Tag Archives: William Faulkner

Break Any Rule but This One

Are you one of those who’d like to write a story—a novel, even—but the task seems too difficult? You recall unpleasant memories of Language Arts classes, learning all the complex rules of English. You’re afraid you’ll break a rule.

I’ll simplify things for you. There’s only one rule.

There exist, however, a vast number of guidelines. These cover spelling, grammar, punctuation, sentence structure, plot, pacing, character development, story formatting, manuscript submitting, and more. A lot to keep track of.

Or not.

For every guideline you name, at least one famous author ignored it:

  • Don’t use double negatives. Jane Austen didn’t not use them.
  • Don’t use run-on sentences. Both Charles Dickens and Marcel Proust thought otherwise, going on and on with long sentences on many occasions, long past the point of necessity.
  • Don’t begin sentences with conjunctions. But William Faulkner did.
  • Always set off dialogue with quotation marks. Cormac McCarthy and José Saramago said no thanks.
  • Use periods and commas where required. James Joyce and Gertrude Stein both famous writers got along okay without them
  • Use proper punctuation. Samuel Beckett never did and Junot Díaz never does

How come you had to learn all those guidelines, but famous authors get to violate them? For one thing, guidelines help when you’re learning to write. Also, the guidelines make your writing more understandable to readers. They’re getting what they expect, what they find easy to read.

It’s okay to violate a guideline, but you shouldn’t break the One Rule.

What’s the One Rule?

Here it is: Tell a good story.

That’s it. Or rather, that’s the simplest expression of the One Rule.

What is a ‘good story?’ From a writer’s perspective, I’d say a good story comes from deep within. The writer cares about the story and feels a strong need to tell it.

If the writer does that job well enough, then a good story (1) draws a reader in, (2) keeps a reader reading, (3) leaves a reader changed, and (4) lingers in the reader’s mind long after reading it.

If you write a good story, it doesn’t matter how many guidelines you violate.

Let’s say you’re in the middle of writing a story. Words are flowing, straight from your heart. You’re in the zone.

You stop. Some inner editor, some memory of a Language Arts teacher, or some recollection of an authoritative website’s advice, berates you for breaking a rule. Looking back over your manuscript in horror, you realize it’s true. You’re a language criminal. The linguistic police will apprehend you and send you to writer jail.

Before the law can close in, you hide the evidence. You change the story, bringing it into compliance with the rules. From somewhere inside, a rebel voice protests, “now you’re making the story worse.”

As you look over what you’ve edited, it’s clear. The voice is right. The story is worse. Not what it was meant to be. As if the story itself wants you to break a rule. Your story demands it.

What to do? Well, many things that seem like hard and fast rules are really just guidelines. If obeying them would worsen your story, ignore them.

That last part—that ‘if’—is key. Violate a guideline only after consideration, not out of ignorance.

Just don’t break the One Rule. Tell a good story. In the pursuit of that goal, you may violate any other guideline, with the full permission of—

Poseidon’s Scribe

May 22, 2022Permalink

Author Interview — Robert McGough

Robert McGoughAnother treat for Poseidon’s Scribe readers today. I had the pleasure of interviewing Robert McGough, whose short story “Black Hydra” will appear in the upcoming anthology Avast, Ye Airships! He tells me he writes in the Horror, Steampunk, and Southern Gothic genres. On to the interview:

Poseidon’s Scribe: When and why did you begin writing fiction?

Robert McGough: I have written fiction as long as I can remember really, though my first serious attempts came in high school. They were laughably bad, so I more or less shelved any sort of serious writing til about two and a half years ago, during grad school. As for where, I was born and raised in south central Alabama!

P.S.: What are the easiest, and the most difficult, aspects of writing for you?

R.McG: Writing is easy. Editing is a nightmare. I can happily crank out 1-3 thousand words a day for weeks on end…but when it comes time to edit, I typically don’t. I would rather get new ideas to paper than spend time revising old ideas. I typically only edit when I am actually sending something off for submission.

P.S.: I see on your website you have participated in Nanowrimo several times. What were those experiences like? Do you plan to do it again?

R.McG: I have ‘won’ it three times now, the past three years. My first ‘win’ came about four months after I started back seriously writing. I would not trade the experiences for anything, but I find that each year gets a little bit harder. I will likely keep doing it until such point that I feel the strain outweighs the gain.

AvastYeAirshipsP.S.: You have a story, “Black Hydra,” in the anthology Avast, Ye Airships! Tell us a little about the story, and what inspired you to write it.

