VCFA Archives | Numéro Cinq

An Exploration of the Poem Painting and More, by Wendy Voorsanger

Feb 102011

“Portrait and Poem Painting” (1961), by Larry Rivers and Frank O’Hara, Image courtesy of Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York.

As a writer, I often turn to art for inspiration. Flipping through the pages of a Paul Klee book, I can get lost in swirls of color, rigid lines, blocks of symmetry or irregularity and find myself at the exact literary abstraction I was looking for in my writing. Turns out, I’m not alone.

Beginning in the 1950s the Tibor de Nagy Gallery served as a unique artistic salon where many New York School poets and abstract expressionist painters looked to each other for inspiration. Poets such as Frank O’Hara, Kenneth Koch and John Ashbery hung out with painters Larry Rivers, Helen Frankenthaler and Willem de Kooning, sharing an artistic fellowship and an aesthetic style that often resulted in collaborative poem paintings. These paintings offered a unique blend of visual and lyrical artistic passion. The Tibor de Nagy Gallery in New York is currently featuring the exhibit: Painters and Poets. The New Yorker art critic Peter Schjeldahl disusses the exhibit in the article, “Artists and Writers: New York Mashups” (January 31, 2011). Schjeldahl says the show is primarily dominated by literary material—collaborative imagery, books and ephemera.

“The typical New York School collaboration is a carefully nonsensical interplay of visual and verbal vernaculars, as infection and as frustrating as a lively party overheard through a wall. (You had to be there. You almost are.)”—Peter Schjeldahl

Schjeldahl has an audio slideshow featuring a few poem painting collaborations and an excerpt from John Ashbery’s “And Ut Pictura Poesis Is Her Name.” The New York Times also has an article describing the Tibor de Nagy salon’s early years entitled, “When Art Dallied with Poetry on 53^rd Street.” You can see the poem painting collaboration between painter Larry Rivers and poet Kenneth Koch, entitled “In Bed,” (1982, mixed media). The gorgeously designed Poets & Painters catalog features the collaborations and can be ordered through the mail directly from the Tibor de Nagy Gallery.

There are many poets and visual artists collaborating today. The Academy of American Poets website regularly features poetry and art collaborations. In addition, Saturnalia Press has published a series of books on artists/poet collaborations. They’re really more poetry pairings, not poetry paintings, but nonetheless, I found them affecting. I especially enjoyed Stigmata Errata Etcetera by poet Bill Knott and artist Star Black, as well as Midnights by poet Jane Miller and artist Beverly Pepper.

“The goal is not to make a story but to experience the whole mess.” —C.D Wright in the introduction to Midnight.

Some poets simply find painting a natural extension of their artistic expression and don’t seek out collaboration, but create their own poem paintings. Poet Kenneth Patchen didn’t consider himself a painter, although almost all of his nearly 40 volumes of poetry and prose had a visual component.

“It happens that very often my writing with pen is interrupted by my writing with brush, but I think of both as writing,” said Patchen. “In other words, I don’t consider myself a painter. I think of myself as someone who has used the medium of painting in an attempt to extend.” — “Kenneth Patchen’s Painted Poems” on Poets.org.

Trip to Paradise

“Trip to Paradise,” poem painting by Tonia Colleen, current VCFA fiction writing student (Watercolor on rice paper, with the poem hand written in ink. Some of the images are from the artist’s original wood carvings.)

“Trip to Paradise” Excerpt:

The shredding cloaks of poverty
are gleaming satin gowns
and broken doors are used as boats
and oars are pulled by skies.
In Paradise your questions beg
and answers grow like alms.
And yes and no are Siamese twins and
Mondays carry songs.
In Paradise you are who
you are supposed to be and no one thinks to drown.

I’m on the look out for other inventive poem paintings. The visual bath and literary conversation of a poem painting might jar something open inside my brain. Offer me more than just color and light, but some sort of linguistic grapheme to incite a fresh creation all my own.

