Adjectives and Adverbs - Use Them Sparingly

"Adjectives and adverbs are rich and good and fattening.  The main thing is not to overindulge...Some adjectives and adverbs have become meaningless through literary overuse.  'Great' seldom carries the weight it ought to carry.  'Suddenly' seldom means anything at all; it's a mere transition device--'He was walking down the street.  Suddenly he saw her.'  'Somehow' is a weasel word; it means the author didn't want to bother thinking out the story--'Somehow she just knew...' 'Somehow they made it to the asteroid...' When I teach science fiction and fantasy writing I ban the word.  Nothing can happen 'somehow.'

Ornate adjectives are out of fashion.  Nobody much is likely to say that anything is sesquipedalian, these days. But some conscious prose stylists use adjectives as poets do; the adjective's relation to the noun is unexpected, far-fetched, forcing the reader to stop and make the connection. This mannerism can be effective, but in narration it's risky. Do you want to stop the flow? Is it worth it?

I would recommend to all storytellers a watchful attitude and a thoughtful, careful choice of adjective and adverbs, because the bakery shop of English is rich beyond belief, and narrative prose, particularly if it's going a long distance, needs more muscle than fat."

        -Steering the Craft, Ursula K. Le Guin, pp. 61-62

Theodore Roethke on Craft

Theodore Roethke. Manic-depressive, hard-drinking male-chauvinist-pig. Extraordinary, nurturing teacher and legendary poet. In class he tread lightly on some students' strange work, in case this evidenced a hallmark of an emerging style.

We love to call him our Northwest poet, but he was imported from University of Michigan to the University of Washington. At the infamous Blue Moon in the University District where he hung out, there is a picture of him on the wall. The adjoining alley is named after him.

Here are some of his quotes taken from the book, On Poetry & Craft:

• Literalness is the devil's weapon.
• Art is our defense against hysteria and death.
• There are only two passions in art; there are only love and hate--with endless modifications.
• God is one of the biggest bores in English poetry.
• The sneer is easy to master and usually the mark of the adolescent.
• Break in on the reader sideways. Think with the wise, talk like the common man: Give noun a full swat, But adjective, not.
• The idea of poetry itself is a vast metaphor.
• Simple and profound; how little there is.
• Too eager to say what a lot of people will want to hear.
• I long to be a greater failure in life so I can write better books.
• Today I'm going to lecture on confusion.  I'm all for it.
• This course is an act of faith. In what? In the imagination of us all, in a creative capacity--that most sacred thing--that lies dormant, never dead, in everyone.
• Transcend that vision.  What is first or early is easy to believe. But...it may enchain you.
• I dream of a culture where it is thought a crime to be dull.
• Never be ashamed of the strange.
• There are those who can hold forth, but me, I have to holler.
• He was a man with little capacity for any kind of thinking: therefore he was made an administrator.
• Teaching goes on in spite of administrators.

Mr. Muse Lives in the Basement

There is a muse, but he's not going to come fluttering down in your writing room and scatter creative fairy-dust all over your typewriter or computer station. He lives in the ground. He's a basement guy. You have to descend to his level, and once you get down there you have to furnish an apartment for him to live  in. You have to do all the grunt labor, in other words, while the muse sits and smokes cigars and admires his bowling trophies and pretends to ignore you.  Do you think this is fair? I think it's fair.  He might not be much to look at, that muse-guy, and he may not be much of a conversationalist (what I get out of mine is mostly surly grunts, unless he's on duty), but he's got the inspiration.  It's right that you should do all the work and burn all the midnight oil, because the guy with the cigar and the little wings has got a bag of magic. There's stuff in there that can change your life.

--Stephen King, On Writing, page 144.

As far as how-to books are concerned, there are many out there.  I like to couple Stephen King's memoir with Natalie Goldberg's Writing Down the Bones.  They couldn't be more different.  Yet, they both are right on, as far as writing goes.  My students find them both equally helpful.

Self-Deprecation

If we're honest, we have a treasure trove of self-deprecation.  You know your foibles better than anyone else. Rodney Dangerfield's "I don't get no respect" attitude is fodder for writing. Mine your own insecurities once in a while; laugh at yourself and encourage your reader to laugh at those qualities in them.  It's part of the human condition.

Anne Lamont is a good example.  She describes a reading where she had jet lag, the self-esteem of a prawn, and to top it off, she stopped breathing. She said she sounded like the English patient.

Understatement and hyperbole work in writing.  Exploit them both.

