Get it Down or Labor Lovingly?

 

Blog 37

A recent conversation with my adult son triggered awareness of an evolution in my writing approach. My son, an actor, who is developing a screen play, seemed to be laboring to the point of immobility in his desire for conceptual and language precision.

My initial, almost reflexive, response was to “just write,” the idea being to get something down and see what follows. Believing that so much in writing is reparative eventually, my thought was (is) you can always repair it later. It’s called editing.

Following a deeper consideration of his struggle, it reoccurred to me that it is not uncommon for a writer to delay a start to a work until he / she can find the right feel for entry to the story they’ve imagined. I’ve read of instances where the delay lasted several years and included multiple re-starts. In my son’s case, the need to feel right, as he moves forward, may even be more necessary relative to the more regimented form of the screenplay.

All that said, for me, the question remains: When attempting to write a novel, do you aim to just get a sentence down hoping it will trigger the next (and the next) or do you labor lovingly over it at the risk of overloading it?

Until recent years, I worked so hard at sentences, I believe I tended to overwrite them. Now, I want to get the story out, down on paper, then, into the computer. At both stages of development, I can begin to refine as needed via the endless editing process, something I’ve come to enjoy more with time.

In retrospect, my earliest writing was so overwrought, so larded with vocabulary – an amateur’s honest, but fatal mistake – that it interfered with the reading. My opinion: Anything that interferes with the reading of a story, anything that makes the flow viscous, can slow, if not deaden, the story. Therefore, it needs to be stricken, any and all of it. Think Elmore Leonard.

The poetic line in writing may elude me in my pursuit of getting the story down, but I’d like to believe it’s in service to writing a good story. (Of course, what writer doesn’t?)

This evolved tendency is true for my novelistic attempts. For shorter works, I still labor much more intensely over the sentences, perhaps related to the need to convey a story in a more compact format. Regardless, it’s ultimately about the reader, isn’t it?

What are some of your thoughts about this? Is this my tempest in a teapot or do you find yourself landing on one side or the other – or somewhere in between?

           

Blog 36 Balancing Dialogue and Description

 

In fiction, particularly crime fiction, there is a (debatable) balance to be drawn between dialogue and physical description. On this occasion, I’d like to focus on that balance.

It was my impression that Elmore Leonard, one of my favorite crime fiction writers, seemed to tilt heavily toward dialogue (as do I), though he was declaratively frugal across both categories. In my memory, his novels live through his characters and their street-edged exchanges.

I tend to use physical description to give the reader a means for framing a scene, but I prefer to drive action with dialogue. Credible dialogue is crucial for me to believe in a character. Lacking that, I fall out of the story’s rhythm, find myself questioning the author. Overuse of physical description of setting, no matter how poetically or enchantingly rendered, separates me from the thrust of the story. I tend to catch myself beginning to speedread (I don’t want to but it happens) with overuse of scenery description. Example: The author, Kem Nunn, an excellent writer and story teller, in The Dogs of Winter, would wax eloquent for pages on the collision of weather and wave action per surfing – and lose me. I’d find myself speedreading to get back to the characters.

It’s as if there’s an optimal tempo for me to devour a story. Too much of anything can disrupt my focus, but more likely if details dominate dialogue. Permit me to stress that if too little is offered in scene-shaping details that elicit sensory engagement, that’s also detrimental to reading pleasure. But again, it is dialogue that enables me to identify with character, evokes my compassion for that creation on a page, and gives me a sense of that imagined life. When I find myself caring for a character, reaching to comprehend his or her motivations, I will remember the story.

As I stated in the opening line of this blog, my sense of balance between dialogue and detail is debatable. I recall years ago at a writer’s conference in Durham, North Carolina, a particular writer, in his general criticism, wanted more detail, not just the telling detail, to paint a scene in his mind. Though I couldn’t bring myself to say it, such was the volume of his detailed descriptions of setting (I thought of Proust’s Swann’s Way), I became numb to his characters and, ultimately, the story. To be fair, his story was not crime fiction but more a scarcely concealed memoir as fiction. Perhaps the story was so personal to him, there was no other way to write it.