R.McG: I have created a fantasy/steampunk world that all of my steampunk stories take place in. As most of them are currently tied up in what I hope will be a future publication, I decided to write a story for this anthology. It is in fact the third story I have written featuring the main character, Colonel Gurthwait, a somewhat bumbling ‘great white hunter’ type.

P.S.: Your story “Whispers on the Wind” got published in the anthology Journals of Horror: Found Fiction. Please tell us about that story, and how you got the idea for it.

R.McG: H.P. Lovecraft is a huge influence on me, and this was the first story that I wrote in emulation of his style. It is about a writer who hears stories on the wind, and begins to write them for publication, and the fall out that ensues. It is not cthulian however, I have come up with my own mythos which is based on gnosticism. But if you love Lovecraft, then I think you will like it.

P.S.: Your website suggests you write in three genres: Horror, Steampunk, and Southern Gothic. I haven’t heard of Southern Gothic–can you describe it?

R.McG: The most famous southern gothic writers are Faulkner, Flannery O’Conner, and Harper Lee. They are tales set in the south that feature the eccentric, the strange, the grotesque. Like more mainstream gothic tales they often feature a bit of a hint of the supernatural. All in all, good stuff!

P.S.: What is your current work in progress?

R.McG: Tonight I finished a southern gothic tale called ‘Pearls Before Swine’ which is a take on deals with the devil. I am also working on a weird fiction story, editing up a steampunk novella, and am about to start a pair of fantasy stories. I typically keep several projects going at a time so that I don’t get bored.

Poseidon’s Scribe: What advice can you offer to aspiring writers?

Robert McGough: The best advice I can give is that whatever excuse you have to not write is likely bullshit. If writing is important to you, you will make the time. If you find yourself continually making excuses, maybe you need to find a different hobby.

 

Thank you, Bob! Folks can find out more about Robert McGough on Twitter (@talesbybob), Facebook, at his website, and his blog.

 Poseidon’s Scribe

January 16, 2015Permalink

Better Writing through Chemistry?

If you consume alcohol or mind-altering drugs, will that improve your writing?  Many people think so.  Supposing it’s true, it’s nice to have that short-cut to greatness available, isn’t it?  Why struggle to choose the right words while sober or clean when you can snort, inject, or imbibe your way to literary greatness?

The connection persists because so many of the top writers, it seems, had a reputation for using drugs or alcohol.  The two that spring to my mind are Edgar Allan Poe’s use of opium and absinthe, and Ernest Hemingway’s consumption of wine, mojitos, and daiquiris.  The list of famous authors who wrote under the influence also includes Anthony Burgess, William S. Burroughs, Raymond Chandler, Jean Cocteau, Phillip K. Dick, William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Aldous Huxley, Jack Kerouac, Ken Kesey, Stephen King, Carson McCullers, Dorothy Parker, Robert Louis Stevenson, Oscar Wilde, and Tennessee Williams.

The effects of alcohol that might benefit a writer include a loss of inhibitions, which might stimulate creativity.  However, other effects would be less helpful: blurred vision, slurred speech, slowed reaction times, impaired memory, blackouts, shaking, lack of muscle coordination and balance.

Drugs vary in their effects, but some of the reactions that might aid an author include euphoric pleasure, confidence, and extended wakefulness.  I suppose hallucinations could be of use to a writer, so let’s include those.  However, the known downsides of drugs can include delusions, aggression, paranoia, drowsiness, respiratory depression, nausea, blurred vision, headaches, disorientation, impaired memory, slowed reaction time, diminished judgment, mood swings, and addiction.

On balance, it seems to me there would be more harm than good in drinking or using drugs to improve your writing.  Some of the things said about the writers I listed above may not even be true.  The Edgar Allan Poe Society has debunked the myths about the writer of “Annabel Lee” and “The Bells.”  It’s not entirely clear if some of the other writers took drugs or alcohol to improve their writing or to cope with their troubled lives.

I remain skeptical about using drugs or alcohol as a path to quality writing.  Joanna Penn, whose blog I follow, has written a very thoughtful piece on the subject.  I have to commend author Eric Kuentz for actually conducting an experiment and being willing to share his experience.  His results seem rather mixed and it appears he’s disinclined to recommend the practice to others.

I’d like to hear your thoughts on, or experiences with, this subject.  Please leave a comment.  As for my own experiences, well, my scribing job occasionally takes me to Olympus where I’m sometimes allowed to partake of ambrosia and nectar.  Those are the substances most recommended by—

                                                    Poseidon’s Scribe

November 4, 2012Permalink

Do the Objective Correlative

No, the Objective Correlative isn’t a dance step, so far as I know.  It’s a literary term that can be hard to comprehend.  Let’s see if I can explain it in words even I can understand.