Anna Maria Johnson’s submission to the Numero Cinq Erasure Contest (above) could be characterized as a poem painting, of sorts. Her Numero Cinq Novel-in-a-Box contest submission is perhaps a “novel painting.” Some writers are eschewing flat paper as a medium all together for their poetry and prose, extending their art form to wood, leaves, rocks. Check out the Off-the-Page Project at the VCFA 2010 summer residency. Also, Writer and VCFA instructor Nance Van Winkle melds her photography with small poems she “graffities” onto a photographic surface resulting in a creation she coined as: the PHO-TOEM (photograph + Poem=PHO-TOEM).

Post below if you find a unique poem painting or other writing/art blend that might excite a writer’s brain.

—Wendy Voorsanger

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Richard Farrell’s Non-Commencement Commencement Address, Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA in Writing Graduation, January, 2011

Jan 102011

Contributor’s Note: DG and Lucy requested that I put up the speech I delivered at graduation during the recent residency at VCFA. The last time I gave a speech was at my 8th grade graduation, so, needless to say, the tension was riding high. That being said, the speaker was (is) aware of the fact that the poet in attendance was Matthew Dickman, not Michael, and was playing off a joke which began early in residency. My entire time at VCFA can be summed up in one word: humbling. I failed to mention that anywhere in this address, but it should have been said. —Richard Farrell

DG adds: This was perhaps the finest graduation speech I’ve heard at Vermont College. Rhetorically deft, comic, heartfelt and inclusive. There was barely a dry eye in the house. The phrase “non-commencement commencement address” is, I think, what VCFA President Tom Greene called it.

Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA in Writing

Graduation, January, 2011

By Richard Farrell

I wanted to write a graduation speech about the war on language, about the struggle we face every day as writers. But my friends wouldn’t let me. They told me to talk about living in a dorm again, about softball games and swimming holes and cafeteria food.

I wanted to talk about the real fears we face going forward as writers. But my friends told me to celebrate this moment. They told me to talk about the surprise birthday party we once threw for Gary Lawrence when it wasn’t his birthday. How we bought him a cake and sang to him. And how Gary had no idea what the hell we were doing, but how he smiled and blew out the candles anyway.

I wanted to remind you of the difficulties of finding work, about the strength we would need to make it in the writing world. But they said to tell you the story of how terrified we were at our first student reading, how shaky our voices were. But how we persevered, with dry lips and racing hearts, and how proud we were of each other when we finished.

I wanted to frame our experiences here at Vermont College as a proving ground, and to tell you that we were crusaders ready to sweep out across the world in defense of language. But my friends wouldn’t let me. They told me to talk about the wine we drank in Dewey Hall, the conversations till dawn. How we wrote erasure poems on potato chip bags and formed facebook groups and sent each other text messages and long emails between packets. How we helped each other navigate through our doubts and believe in our words.

I wanted to talk about how scared we were as we approached graduation and how we wondered what we would do next, but my friends told me to talk instead about the laughter we shared at Charlie O’s, about New Year’s Eve in Montpelier, the fourth of July, about dinner at Sarducci’s and conversations on the porch of the Martin house. They told me to talk about joy.

I wanted to quote Toni Morrison and Shakespeare and convince you of our earnestness. They told me to tell you the story of our class readings at each residency, how we listened to each other’s poems and stories for hours, never once calling time on a reader who went too long. And how nowhere else in our lives was this possible.

I wanted to speak about our resolve going forward, how we would rise up to the challenges of the world of publishing. But they told me to talk about the friendships we’ve formed, about the dysfunctional family we became over the course of these ten day retreats from our lives.

I wanted to talk about how College Hall was built on the ruins of a Civil War hospital. How it was a place of healing, but my friends told me not to talk about our wounds. That pain was not nearly as important as laughter. Not today.

I wanted to discuss writing, but they told me not to. They reminded me that we almost never speak about writing itself. That while we talk all the time when we’re here, it’s never about our own process. They told me to celebrate our accomplishments, not dwell on the ineffable.

I wanted to make this speech about language, but they said that never could happen. This experience, who we are as a class and who we want to be as writers, is not just about the words, but also about bonds between us. We may write in a vacuum, but we formed a community here, one without assumptions or judgments. Well, maybe with a little judgment. Did you see Michael Dickman dancing the other night?