Balance.

Blog 35 - Writing Regardless of Mood

 

I am, as I’ve often said, going to do something directly related to writing (almost) every day. I’ll do it (almost) regardless of mood. Something, right? Gotta be something. In stating that, am I suggesting mood doesn’t matter, that it has no impact? Definitely not! Because mood is so impactful with me, I believe I’d be foolish to ignore the conditions, actions, and routines that can affect my mood prior to writing. Writing, for me, is not reflexive or organic. It is, in its own way, toil, requiring honest labor. So anything I can do to enhance mood? I’m for it. That said, I’d like to offer some of my mood-enhancing habits for consideration. So, to set the mood:     

1)      Thinking – Each session, I prefer to think briefly about where I am in a developing story and where I might like to go.

2)      (Almost) always following my (thinking) warm-up, I’ll make a page or two of notes. My intention is to get a reflection of my thoughts on a page and not just depend on memory.

3)      I do not read prior to writing. I love to read, but it seduces me to defer (procrastinate?) the onset of writing. You know the drill: “Just one more chapter.”

4)      Often prior to writing (or during a session, depending upon dog or cat), I’ll spend time with one of our pets. Giving our eighteen year-old, junkyard dog, Mufasa, his daily walk (as I did today), puts me in a more mellow frame of mind, our connection eliciting gratitude for his presence in my life. Result: good mood. Our sixteen year-old cat, Purr, will come up in my chair and settle against my leg almost any time I sit to write. Her presence is an antidote to internal tension on my part. Not infrequently, I’ll briefly pet her and she responds by leaning into my hand. Result: good mood.

5)      Morning sessions (almost) always follow a shower and a shave, gracing my mood with a fresh alertness.

6)      Afternoon sessions (almost) always follow a pleasureful activity, e.g. lunch, dog walk. I rarely pursue dual sessions the same day. For me, I risk allowing the writing to become forced.

7)      At the end of a writing session, I’ll often review and edit what I’ve written. It tends to produce an enhanced sense of direction for where I go next, leaving me mindful of tomorrow and already in a positive mood.

8)      How about chatting prior to (or during) a session? Can’t do it. It takes me out of a writing rhythm, away from my collected thoughts. And yet my understanding with my wife is that if she needs or wants to talk to me, she can. In return, she understands how the process works for me and tries not to interrupt. But she has to have the option. After sixty years together, it’s not just about me.

Blog 34 A Reading List for Those Who want to Understand

 

In the autumn of 1958, my junior year in high school, I entered the annual oratorical contest, my subject – racial discrimination in America. You could hear a pin drop in the auditorium of the almost entirely white student body. I did not win the contest. In retrospect, the memory reminds me that I was already sensitized to the issue of race in our country.

With an erratic pulse in the subsequent sixty plus years, our country has moved unevenly toward a reckoning with our history of slavery and its aftermath. Today, at a time when a plethora of historians / writers, many of them African-American, are providing us with a means to confront with knowledge one of our two national sins (the other, our treatment of the original Americans), sadly, but not unexpectedly to me, a significant number of white Americans are turning away from this opportunity. I choose to look closer.

The two-plus-year pandemic has awakened me to scholarly works addressing this willful lacuna in our national education. I decided to test and enhance my knowledge base by availing myself of a selection of the book salad before me. To date, I have striven to choose a variety of approaches to this massive undertaking in the belief that no single work could exhaust the challenge of continuing to educate myself while reducing, if not eradicating, my prior assumptions.

Among my efforts, may I recommend: 1) Say It Loud (Randall Kennedy) Within an overarching legal framework, this law professor’s essays plumb the issue of justice (or its absence) while offering a window into unrelenting black American historical pursuit of justice. 

2) On Juneteenth (Annette Gordon-Reed) In what I found a gentle but effective presentation, this history professor anchors her work with the date (June 19^th, 1865), too long after the Appomattox surrender, that the last slaves in Galveston, Texas were informed they were free, and then expanding from there its historical significance for all Americans. 

