Category Archives: Writing Mechanics

What He Said About ‘Said’

“Today’s blog post is about the word ‘said,’” said Poseidon’s Scribe.

“What is there to say about ‘said?’” asked Blog Reader, who hoped to write fiction someday.

“First, ‘said’ is the most common type of ‘dialogue tag’ used in fiction to indicate who’s speaking,” said the Scribe.  “However, many budding authors worry about overusing that word, so they substitute other words.”

“I don’t believe that,” asserted the Reader.

“It’s true, but the fact is, ‘said’ is pretty much invisible.  You can’t overuse it,” said the Scribe.  “People pass right over it as they read.”

“Well, I declare,” declared the Reader.

“Still, there is something even worse than that,” said the Scribe.

“What’s that?” the Reader asked, questioningly.

“Modifying ‘said’ with an adverb.”

“I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that,” the Reader said unthinkingly.

“Use of adverbs in that way is termed a ‘Tom Swifty,’ from the Tom Swift series of books about a young inventor.  The authors of those books occasionally sought to modify ‘said’ with adverbs.  Not only are they examples of bad writing, but Tom Swifties have given rise to an entire brand of humor.  There are examples here and here and here.”

“Okay, please stop listing links,” the Blog Reader said haltingly.

“Look, there are at least four things to remember about writing dialogue,” said the Scribe, “and the first is to be very clear about who’s talking.  Don’t leave your readers wondering about that.”

“What do you mean?”

“If you go on for several lines of dialogue without tags–“

“Like we’re doing now, you mean?”

“–the reader can lose track of who’s speaking.”

“You don’t say.”

“I do.  Especially when there’s more than two characters or when they have similar styles of speech.”

“Are there any times you would use several lines of untagged dialogue?”

“Oh, yes.  That technique can heighten the drama of a scene, build it up to a climax.  As each line of dialogue becomes shorter and shorter, your readers will naturally sense the tension building.”

“Are you sure about that?”

“Yes, I’m certain.”

“Really certain?”

“Oh, yes.”

“Sure?”

“Yup.”

“Okay, I think I understand that,” said the Blog Reader.  “You said there are four key points about dialogue.  What’s the next one?”

“Keep it interesting,” said Poseidon’s Scribe.  “Humans are social animals and love to talk.  Your readers want to hear your characters talking, and they have a preference for dialogue over narration.  But they don’t want to be bored, so keep dialogue interesting.”

“And the third key point?”

“I thought you’d never ask,” said the Scribe.  “It’s related to the second point.  Use dialogue for dramatic purposes, to show characters at their moments of strong emotion as they grapple with the problem that represents the story’s conflict.  Minimize the use of dialogue just for providing information.  That’s called info-dumping.”

“Which is what you’re doing now,” said the Reader.

“True, but we’re having a real discussion, not a fictional one.”

“Are you sure?”

“Pretty sure,” Poseidon’s Scribe held up his right index finger.  “There’s one last point I want to make about the use of ‘said’ in dialogue.  If you’re still worried about repeating ‘said’ and you doubt my point earlier about readers skipping over it, then substitute some type of action, or movement, or description.”

“What do you mean?”  The Reader’s brows furrowed.

“Instead of using ‘said,’ have your character do something while speaking.”  The Scribe swept his hand to indicate motion.  “After all, people really do things while talking.  They don’t just stand there.”

The Reader nodded.  “I see what you mean.  But what do I do if I have a question about this later?”

“Just click on ‘leave a comment’ below this blog entry.  See it down there?”

“Yeah, there it is.  Well, thanks for everything!”  The Blog Reader smiled.

“Don’t mention it,” said–

                                                             Poseidon’s Scribe

April 8, 2012Permalink

Hook ‘em, So You Can Reel ‘em In

How will you begin your next story?  The beginning, called the ‘hook,’ is important.  These days readers don’t have much time.  Other things like TV, video games, and the Internet compete with your story for their attention.  If your first sentence or paragraph doesn’t grab them, they’re on to doing something else.