I wanted to close this speech with a metaphor of a soldier returning to battle, but they laughed at that and told me to lighten up. Then, last night, Michael Bogan gave me a great piece of advice. He told me to tell a personal story instead, something about what Vermont College has meant to me and to let that represent our collective experience. So here it is.

Before each reading I delivered here, I had a friend who listened to me rehearse my words. Danielle and I would go off to a quiet dorm room or find a bench in the shade of College Hall, and no matter how awkward my story was, no matter how tentative and unseemly, she helped me reshape the story until it was better. She would never allow me to fall flat on my face. And after I finished, I would do the same for her story. And as much as any craft book or workshop or packet letter, it was her friendship that made me a better writer. And how we have all found those people here. In our classmates and in our teachers. And how such people are rare.

I wanted to write a graduation speech but I couldn’t. Not until I turned it over to my classmates and they wrote it for me, perhaps not the words, but the spirit behind the words.

We can’t encapsulate what Vermont College means in 3 pages. We can only tell you that it has changed more than just our writing. It has changed our lives.

—Richard Farrell

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#2 of The Top 10 Things I Learned This Semester: (Invitation to a Re-shredding)

Sep 012010

Lately, NC has been overrun by some strange, possibly disturbing (disturbed?) posts. There have been trips to Wal-Mart, essays about dead, German philosophers, a gilded Michael Jackson and ‘Bubbles’ statue, and some impostor (or series of impostors) running around claiming to be DG. It’s all very confusing. It seems the perfect time to throw my “Top-10” essay back into the mix. How could it hurt?

For those of you following these posts with bated breath (and I know there’s at least one of you out there…Bubbles is a huge fan) it began as a series of short essays covering ten of the more important lessons I learned as student working with DG last semester at VCFA. DG approved this series and has been paying me handsomely for each installment. (By the way, Doug, the checks haven’t been arriving. Could you re-confirm my mailing address? Thanks in advance. These Talisker bills are adding up.)

I’m down to the top two. Number two covers, quite simply, verbs.

(Please note: all quotes in this post are from DG’s essay, “The Attack of the Copula Spiders.”)

I entered last semester (my third) bright-eyed and eager. Though tales and legends swirled regarding the dangers of the Shredder’s realm, I believed I could safely navigate the terrifying path, escaping with little more than a few scratches and cuts. Ah, the joy of innocence! Three steps into that primordial, Canadian forest, a sharp pain split my calf. Toxic venom spiraled toward my spine. Before I could hack off my own leg to prevent further injury, the face of a copula spider appeared, a spider bearing a shocking resemblance to DG. It mocked me as it scurried back to its upstate NY home. Arachnis copulataris. (Confused? Keep reading! )

“A copula spider occurs when a student uses the verb ‘to be’ so many times on a page that I can circle all the instances, connect them with lines, and draw a spider diagram on the page.” (See exhibit A)

Exhibit A: The Copula Spider

#3 of The Top 10 Things I Learned Last Semester: (Invitation to a Re-shredding)

Aug 102010

Deficiencies of Desire:

Simply stated, we are creatures of desire. Doug helped me focus this idea into my writing. He told me that my characters should desire something, almost obsessively, and that someone (or something) should resist this desire. Desire plus resistance creates a dramatic arc, which plays out again and again in a story, until the character either achieves her desire or fails in that quest. Think of two characters locked in a closet and fighting it out, until one or the other either wins, loses or calls it a draw. (This is DG’s image from his essay on SS structure.) Subtext should echo from the central conflict to create unity in a story. I’m not going to belabor the details of this. Read the essay on short story structure or just spend tend minutes with DG and you’ll become acutely aware of it.

What I’m going to talk about, instead, were my particular problems applying this concept to my writing. My desire deficiencies, as it were.

I kept running into a problem when I wrote: I understood the concept of strong desires but I couldn’t seem to enact that concept on the page. I submitted eight short stories last semester: six new ones and two revisions. (This is fuzzy math: the total stories would be 7 because one story was brand new and revised once…this is why we write and don’t study calculus.) I’m going to briefly summarize the desire lines in each to offer some idea of how it went.