3) Woke Racism (John McWhorter) Possibly an iconoclast to some, I feel this African-American linguistics professor, in exploring examples of a negative impact of woke racism, reaches to balance efforts within ‘the cause’ rather than permitting shrill adherents of political correctness lead to detrimental results despite good intentions, i.e. criticize when indicated, but refrain from using this freedom to destroy. In other words, let the punishment fit the crime. 

4) Mediocre: The Dangerous Legacy of White Male America (Ijeoma Oluo) Key to this writer’s focus is a historical examination of the negative impact of white male violence upon women, people of color, and, ultimately, whites themselves. Perhaps expecting a polemic based on the title, I found it more a call for a reckoning with our history, past and recent. 

5) The 1619 Project (Nikole Hannah-Jones, creator) Though it has been lauded by many and criticized by some, I plan to read it in keeping with my determination to maintain my own mind. The more certain politicians criticize or dismiss it (without having read it), the more I sense there is something there. 

My intention is to continue to reach to learn more about my (our) history. I want to know, always have, whether engaged in a discussion or knowledge for its own sake. And so I read on.                                          

 

Blog 33

Third in a Series: Responsibility as a Writer

I’d like to return once more to the theme of my sense of responsibility as a writer (an
d reader), the third in this series. The first more narrowly focused upon self, the second more broadly examined connection to country and the world. This time I’d like to explore middle ground, to examine the issue of personal responsibility as a writer and citizen in relation to family and neighborhood (as an extension of family).

Responsibility to family might be assumed; in my case, it can be. My wife is the sun, our children orbiting planets, our pets reflected light, all of them the source of joy and, more constantly, satisfaction in life. Motivated by caring for family as I approach sixty years of marriage, can I extend at least some of that bone-deep caring to my neighbors, and in that remain connected to country and world? A fair question: How do I actively attempt to carry out a drawing-board intention? One caring act at a time.

As part of my daily physical exercise, I regularly walk through my neighborhood, an approximately one-mile circuit. More than limiting my route to mere physical exercise, I greet my neighbors. I introduce myself to those I don’t know or am less familiar with, the icebreaker often a beloved dog. I request first names as a starter, offering mine in advance. Foremost, I always ask a dog-owner if she or he is comfortable with me petting their animal, requesting the animal’s name at the outset. Rarely does a loving owner refuse my interest.

From that moment, I strive to memorize the names of the neighbor and the pet. Henceforth, I not only watch for them, but I try to watch out for them, to stay attuned to a neighborly flow of information as to their welfare, alert to the possibility one may be struggling. I would describe my citizenship attitude as microcosmically universal – again, one act of caring at a time. As a citizen, I’ll engage a neighbor in conversation or, as more often happens, I’ll respond to their attempt at engagement, allowing the other to share what they wish. If my views diverge, I try to listen as fully as I can, requesting clarification when needed, then offering my view non-argumentatively or choosing not to in consideration of moment, purpose and neighborliness. When I encounter a disappointing difference of opinion, I try to develop a sense of why that particular view is so important to them. This relates to my perceived roles as writer and reader. I try always to be alert to a possible story and I require myself to read divergent views, i.e. the whole as the sum of its parts.

My Sense of Responsibility as a Writer

 

Blog 32 February 17, 2022

                                                                                                          

This month, I want to return to the issue of my sense of responsibility as a writer, but more broadly as it relates to being an American citizen. I visualize my citizen’s stance as one person, one act at a time toward the greater good. Central to this perception is a dedication to truthfulness, even when the effort proves daunting. My lens is focused specifically on pride and what this word means to me conceptually, how I identify with it, how I clarify it, and how I attempt to remove any assumptions about it that infiltrate my thinking or writing.