Here are some examples of great hooks used in novels as chosen by the editors of American Book Review:

  • Call me Ishmael.  Moby-Dick, Herman Melville 
  • Marley was dead, to begin with.  A Christmas Carol,  Charles Dickens
  • It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.  1984, George Orwell
  • You don’t know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain’t no matter.  Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain
  • Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he was arrested.  The Trial, Franz Kafka
  • Mother died today.  The Stranger, Albert Camus
  • There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.  The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, C.S. Lewis
  • He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish.  The Old Man and the Sea, Ernest Hemingway
  • It was a pleasure to burn.  Fahrenheit 451,  Ray Bradbury
  • The cold passed reluctantly from the earth, and the retiring fogs revealed an army stretched out on the hills, resting.  The Red Badge of Courage, Stephen Crane

These beginnings work well for several reasons.  They give us an early idea what the story will be about.  They establish the tone of the story, and something about the attitude of the narrator’s voice.

But most of all they seize our attention and compel us to want to read more.  What gives them this quality?  It’s hard to find a common attribute just by looking at them.  They seem to appeal for different reasons.

Writer Darcy Pattison has grouped the different beginnings into categories.  This is helpful since one category might work better for the start of your story than another.  Knowing the category can give you a starting point for developing your hook.

Many of the beginnings in the list start with a sense of the ordinary, and then give the reader something that clashes or is jarring somehow.  We’re left with a puzzle, an oddity, a question that can only be resolved by reading further.  So read on we must.

Those without that twist added to the ordinary seem to possess a different quality.  They settle us in, set a mood, fluff up our pillow, put on some appropriate music.  We’re now comfortably in the story, transported to the author’s world right from the start, and now that we’re there we might as well read on to see what the place is like.

Each of these beginnings without exception is easy to read.  None have rare or difficult words to stumble over.  All have rhythm, and almost poetic brevity.  Not a word is wasted.

How do you write an opening like these?  Heck if I know; these are some of the best ever written.  Ask one of the world’s greatest authors.

With that task added to your to-do list, perhaps we could set our sights a bit lower for now.  How do you write an effective story beginning?  For one thing, it takes time and many trials.  The beginning is the hardest part to write, usually takes the longest, and usually involves the most revisions.  You might decide to skip the hook and come back to it later as the story evolves.  You might like to write a first version of the hook knowing you’ll revisit it over and over.  In any case, be prepared to spend the time and thought to craft it right.

To learn much more about how to write story hooks, read Hooked by Les Edgerton.  What an invaluable resource!

With regard to beginnings, we’ve reached the end.  Remember to check back at this site next week for further ramblings about writing by–

                                                                 Poseidon’s Scribe

March 4, 2012Permalink

Coming to Your Senses (in Your Writing)

If Poseidon’s Scribe suggests you incorporate an appeal to all five senses in your writing, that’s not exactly original advice.  But why are writers told to do this?  And how do you go about it?

The reason for using all the senses is to make your scenes more vivid, distinct, and real for the reader.  You’re trying to take your reader away from her world where she is sitting and reading a book, just sweep her away to your made-up world.  We speak of “painting a picture” in writing, but it should be more than that.  It should be a multi-sensory experience.  It’s like a Star Trek transporter machine that can move a person in an instant to a different location for a full immersion experience.

Artists, too, often bring the senses into their work.  This is “Still-life with Chessboard (the Five Senses)” by the 17th Century painter Lubin Baugin.

Each of the senses has certain properties.  Although they are obvious from lifelong experience, let’s think about each one from a writer’s point of view.

 

  • Our primary sense is sight, and that’s usually the first way a character perceives his surroundings.  Human sight is most especially tuned to moving objects, so characters notice them first of all. Depriving a character of sight using darkness or interfering objects can heighten tension.
  • Hearing is our secondary sense, and also has a long range.  Characters can hear things around corners and thus detect them before seeing them at times.
  • Smell has a strong link to mood and memory, and thus can provide a great opportunity for the reader to understand the point-of-view character’s temperament and background.
  • Taste is coupled to the sense of smell.  Letting a character experience food and drink in a scene can enhance the overall impression for the reader.  Remember that characters can learn things by tasting even non-food items, such as deciding whether a liquid is water or oil, for example, when gathering evidence.
  • The sense of touch is probably the most intimate.  It’s the only sense without a specific organ, and the only one we can’t block out except through numbness.