One huge problem for me was finding desire motifs that were ‘story worthy.’ Hell, they often weren’t even scene worthy. My first story involved a Navy pilot who was heading home after quitting flight school. The main thing he desired, to quit flying and return to a simpler life, happened in backstory and memories. In the front story, I had a lot of people standing around doing nothing, a lot of ruminating and anticipating. The problem was that my character’s strongest desire had already been acted out and the drama was over. Those careful NC readers will recognize this as a ‘bathtub’ story.

My second attempt wasn’t a whole lot better. A married couple lost a baby late in the wife’s pregnancy. The husband desired to talk with his wife to repair the damage, but she wouldn’t open up about this tragedy. There’s a slight improvement here, because at least the desire is apparent, but what happened on the page was a lot of ‘not talking.’ (Reminds me of that great line in Christopher Guest’s movie, Best in Show, when the woman says, “We can talk, or not talk, all night.”) DG told me that not talking usually creates no drama, and that it takes a really experienced writer to pull it off.

By my third story, I hit upon an idea. If my characters’ desires could be played out in historical settings, when wars raged, where the conditions of life beleaguered the characters, then survival itself could become a desire. I wrote two stories set in various battles during WWII. My most simple attempt involved sticking two soldiers in a foxhole during the siege of Leningrad. These soldiers were fighting each other over a stolen pair of gloves. They desired things intensely, like food, water, a pair of gloves, because conditions were so dire. Of course DG shredded the story itself (though not the structure…a minor, though hard-fought victory) because historical fiction quickly descends into tired imagery. Mention the Neva. Mention the Hermitage. Throw in a few Nazi’s and some snow, and voila, a Potemkin village of historical fiction. Clearly, in order to create an effective story, I’d have to inhabit the place, not just pop in for a visit. Hence the story did not work as written, but the desire motif was clarified. The other historical story I wrote also had a strong desire component but suffered for other structural reasons.

In order to create strong desires in contemporary stories, my work became highly sexualized. The remaining three stories all involved adultery, betrayal, or dangerous sexual behavior. I basically defaulted to one of the strongest desires humans feel. (I suppose it could have been worse: I could have defaulted to stories about eating, sleeping or going to the bathroom!) There was nothing wrong with using sex to play out desires, and it was kind of fun, but I began to realize that these stories were some of the lower fruit on the fiction tree. It was hard to find ways to say new things. They also ran another risk: titillating rather than exploring the human condition. But at least with sex, I had found a strong, comprehensible desire motif that allowed me to explore characters, plots, and themes which otherwise had been getting lost.

So what’s left? I read a lot of stories that work without sex, without war, without betrayals of trust, but I still struggle to find ideas for my own writing. I recently finished Robin Oliveira’s novel, My Name is Mary Sutter. Her character desires to become a surgeon and that desire carries most of the novel. (Though interestingly, much of that desire can only occur because the story is set during the American Civil War, when women couldn’t become surgeons. Robin, however, fully inhabits the time period. No Potemkin villages in Mary Sutter. ) Another favorite story of mine is Lorrie Moore’s “Dance In America,” which operates entirely without sex or violence and seems to replace a clear desire motif with a ‘life-force’ motif. So it can be done. My characters don’t have to be tying each other up to bedposts, cheating on their spouses or fighting a battle to enact desire. But I haven’t found a balance yet.

Last point: I often found the desire motifs worked for a page or two before I gave up on them and shifted into some other area. This creates a huge problem for story unity. Finding a central desire to carry the story remains one of the great challenges going forward.

I know there are many other types of stories that do not work directly off the desire/resistance model, but it was a useful tool. It helped me generate dramatic action on the page. It helped me push stories forward.

Up Next: #2, Verbs, verbs, verbs.

-Rich Farrell

See earlier posts in this series beginning here.

#4 of The Top 10 Things I Learned This Semester: (Invitation to a Re-shredding)

Jul 262010

#4: Use Caution When Exiting the Bathtub: Shy and Retiring Plot Problems.