Often, it seems these days, there is public pressure to submit to a pre-ordained profession of pride, e.g. “America, right or wrong.” Most simply put, it can attenuate to a required declaration of pride as an American citizen. Do I feel pride as an American? Sometimes, but not automatically. I do flush with pride when we, as a nation, do something right, something that tilts us closer to achieving our stated ideals, something that reflects who we can be to the world. In my novels, I try to imbue my protagonists with a congruent morality.

I have, however, also experienced doubt, even shame, not only over what our country has done historically, but at our current efforts at denial. Same country, different channels.

Not infrequently, I hear people speak of pride in being (fill in the blank), citing a race, a hue, an ethnicity, a religion, a gender. My ethnic heritage is at least fifty percent Irish. Am I proud of that? Frankly, pride doesn’t seem to enter into my reaction. But I enjoy the connection. I feel positive about the historical roots of people who survived attempted genocide by starvation and indifference while managing to produce a stream of writers and poets who contributed to the literary canon.

Pride for me personally, relates to accomplishment, not to an accident of birth. If I strive to do something (writing a novel) and I do it well (to be determined), I very likely will feel the blush of pride, briefly. Again for me, it’s akin to being an American. My responsibility is to display good citizenship; in return, my country owes me good governance. When we behave badly as citizens or as a country, why would I take pride in that?

I do feel fortunate to be an American, feel positive about doing my share to help my country be what it could be by striving to be what I can be, to achieve the standards I try to hold myself to. An example of this effort: a refusal on my part to allow political mania or expediency carry me off into a soul-decaying resentment of others or to surrender to the lure of a convenient explanation to make sense of a dizzying array of complex data.

I am deeply grateful to my country for allowing me opportunities I might not have in too many other countries, e.g. the freedom to express myself through the written word. How many Russians or (again, fill in the blank) would feel at ease expressing these feeling in writing?

Blog 31 January 22, 2022

 

Already “at it” in a new year, I’d like to share some of the directions the journey we call life seems to be taking me. In discussing my thoughts early in 2022 and what I might likely pursue, I would prefer “challenges” to the more prosaic “resolutions.” I’m promising nothing as I lean into the year and its possibilities. Broadly speaking, my thoughts are imbued with and channeled by a sense of responsibility threading self, family, neighborhood, country, world. I hope to return to these challenges next time (and perhaps a time after that), but this time I’d like to focus on how early thinking is impacting my sense of self. More specifically, I’m considering the reality (to some extent) of age-determined aims, notably any activity partially affected by physical well-being. At this moment, to my knowledge, I’m in good health.

The move to Virginia from North Carolina in 2017, an age-related consideration, deracinated me from writing “roots,” e.g. clubs, associations, informal groups, kindred individuals at whose tables I found brain nourishment. The cost: at least some loss of ferment. The loss has been heightened by my hesitation to reinvest in similar contacts here. I tell myself the hesitation relates to the time and responsibility required to re-associate myself. Age related? Possibly. Awareness of time shapes decisions. Part of being responsible, a promise has to be kept.

All that said, I have noticed changes in my writing life that I suspect relate, somehow, to aging. I seem to be letting stories come to me more now whereas up to the last year of two, I actively sought them. I also spend more time than in the past on pre-writing thought, editing, revision, and research.

I still read selectively, interspersing fiction and non. Within fiction, I still mix genre with literary, probably on a ratio of two or three to one. Within non-fiction, while my interest still feels protean, I suspect the range has narrowed slightly. A factor of time left? I suspect so. Then too, it also appears there’s a quantitative lessening as well. For decades, I averaged reading eighty to ninety books per year, occasionally more. Now the average appears roughly to be sixty to seventy, possibly fewer. Am I enjoying reading less? Heck no! If anything, quite the opposite; I continue to treasure the endless pleasure a good book offers. Perhaps I’m less driven to pack away knowledge and more open to the rhythms of optimal absorption. That’s just a guess.

            Back to writing, please don’t misunderstand; I still write, engaging in some aspect of the writing process almost every day. I recently completed the first draft of the fourth novel in the Quarry crime series. I’ve also been reviewing earlier work that, for various reasons, I’ve allowed to lie dormant. The writing goes on! It’s what we do, right?