If you open up your writing to appeal to all the senses, you’ll find a wealth of new adjectives at your disposal.  There are many great descriptive words that apply to the non-sight senses.  These sensory descriptions should be used with purposeful ends in mind, though.  You’re trying to advance your plot, reveal character attitudes, or set a scene, not to demonstrate your knowledge of the senses.

Through practice you can improve the perceptiveness and sharpness of your senses as well as your ability to write better sensory descriptions.  It’s just like improving any other skill.  I’ll have more to say about that in a future blog entry.

I should caution you not to overdo it, though.  Modern readers dislike, and often skip, long paragraphs of description.  It’s best to sprinkle your sense-based descriptions in small chunks between and among character thoughts and dialogue throughout the scene.  This avoids overloading and boring the reader, and also gives the reader occasional reminders about where the characters are and the state of their surroundings.

As always, I welcome your comments on this topic.  From what I’ve seen, heard, smelled, tasted, and felt, this concludes another blog entry by–

                                                                          Poseidon’s Scribe

January 8, 2012Permalink

Just Thinking to Myself

The title of this blog entry is a little joke to remind me not to ever do that in my fiction–state that a character is “thinking to himself.”  How else would he be thinking?

But the broader question facing us today regards how a writer should convey a character’s thoughts.  To get your fiction published these days, it’s important to be able to let your readers know the thoughts of your point-of-view character.  Fiction, as I’ve said before, is about the human condition, and a large part of the human experience requires thinking.  In fiction, we expect to find a protagonist dealing with one or more conflicts, and a large part of understanding her struggle is to know her thoughts.

Thoughts reveal a lot about a character.  Often thoughts are more extreme and emotion-packed than spoken words.  In the cases where a character’s thoughts are just as restrained as his speech, that tells the reader this character has a great degree of self-control.  A character that “speaks his mind” likely does not have much tact in social situations.

It’s rather strange that English has quotation marks to indicate spoken dialogue, but no analogous, standard symbol for a character’s thoughts.  Without such a standard, practices vary:

  • “I sure could go for a hamburger,” Steve thought.
  • I sure could go for a hamburger.
  • Steve thought about how much he wanted a hamburger.

The first example with the quotation marks seems to have fallen out of favor.  It’s potentially confusing, since a reader could assume the character is speaking out loud, until the tag–Steve thought–appears.  Some say the second example with italics has run its course and is not recommended.  It may also lead to potential confusing ambiguity, since italics are also used for emphasis, or sometimes to indicate foreign words.

As for me, I prefer italics.  I like how italicized words leap out and distinguish themselves as different.  When used to indicate thought, they really help the reader separate “dialogue” from thought and narration.  I suppose the knock against italics is they can interrupt flow.

Although the last example reads just like narration, the tag “Steve thought” clues the reader in that the character is thinking.  The use of standard text makes for a smoother read.

In my view, there are three guidelines you should follow:  (1) stick with the publisher’s guidelines, if known; (2) avoid confusing the reader; and (3) be somewhat consistent through your story in the technique you use.

There are some other helpful blog post articles on this topic here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.  As you’ll see from reading through them, there is general agreement, but some differences.  What are your thoughts on representing a character’s thoughts?  I welcome comments.

That’s another fine blog post I’ve written, thought–

                                                                               Poseidon’s Scribe

 

January 1, 2012Permalink

Alone With Your Writing

Most writers write alone.  Some collaborate, but for the majority it’s a solitary thing.

Do you like being alone?  Those who tend toward introversion prefer solitude to recharge after the drain of being around other people.  However, even the most introverted person is still a bit of a social animal; we all need company now and then.

Extroverted writers face a more complex dilemma.  Their need to write compels them to work alone to complete it, but solitude exhausts them emotionally until they can recharge by being around others.  There certainly are some extroverted writers, but it must be a struggle.

Being alone, of course, does not necessarily mean being lonely.  Aloneness is a condition, but loneliness is an emotion under your control.  If you enjoy what you’re doing while alone–writing, in this case–then you won’t be lonely.