Why is writing a good plot so difficult? Shouldn’t crafting a solid plot be almost mechanical: A leads to B which leads to C which ends with D? But it never turns out this way for me. My A leads to Q which turns into a 6.4, which leads back to J. I’m not trying to be complicated, but it always seems that when I write, plot quickly gets away from me.

I found, perhaps through a twist of karma, that even writing this blog post was elusive.

I tried half a dozen times to write this entry. I worked on three drafts that compared plot to the game of golf. All three attempts failed miserably. I tried ignoring this post, hoping it would go away. I spent an entire weekend watching DVDs of Mad Men to avoid thinking about it. I’ve even considered switching topics. Who would notice? Why should I chronicle my personal struggle with something so basic in writing?

Most of my previous posts have come easily. The lessons I learned seemed clear, the application straight forward (though not easy) and my posts on NC were quickly dispatched.

Not so with this topic.

I’m still lost on the elements of how to move a story forward. I’m still trying to understand plot, and it seems to be the most basic, most elemental part of fiction writing. Oh, I’ve read all the books and I’ve tried all the exercises. I’ve not ignored it by any means. I have books on master plots and I’ve read countless essays on structure and the importance of plot. I worked with Glover, for crying out loud. Shouldn’t I get this by now? Shouldn’t this be a lesson so deeply ingrained in my neocortex that stories just coming flying off the keyboard? How the hell do I talk about this on Numero Cinq?

I suppose I should start with my own struggles.

From day one last semester, Doug hammered me on story movement. The first two stories I submitted were bona fide ‘bathtub stories,’ a Gloverism which has driven me mad ever since I learned it. I’ll let Doug’s words explain: A bathtub story is “a story which takes place almost completely as backfill in the mind of a single character (who often spends the whole narrative sitting in a bathtub—I am only being slightly facetious).” (Glover, “Short Story Structure: Notes and an Exercise,” p. 166.) Thankfully, none of my characters were ever actually in a bathtub, but they did mostly sit around thinking about events that happened off the page. Lots of lyrical rumination but no drama.

Okay, that was easy enough to fix. Make something happen.

By packet three, I had more or less remedied the bathtub issue, but then a new problem arose. Now Doug told me to “stop PLANNING quite so much.” He said that I seemed to have a more dramatic story, but that I had simply put my characters through their paces with the end in sight. He urged me to be less structured with my plot. Doug wrote, “I’d be even more pleased if I felt you letting go of the reins a little bit, surprising yourself, not seeing the ending before you get there.”

I began with over-written bathtub stories. Then I planned, had more drama, but I over-planned. Was this madness? Was my advisor screwing with me, trying intentionally to confuse me? I didn’t know. When I finally let go (in my last packet), the result was predictable: I drifted back into the bathtub model. Too much backfill, not enough drama.

I submitted a revised version of a story for workshop this summer, the packet 3 story I had worked on with Doug, the first non-bathtub one. The workshop participants told me they wanted more context, more backstory and depth. They said I was going too fast.

To me, these are plot problems, pure and simple. No matter how many times I sit down to write a story, I end up wandering off into digressions that aren’t useful, backstory that isn’t dramatic, or over-contemplative characters who sit around and do nothing. Conversely, if I achieve a dramatic story, it becomes too thin, too quick, and the story glosses over the deeper, more salient points of character, setting, theme, etc.

What is the solution, I keep asking myself? What balance of dramatic action and interior access will result in a well crafted story?

The conclusion I’ve reached in finally writing this blog post is that I still don’t know. Perhaps that’s why I struggled for so long to write it.

One of the great things I learned from Doug last semester was the importance of keeping the story’s present forward moving action dramatic. Something has to be at stake in every scene. Desire and resistance. There has to be vertebrae for the story, a dramatic skeleton, as it were. (Another great Gloverism is the “broken backed story,” in which a timid writer loses confidence in the central conflict and switches to another conflict…I’ve been guilty of this, too.) Without this underlying structure, the story can’t move. Robert Olen Butler (among others) calls it ‘yearning’.