Imagine you’re an author writing a scene in which a boy encounters a rather scary bear.  You want to convey to the reader the emotion felt by the boy when he senses the bear is watching him from somewhere, but he can’t see the animal.  You could simply state the boy was scared.  That would violate the principle of show, don’t tell we’ve discussed before, and it’s rather on the amateurish side. You could instead paint a word picture of the scene, as William Faulkner did in his story, “The Bear.”

He heard no dogs at all.  He never did hear them.  He only heard the drumming of the woodpecker stop short off and knew that the bear was looking at him.  He never saw it.  He did not know whether it was in front of him or behind him.  He did not move, holding the useless gun, which he had not even had warning to cock and which even now he did not cock, tasting in his saliva that taint as of brass which he knew now because he had smelled it when he peered under the kitchen at the huddled dogs.

First we have the sudden silence of normally noisy animals–dogs and a woodpecker.  We have the sense of “blindness” in that the boy cannot see the bear.  Faulkner describes the boy’s only potential weapon in countering the situation as “useless” and not even cocked.  There’s a cold, metallic taste in his mouth.  Finally we find the dogs huddled, hiding.

In a few sentences, Faulkner shows us that terror of being watched, vulnerable, unable to even confront the danger.  Never once does he mention the boy’s emotion, and yet we feel it nonetheless because of the situation, the chain of events, the details chosen in the passage.  Moreover, a single one of the details wouldn’t have sufficed; the combination of several details completes the effect of evoking the emotion.

That is the Objective Correlative.  The artist Washington Allston coined the term around 1840 and meant it to be applied to painting.  T.S. Eliot later revived the term and applied it to literature.  I came across the concept while surfing the web one day when I came across this site.

T.S. Eliot said there are ways to fall short of having the right objective correlative.  The details in a scene might not leave readers with any particular emotion, or maybe with the wrong one.

You can use common literary symbols as part of an objective correlative.  Some of the many symbols used to represent an emotion include the color blue to mean calm, darkness to mean fear, rain to mean sadness, and a mouse to represent shyness.

Of course, readers vary by culture and background and some words do not convey the same emotions to all.  Still, the objective correlative is an effective tool for maximizing the emotional impact of your writing.  I encourage you to ‘do the objective correlative’ even if it isn’t a dance.  Did this blog entry help you understand the term?  Leave a comment and let me know.  Dancing here in this little corner of the Internet you’ll find–

                                                  Poseidon’s Scribe

 

 

August 26, 2012Permalink

The first thing we do, we kill all the darlings!

The title of this blog post combines a bit of William Shakespeare with William Faulkner.  I’m fairly confident neither William will sue me.

Faulkner’s quote actually was, “In writing, you must kill all your darlings.”  What did he mean by that?  My interpretation is he meant for writers to look, as they edit their stories, for passages with clever phrases, little jokes, or humorous anecdotes—the passages that made them smile as they wrote them for the first time.  Then they are to ask themselves, “Does this passage relate to the story?  Does it advance the plot?  Does it help the reader understand the characters?  Does the style or tone of the passage match the rest of the story?”

Here’s the hard part.  If the passage does not pass these tests, the writer must delete it.  That’s difficult because the writer might consider the passage a demonstration of the greatest height of her talent.  The writer may have fallen in love with a particular clause, a sentence, a paragraph, a character, a scene.  However, for the sake of the story, the darling must go.

Here’s the even worse part.  As he was writing, the author might have thought of and written the darling, fallen in love with it, and then bent the story around to force-fit the darling in.  Now the question of killing the darling involves how much of a force-fit it was, and how much rewriting is necessary for the deletion.  Even so, the writer should think hard about this, keeping in mind the story is more important than the darling.

Fortunately, the darling need not be so terminated that it vanishes to wherever deleted bits and bytes go.  The writer can save it in a separate file, for potential use in a later story, one where it will fit better.  Perhaps an entire story can be written around that darling.  In the directories where I save my stories, there is almost always a “Deleted Sections” file I’ve created to dump the parts of early drafts that I’ve axed.

I don’t know that Faulkner was necessarily advocating more concise writing.  After all, a writer could go back, kill the darlings, then replace them with even longer passages that fit the story better.  I think he was advocating the writing of more integral stories, where each piece of the story is necessary and supports the plot and theme.

As you do this in your writing, don’t think of yourself as moving along the path to becoming a psychopathic murderer.  Think of it as your effort to become a better self-editor, a writer who produces well-crafted stories.  Though I may be known to my computer as the Killer of a Thousand Darlings, to you I’ll always remain—

Poseidon’s Scribe

June 12, 2011Permalink