Most writers would argue they’re not completely alone when they write.  They’re surrounded by groups of “virtual” people.  First are their story’s characters.  For a writer who is “in the zone,” the characters can seem very real and almost present.  Rather than feeling alone, then, a writer is actually transported to a different world, the world of his story, which might be very crowded indeed.

To some extent, writers also feel the presence of their readers.  The writer shares the reader’s eventual emotional reaction to the story as if the reader is looking over his shoulder.

Lastly, while alone, the writer can also be “accompanied” by an editor or critique group member.  Each time he types an adverb or mixes a metaphor or creates an awkward point of view jump, he’ll hear the disapproving voice of that person in his ear.

If you are considering becoming a writer, my advice is not to let the prospect of spending all that time alone deter you.  If you have a story to tell and something inside is driving you to write it down and share it with the world–if the passion is that intense, you’ll welcome the solitude rather than fear it.

One note of caution:  not only is writing a solitary endeavor, it is also a sedentary one.  It’s pretty much the opposite of physical exercise.  It requires hours and hours of sitting.  Here’s my advice on dealing with that:

  • Make yourself as comfortable as possible while writing, so you’re not straining any particular muscles.
  • Take pacing or stretch breaks when you can so you’re not in one position for too long.
  • Don’t eat while you write.  Once you begin mentally associating writing with snacking, that will become your normal mode and undesired weight gain can result.
  • Find time to exercise.  It’s true that both writing and exercising consume time, which is precious for us all.  But think of it this way–your eventual readers will want you healthy enough to keep cranking out more books!  Besides, you might be able to take a small digital voice recorder with you as you exercise (particularly jogging or walking) so you don’t lose the ideas that occur while your mind is otherwise unoccupied.

In summary, sitting alone is what writers do.  If writing is what you love, then you’ll be able to cope with the sitting and the solitude.  On this and in all other matters, you know you can trust…

                                                                        Poseidon’s Scribe

December 18, 2011Permalink

Why’d She Do That?

Did you ever read about a character making a decision or taking an action and wondered “Why did she do that?”  For example, why does the girl in the skimpy dress unlock and crack open her door after she’s seen the TV news and knows there are zombies loose?  If you have to ask why, the author hasn’t made the character’s motivations clear enough.  Today I thought I’d give you one technique for avoiding that problem.

Engineers have a method called Root Cause Analysis (RCA) they use when something goes wrong with machines or systems they designed–ships sink, spacecraft blow up, cars crash, etc.  They review the accident to understand if they could design the machine or system better to lessen the risk.  It occurred to me one day that RCA could be applied to fiction writing.

Imagine an event–one person taking a specific action.  Let’s represent that event with a rectangle.  For the moment, we’ll call our event the “effect.”  For that event to take place, a set of conditions must be present, and a few other events must have taken place first.   These can be represented by other box-like rectangles off to the left, connected by lines to the effect box.  The prior events can be termed “causes.”

Each of the prior causal events are also themselves effects of even earlier causes and conditions.  This means there is an endless stream of causes and effects, creating a rather messy diagram of infinite boxes and lines. But for our purposes we can keep it from getting too complicated.

Let’s take our seemingly idiotic girl (whom we’ll call Mary) who unlocks her door in a zombie-infested neighborhood.  We put the words “Mary cracks open door” in our effect box.  We know some conditions have to be present for that to happen, but some of them are too obvious to write down–Mary has to exist, she has to be inside a house or apartment, the dwelling has to have a door.  As you do RCA you’ll become more skilled at figuring out which conditions to write down.

Let’s suppose there are other, less obvious, conditions that lead to Mary’s action.  Suppose there’s a storm or fog and the view out her nearby window is obscured.  These could be shown as condition boxes with lines connecting to our effect box.  Suppose Mary’s personality includes the fact that she’s a naturally curious person.  We’ll come back to that one later.

Aside from conditions, we can think of a few preceding events that might prompt Mary to crack open her door.  Suppose she knows her boyfriend is outside somewhere, because he called her earlier and said he’s on his way to her.