With this desire/resistance motif in place, the character returns again and again to situations in which the drama is played out. When there is a resolution to this central conflict, the story is over. It sounds and seems so simple, but the execution has continued to prove elusive. I see how dramatic stories work now, when I read, when I watch Mad Men, even when I begin to write a story, but somewhere along the way I still get lost. They say the first step on the road to recovery is admitting you have a problem. Well, there you go. I have plot problems. Now someone give me a twelve step booklet to solve it. I’ll yield the floor for a more eloquent explanation.

John Mortimer, an English writer, says this about plots:

Plots are essential, but plots are the hardest part; at any rate I find this to be so. Everything else about writing can be done by turning up regularly on the empty page and starting the performance. Plots are notoriously shy and retiring. With luck they may visit you in unexpected places, in the bath or while waiting in the doctor’s surgery. Very often they stay away altogether and are always out in a meeting and don’t return your call. Then it’s no good sitting and waiting for them, you have to start writing, you have to begin to create characters. And then, as a character begins to talk, or comes into conflict with another, the plot may start working; because it’s important that the characters perform the plot and the plot doesn’t manipulate the characters. This process is a mysterious one and the most exciting part of writing fiction. (Mortimer, John. “Plot Luck,” as found in The Agony and the Ego, ed. by Clare Boylan.)

Up Next: What I Learned About Desire: (The Return of Paris Hilton)

-Rich Farrell

See previous posts in this series beginning here.

#5 of The Top 10 Things I Learned This Semester: (Invitation to a Re-shredding)

Jul 122010

#5: My Love Affair with Abstractions

-From Packet Letter One, Doug Glover to Rich Farrell, Feb. 7, 2010: “Over and over you deliver abstractions over concrete substantive details. Abstraction in the form of generic verbs and actions, in the form of vague figurative language, abstraction in the form of disembodied voices.”

Let me be perfectly clear about this: abstractions are fun. I’ve wallowed in them with a deranged delight. They’ve tempted me like the unencumbered enthusiasm of a nineteen year old girl lounging by a blue pool, drink in hand, asking me to rub suntan lotion on her lithe, brown shoulders. I know nothing about this girl, only the shimmering veneer of her youthful body: her curves, her flowing hair, brown shoulders, perfect skin, nary a tan line to be seen. She invites me closer. I smell coconut on her skin. She confuses me with her beauty, uncomplicated by reality. She confuses me with brown shoulders.

I convince myself that abstractions are not simple-minded fantasies. I tell myself that abstract writing is capable of rising to sublime heights, standing on the (untanned) shoulders of great writers, capable of lifting my stories to stratospheric altitudes on flights of faux literary fancy. Wasn’t Joyce abstract? Didn’t Virginia Woolf raise abstract imagery to an art form in some of her novels? I tell myself so. I tell myself that a lyrical voice hides in the mysterious tones of abstraction; by keeping the writing vague and out of focus, a poetic energy must murmur just beneath the muddled surface. It must. I tell myself that this nineteen year old girl by the pool might be a fucking genius; she might be Sylvia Plath in a string bikini.

We swim, Sylvia and I, joyously in the pool. My sentences, paragraphs, scenes, even whole stories, splash in abstract language: sloppy verbs, unspecific images, overused pronouns. Who cares! I never once consider the consequences of our hedonistic little existences. Goddamn it, abstractions are fun!

I love abstractions because of those glittering surfaces, because they sometimes sound so wonderful, so lyrical, so different than the tired prose of everyday, so different than the working-class language of my roots. Abstractions must evince a broad intelligence, sure signs of good writing, of potential, of an emerging poetic voice.

But of course, abstractions delivered on very few of their promises. In the end, my heart was broken. Sylvia turned out to have leprosy.

In my first packet letter from Doug, he used the word ‘abstraction’ (or abstract) eight times to describe my writing. Eight. He wrote it six more times on the hardcopy of my story. I challenge any of his new advisees to top my record. Fourteen ‘abstractions’ in one packet.

My knee-jerk reaction (like all good lovers) was to initially defend this style. I’d often been told that my stories were “over-written,” and I once took that to be a compliment. It was not.