Favorite Quote on Writing -- James Baldwin

One writes out of one thing only — one's own experience. Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from this experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give. This is the only real concern of the artist, to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art.
Baldwin, James. Autobiographical Notes. 1952.

Try Five Different Styles

Write this incident in five completely different styles:

A man gets off a bus, stumbles, looks over and sees a woman smiling.

Let me know how it goes.

Song and Rhythm

Struggling with my novel about a Vietnam combat Marine, I came across this quote from Woody Guthrie in the Sun, May 2014, Issue 461:

". . .When a soldier shoots a soldier, that's a note to this song. When a cannon blows up twenty men, that's part of the rhythm, and when a soldier march off over the hill and don't march back, that's the drumbeat of this song. . . ."

Difference Between a Short Story and a Novel

Taking a break from short stories, I am in the midst of writing a novel.  I've heard that the only difference between the two is that a novel is longer.

I couldn't disagree more.  Writing a book demands tenacity and endurance. Faith and patience. Hope and letting go.  A strict writing regimen.

Short stories come to me quickly.  I'm in control.  After every word is checked and my writing group critiques, I send the finished product out to literary journals.  So far I've  received gratification in a short time in the way of an acceptance.  After publication, the copyright reverts to me.

Not so with my novel.  It's taking an agonizing amount of time, effort and discipline.  The plot changes as do the characters, without any direction from me.  Suddenly a character shows up I've never met before.  A new plot develops.  Part of the old one gets thrown out.  I don't expect gratification now or anytime soon.  I am far from submitting to small presses.  Far from finishing the first draft.  Even further from editing and revising.

So why am I torturing myself?  Because my protagonist and his tale have been following me around for decades.  I cannot not squeeze his life and soul in a short story.

In the meantime, I'm furthering the story by getting out of the way and letting it happen.

Angels or Demons? Contradictions are the Stuff of Story

You must carry a chaos inside you to give birth to dancing.
                                                                                             --Nietzsche        

                                                                               

The creative principle must have opposition in order to exist.
                                                                                            --Norman Mailer

All suffering is bearable if it is seen as part of a story.
                                                                                           --Isak Dinesen (Out of Africa)

A creative person has little power over his own life.  He is not free. He is captive and driven by his daemon.
                                                                                            --C.G. Jung

Nothing resembles an angel so much as a demon, and vice versa.
                                                                                            --Jean Dutourd

I feel there is an angel in me whom I am constantly shocking.
                                                                                             --Jean Cocteau

The world into which we are born is brutal and cruel, and at the same time, of divine beauty.
                                                                                              --C.G. Jung

Art is a lie which allows us to approach the truth.
                                                                                                --Picasso

A Love-Hate Relationship

I have a love-hate relationship with the writing life. I wouldn't wish to have any other life . . . and on the other hand, I wish it were easier. And it never is. The reward comes sentence by sentence.  The reward comes in the unexpected inspiration. The reward comes from creating a character who lives and breathes and is perfectly real. But such effort it takes to attain the reward! I would have never have believed it would take such effort.

                                                                          Journal of a Novel
                                                                          December 15, 1997

Complexity and Contradictions in Characters

A writer cannot go wrong with Janet Burroway's book, Writing Fiction, eighth edition.  The following is a bit on characterization and complexity:

Conflict is at the core of character as it is of plot. If plot begins with trouble, then character begins with a person in trouble; and trouble most dramatically occurs because we all have traits, tendencies, and desires that are at war, not simply with the world and other people, but with other traits, tendencies of our own. All of us probably know of a woman of the strong, striding, independent sort, attractive only to men who like a strong and striding woman. And when she falls in love? She becomes a clinging sentimentalist. All of us know a father who is generous, patient, and dependable. And when the children cross the line? He smashes crockery and wields a strap. All of us are gentle, violent; logical, schmaltzy; tough, squeamish; lusty, prudish; sloppy, meticulous; energetic, apathetic; manic, depressive. Perhaps you don't fit that particular list of contradictions, but you are sufficiently in conflict with yourself that as an author you have characters enough in your own psyche to people the work of a lifetime if you will identify, heighten and dramatize these conflicts within character, which Aristotle called "consistent inconsistencies."

                                                                     pp. 131, 132.

I am in the throes of writing a novel with a central character, an ex-Marine, who is a pushover for babies. Yet as a kid he slapped a baby who wouldn't stop crying.  He hates his sister for his dependency on her as he slogs his way into alcoholism.  Yet it is she who he turns to for help along the way.  We'll see what his feelings are in sobriety.