Suppose she just heard a noise from outside, a voice that sounds like it might be her boyfriend.  If the call from her boyfriend is one of the prior events, that one will take some explaining, too.  Why would he venture out on a stormy night when zombies are about?  That event cries out for its own prior events and conditions.

The point is for you the author to think about each major decision or fateful step taken by a character and come up with reasons, motivations (whether they are prior events or conditions) that help explain why the character takes that action.

Remember I mentioned that one of our story’s conditions would be that Mary is a curious, inquisitive person?  It’s not enough to just put that in a box on our cause-effect motivation chart.  You need to establish that point earlier in your story.  Provide some scene, or part of a scene, showing that Mary’s personality includes that trait.  Only then will readers understand why she cracks the door later.

When you finish your chart, it should look something like a big ‘greater than’ (>) symbol leading to the final event of your story.  Now make sure the manuscript mentions all the events and all the conditions, even if briefly, and even if only hinted.

RCA helps engineers figure out why bad things happen with complex engineered systems, but I think authors can use it to help explain why their characters do things, too.  What do you think?  Could that technique help you?  From personal experience, I can tell you it has helped–

                                                                   Poseidon’s Scribe

November 27, 2011Permalink

Show and Tell

Did you have Show-and-Tell in elementary school, where you brought in some object of interest, showed it to the class, and told them all about it?  The shown object gave something for the class to look at while listening to the speaker’s narration about it.  The whole process wouldn’t have worked as well if it were just Show or just Tell, would it?

Today I’m tackling the age-old caution given to writers to “Show, don’t Tell,” which I briefly mentioned here.  As with many of my blog topics, I’ll write about it as if I’m an expert, though I still struggle with the concept in my own fiction.  First let’s define terms.  In writing, “Show” means to convey to the reader a sense of being inside a character, experiencing what the character is going through, portraying the character’s senses, thoughts, and feelings.  “Tell” means to describe or inform in narrator fashion, mainly using facts much like a journalist would use his “who-what-when-where-why-how” model.

In Showing, you really engage the reader.  Remember that the purpose of storytelling is not just to convey information, but to create a reaction in the reader, to entertain (and I mean that in the broad sense, not the comedic sense).  Showing does that in a way Telling never can.  Think of the best stories you ever read.  Chances are you felt a part of the story as you read along, and that made you care about the characters and about the outcome.  Unfortunately, Showing typically takes more words.  It’s very hard to be blunt while Showing.

On the other hand, Telling can be very compact.  You can convey a lot of information with very few words.  However, Telling is often boring.  It doesn’t engage your reader for long or help her care about your characters.

My advice is to use both techniques, but learn when to use each.  Showing is necessary for the more dramatic moments of story scenes.  It’s vital to show the key moments of your protagonist’s struggle to resolve the conflict of your story.  However, events have to happen between these key dramatic moments.  Use Telling to catch the reader up on these in-between events.

The suggestion to combine some Telling with Showing isn’t just my idea, but any writer will pretty much tell you the same thing.  Why, then, do you still hear the “show, don’t tell” advice?  It’s because Showing is harder to write than Telling, and it’s easy to lapse back into that narrative, journalistic way of writing. It’s difficult getting into a character’s head and conveying the character’s feelings and impressions.  You have to force yourself to Show.  Although writers must Tell on occasion, they need not be reminded to do that.

One key to writing well in both the Show and the Tell mode is to choose details wisely.  That is well worth a future blog entry all by itself.

So just like in elementary school, it’s important to both show and tell.  For now, class dismissed.  Your homework assignment is to leave a comment with your opinion about the “show, don’t tell” admonition, to–

                                                                Poseidon’s Scribe

 

November 20, 2011Permalink

As You Know, Bob…

Perhaps your name isn’t Bob, but this post could still be for you, if you’re a beginning fiction writer.  One of the difficult parts of writing is creating believable dialogue, and one of the easy traps to fall into is called As You Know, Bob, or AYKB.

It stems from the writer’s need to convey information about the world of the story to readers who don’t know it yet.  Dialogue between story characters might seem like the perfect opportunity to convey the information, since dialogue stands out more than long, narrative paragraphs.  Trouble is, the characters are already in the story’s world, and already know about it.