Eventually, reluctantly, I yielded to reality. Doug beat me enough that I finally believed abstractions were mostly disembodied, confused, muddled, and potentially hazardous things. They softened, perhaps even crippled, the backbone of a story.

I abused abstractions. I know this now. They were easy, safe, and uncomplicated. They ginned up my limp stories. Abstractions allowed me to throw weak things onto a page, then fluff them up with vague, foggy language, albeit pretty at times, curved and free of tan lines. I labored over the sound, the cadence of a sentence for days, narcissistically, often arriving at a relatively a good sentence, but one that did nothing to help the story, which withered away in a death rattle of cliché, ineptitude, or worse, utter nonsense.

Good Abstractions vs. Bad Abstractions:

Good abstractions reach toward ineffable ideas. Toward things the writer/reader wants to grasp but can’t. Existential questions. Big questions, with a capital B. Why are we here? What is love? Etc. Bad abstractions are feeble, lazy, and attempt to short-circuit the thought process by appearing flashy on the page without any substantive depth: the 19-year-old in a bikini with a killer tan. Here is a good example of a bad abstraction, taken from one of my stories:

We don’t like the sun, his eyes say when they speak. They tell him they want darkness, rest, and a release from the prison of sight. It’s a tiresome, thankless job, they say, this constant work.

This was the opening paragraph. My intent was to create an eerie mood, to take the reader quickly inside the character’s head, and to disorient the characterization. My intent was to create a ‘good’ abstraction, but instead I have this. Notice how none of the pronouns have antecedents. The reader is immediately lost. Who’s talking? Who’s the ‘him’ in the story. There is nothing precise in this opening. It’s impossible to understand what the hell this even means. Instead of disorienting the characterization, I put the disorientation in front of character. All that’s left is a mess.

Of course, I understood what these things all meant, because I knew who was talking, what my own intentions were, and how they related to the rest of the story. But none of this is conveyed to the reader. Sadly, I repeated this pattern throughout.

In the Slovenia workshop, I submitted a story I drafted later in the semester. One of the most frequent criticisms was that I didn’t go deep enough into the characters’ heads. I’m pretty sure I began to excise my bad abstractions so much that I stopped looking towards the good ones, the ones readers and writers want to explore.

(Note: Thanks to Gary & Doug for helping me clarify this point.)

#6 of The Top 10 Things I Learned This Semester: (Invitation to a Re-shredding)

Jun 252010

#6: Letting Characters Speak the Truth

How often do we lie, hide, evade, and otherwise avoid a truth in life? I don’t mean big lies, lies of consequence, but little ones, white lies, lies of avoidance in place of harsher truths. Most of the rules of polite society demand decorum at the expense of honesty. The common question in the street, “How are you?” is seldom met with a genuine response. If it was, the inquisitor would likely run for the hills. We are expected to behave, to polish reality, to adhere to the strictures of proper behavior, and this tendency can bleed over into our writing. (Well, it did in mine.)

Charles Baxter, in his essay, “Create a Scene,” says, “In fiction we want to have characters create scenes that in real life we would typically avoid.”

In a story I submitted for my third packet, I did something right (at last!) which created a spark of drama. I had one of my characters speak honestly to his wife when he didn’t necessarily want to. It was an uncomfortable moment, and my character spoke a truth that in real life he probably would have avoided saying out loud. Prior to this moment, I had diligently avoided making this choice in much of my writing, but once I did, the scene erupted with dramatic potential. (It fizzled soon after, but hey, I’m still learning.)

Doug wrote about this scene in my packet letter: “But then the scene develops good drama when Jacob actually tells the truth. I love it when a student learns to use the truth to power a scene.” They were only two lines in a 5 page, single spaced response, but what joy at reading those two lines!

On our follow-up phone conversation, Doug reminded me that at each moment in a story, the writer chooses how a character acts. The writer, through the characters, decides to evade or rush forward with the truth. Those choices change the outcome of scenes and stories, creating vibrant, dramatic ones, or, in my case before this scene, creating flat, lifeless ones that mimic the undramatic experiences we have every day. In much of my previous writing, my characters mostly behaved like genteel people, avoiding the truth in a bland mimesis of reality.

