's rehashed and rehearsed. They know when you're telling the same joke between songs that you told in Poughkeepsie last night. They can smell it.
Yes, a story needs to be thought through, even if only on a simple and rudimentary level, but that's not what White is saying here. This is a tip for the more experienced writers who have a few credits under their belt. If you have success, don't ruin it by recycling your work. JK Rowling comes to mind for me. Everyone knows her for the Harry Potter books, but over the weekend, I saw a poster at Vroman's promoting her new novel The Casual Vacancy. When I looked it up online, I found that it was about sex and heroin addiction, totally different from Hogwarts.
Yeah, that's it. Pick a fight with it [the guitar]. That's what you gotta do. Pick a fight with it and win the fight.
Writing is not supposed to be easy. There's more to it than typing words on a page just as there's more to playing the guitar than plucking strings. If it were easy, everyone would be doing it. At some point, however, you've got to dig in and take a bite. You might face a story idea that sounds cool, but you're just not sure if it's going to work for a novel. Well, then find a way to make it work, or you'll always be the guy who starts a story but never finishes one. Stop being a pussy and start owning that shit!
Never wanted to play guitar. Ever. Everyone plays guitar. What's the point? I got really into drumming, playing along with the records. Those rhythms got into me early. 100% only caring about music and rhythm. I had a bedroom that was about seven by seven feet, really small. There was so much junk I had collected. I had two drum sets in there, a guitar amplifier and a reel-to-reel, and no bed. I took the bed out. I slept on a piece of foam on an angle by the door.
Just as writers need other writers to inspire them and learn from, budding authors need to immerse themselves in their craft. They need to breathe it. I have more books than any other item in my house. When I'm cleaning and reorganizing, and all my books are laid out, it looks like a library came all over the place. But that's good. I want the library to cum. Being surround by the books I love gives me a constant visual cue encouraging me to press forward with my own words.
Distortion. Anger. The punk ideal. Guys or someone maybe who got picked on, like a lot of us did, in high school. This is our chance to, you know, push you down now.
Happy endings? Fuck that shit. You only get happy endings if you pay extra at the spa. Life is ugly and messy. It rarely works the way you want it to, and never in the way Disney would have you believing. Like the fight you pick with the words, you've got to harness that aggression and channel it onto the page. Society might be squeamish about raw or even live food, but people love raw and live words. They say to pour your heart out, and they're right. Jack White once played Blue Veins so fiercely that his fingertips bled onto his guitar, that beautiful custom-built guitar with the harmonica mic. Maybe you don't need to cut yourself for the words, but for God's sake, don't shy away from what you got going on inside.