Advertisers fall prey to AYKB too, often in radio ads.  Frequently you hear ads like this:

“I really enjoy Company XYZ.  Their product is superior to all competitors.”

“Yes, and I also like their friendly, knowledgeable staff.”

“And how about XYZ’s convenient location, right downtown at the corner of A Street and B Avenue?”

Advertisers have a limited time to convey information, and they know we pay attention to conversations more than we do to a single, blabbing announcer.  Problem is, the conversation above is just plain stupid.  People don’t talk that way.  In fact, we listeners often feel so insulted by such ads that we start to wonder if Company XYZ’s product can be any good if their ads are so terrible.

The same situation applies to your fiction writing.  Readers will be turned off if your characters talk like that; there’s plenty of good fiction by other writers they could be reading.

How do you avoid the AYKB problem in your writing, especially since it’s such an easy trap?  Review your character’s dialogue and ask yourself if that’s something someone already in the story’s world would say.  Is it realistic and believable?  Get inside your character’s head and cut the dialogue down to only what the characters would really say.

Of course, you still have the information to convey.  The best way to do that is bit by bit, with small amounts of narration or (better) action accompanying the dialogue.  Use the minimum amount necessary for the reader to understand the world of the story.  You’d be surprised how fast the reader will catch up and understand the world of the story with only teaspoonfuls of information sprinkled in from time to time.

AYKB is a well-known writing problem, and is part of a lexicon of writing problems known as the Turkey City Lexicon.  If you search you’ll find several listings and explanations of the many entries in the lexicon.

Good luck in your efforts to strengthen the dialogue in your writing.  And I can’t resist closing by saying:  As you know, Bob, I’m —

                                                                             Poseidon’s Scribe

October 16, 2011Permalink

What? I’m Supposed to Learn Structure, Too?

Yes, you should know about short story structure to be successful in selling your tales.  Luckily, it’s not difficult.  To learn about structure, I mean.  The actual writing of successful short stories takes some effort, but so does anything worthwhile.

Let’s start with the basic structure of any story.  This structure is true for novels, movies, plays, even comic books.  We’ll then see how the structure applies to short stories in particular.

1.  The Hook.  This is an opening section meant to grab the reader’s (or viewer’s) interest.  I’ll have a few things to say about hooks in a future blog post. The hook needs to introduce your protagonist and his or her conflict.  It should set the story in a particular time or place.

2.  The Middle.  Here the protagonist tries several times to end the conflict, but fails.  It can even be the case that his or her attempts actually make things worse. In any case, the protagonist is tested in some way, either to physical limits or emotional ones, or both.

3.  The Resolution (or Dénouement).  In this section the conflict is resolved.  This usually involves the protagonist learning something, perhaps something about himself or herself.  The conflict could also be resolved by the protagonist’s death.

Aristotle called these parts the protasis, the epitasis, and the catastrophe.

 

 

The novelist Gustav Freytag later introduced the concept of the dramatic arc containing five parts: exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, and dénouement.  Essentially Aristotle’s epitasis includes the middle three elements of Freytag’s dramatic arc, though the falling action could be part of Aristotle’s catastrophe.  For simplicity here, I’ll stick to a three-part structure and use my titles for them.

 

In many story forms there will be no breaks or signposts separating these sections.  Even so, a reader who is looking for these sections will find them.  If you think back to novels you’ve read or movies you’ve seen, you’ll be able to recognize this structure.

With short stories, everything gets compressed.  The main feature of short stories is, in fact, their shortness.  This benefits the reader, since she or he can enjoy the story in a single sitting, thus remaining immersed in the world of the tale without interruption by the real world.  However, this brevity becomes the driving constraint for the writer.  The writer has to convey all three elements of story structure, but in very few words.

A short story needs a hook, like all stories.  However, an author of such tales cannot include a long description of the protagonist, other characters, or the setting.  Short stories have bare-bones hooks that just (1) introduce the protagonist, (2) introduce the conflict, and (3) set the story in time and place.

The middle section of a short story is likewise compacted down to the bare minimum.  There are fewer characters to interact with, few or no subplots, not even very many protagonist-testing events.  To keep the middle section short, some events or actions can be implied, letting the reader fill in the gaps in his or her mind.  This implication technique seems to contradict the “show, don’t tell” commandment, but it’s different, and it’s something with which I still struggle.

A short story’s resolution section also is a trimmed-down version, in comparison with longer works.  The section needs to resolve the conflict, possibly by having the protagonist learn something or otherwise grow as a person, or defeat the antagonist.  Nearly all the loose ends of the story need to be tied up in this section.  I say nearly all because it’s okay to leave some things unresolved or open to question–that’s life.

Throughout the writing of the short story, the author must take pains to keep a laser-like focus on the theme of the story.  Delete anything not directly supporting that theme, or necessary to having a meaningful story.

As you read more short stories by authors you enjoy, you’ll see how they employ the three-part structure I’ve described.  Soon you’ll be using it in your own stories, too.  As always, please send a comment if this has been useful to you, and address it to–

                                                                      Poseidon’s Scribe 

October 2, 2011Permalink

When Things Mean Other Things

What do you think of symbolism in writing?  Most of us have been through English (Language Arts) classes where the teacher encouraged us to find symbols in some of the great works of literature.  This is a bit of a stretch for high school students, but school is all about stretching young minds, isn’t it?  Some of us had the unfortunate experience of guessing at a symbol and being told we were wrong.

This raises several questions.  Should writers use symbolism?  If they do, and readers detect and interpret the symbols correctly, does that enhance the reading experience?  If a reader picks up on a symbol the writer didn’t intend, is the reader wrong?

This site lists some of the more common symbols and what they often mean.  But almost anything tangible can serve as a symbol, as long as it relates to the plot, gives added meaning to the story, and is appropriate for the thing (usually something intangible) it’s symbolizing.

Here, writer John T. Reed makes the case that the exercise of looking for symbolism is silly, and no more than a parlor game.  The essay is persuasive, and he argues writers should strive for clarity, not make it a struggle for readers to decode hidden meanings.  Moreover, he says those who seek symbolism often find things unintended by the author.

In Isaac Asimov’s essay on symbolism, he wrote, “When I complained to someone who worked up a symbolic meaning of my story ‘Nightfall’ that made no sense to me at all, he said to me, haughtily, ‘What makes you think you understand the story just because you’ve written it?’… Sometimes it is quite demonstrable that an author inserts a deeper symbolism than he knows-or even understands.”

An intriguing exchange.  Authors have to remember that written storytelling is a curious form of human communication.  The purpose of communication is to convey information from one human mind to another.  But storytelling is one-way only:  writer to reader.  The writer need not even be alive any more, and often isn’t.  The reader’s enjoyment of a story is a personal, internal experience, without any possibility (usually) of asking for clarification or explanation.

Therefore, it seems to me readers get to decide what symbolism they discover in a story, and no one should say they’re wrong.  Not English teachers, and not even the author.

As to whether writers should intentionally use symbolism in their stories, that’s a question for each author to decide.  I’ve used symbolism purposefully in some of my stories, and not in others.  In “The Wind-Sphere Ship,” the human eye symbolizes the future, whether it’s the large eyes of Heron’s friend Praxiteles or the painted eyes on the Greek ships.  In “The Vessel,” the circle symbolizes the old unity of the previous Atlantean culture, but the ceramic drinking flagon symbolizes the attempt to preserve and spread that culture to other, more primitive societies.

One of my favorite uses of symbolism is in Jules Verne’s novel The Mighty Orinoco, which involves a mission to find the source of the river Orinoco.  Finding the sources of rivers was a major 19th century geographical pursuit.  One of the main characters on the mission is also seeking his father, lost somewhere along the river.  Note the symbolic parallel between the river’s source and the source of one’s own life.

In closing, I think it was Sigmund Freud who reminded us, “sometimes a cigar is just a cigar,” but I suspect Groucho Marx would have replied, “Just?”  I’d love to hear your thoughts on the use of symbolism in fiction, so feel free to leave a comment for–

                                                            Poseidon’s Scribe

August 24, 2011Permalink