Baxter again: “The story becomes the stage, not for truth, but for self-actualization. We try to imagine the person as we would like ourselves to be and as a result write a banal and lifelessly idealistic story.”

In life most of us are duty-bound to follow very different rules than the ones we create in our writing. In fiction, we’re unfettered. In fiction, the inner demons can rage. By allowing them to do so, the writer creates an opportunity for drama.

On a specific, concrete level, such drama can be created simply by having characters tell each other difficult truths. Baxter calls this the “staging of a desire, making a darkness visible and dramatic.”

I knew avoidance was wrong and that it impeded my story. That was the frustrating part. I knew that desire/resistance leads to conflict which leads to drama, but I had a hard time enacting it in a scene. Doug’s simple solution of having my characters behave honestly (usually in dialogue) significantly helped me understand the potential at various stages throughout a story.

I found myself going back to this lesson again and again throughout the semester. My characters began to blurt out things that most people wouldn’t say sitting around the dinner table. Baxter says we need such spectacle. “Bad manners put us on a stage, and a stage, as every writer knows, is what is required for dramatic force.”

By taking this relatively small step, and letting my characters speak the truth, I found a tangible technique that helped me amp up the dramatic potential of a scene.

Up Next: #5: My Love Affair with Abstractions

-Rich Farrell

#9 of The Top 10 Things I Learned This Semester: (Invitation to a Re-shredding)

Jun 102010

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yg9MKQ1OYCg

9. Pronouns Without Antecedents Are Abstractions.

I’m going to share with NC the opening of the first story I submitted to Doug this semester. This paragraph was not one of my finer moments as a student, but it nicely illustrates the way pronouns can muddle clarity and muck up a story.

“We don’t like the sun, his eyes say when they speak. They tell him they want darkness, rest and a release from the prison of sight. It’s a tiresome, thankless job, they say, this constant work.”

The paragraph contains thirty-six words and nine pronouns. Nine! Fully one quarter of the paragraph is made up of pronouns, most without antecedents. (Not to mention speaking eyes and italicized eye-speech. What can I say? I had just moved back from Spain and the reverse culture shock was brutal.) I was not trying to be intentionally abstract and confusing. If I’m honest, I was trying to sound interesting, mysterious, perhaps a little vague, but my exuberant use of pronouns severed the paragraph’s clarity lines, unmooring the writing into a sea of vagueness. Using pronouns made sense initially, but toward what end? By keeping proper names out and using pronouns, I created a false intimacy with the reader. The intimacy created with this paragraph was unearned. The slight benefit of being abstract (by using pronouns) rendered only confusion, frustration and fuzzy logic. I’ve seen it done well in stories and novels before, but I wasn’t pulling it off. Instead, I had created an incoherent mess!

I quickly learned from this experience (and the accompanying packet letter which scorched my hands) that a pronoun without an antecedent is an abstraction. Doug wrote the following: “Pronouns are abstractions, they refer to other words, they are not concrete and easily identifiable.” (Then the shredding began in earnest! )

I’d never really thought about pronouns as abstractions before. I used them willy-nilly, inserting pronouns freely and effortlessly as I wrote, not recognizing that my use of pronouns created a swirling ball of confusion. The reasons now seem obvious: As I wrote, I understood implicitly what each pronoun referred to. I knew ‘him’ referred to a character, and ‘they’ referred to a voice inside this character’s head. But a reader would not understand the missing antecedents, and would quickly tire of the confusion. Did I say nine pronouns?

Theodore A. Rees Cheney, in his wonderful little craft book, Getting the Words Right, addresses the issues of pronoun ambiguity. “Pronouns make speech clearer by serving as a shortened reference to something previously mentioned.” Cheney continues:

For pronouns to do their job, it must be clear what they refer back to. We are much more tolerant of poor referencing in conversation than in writing because in conversation we receive other clues (sometimes subliminally) to the antecedent. However, if a reader is forced to guess at an antecedent, there’s a better than even chance he’ll guess incorrectly. A careful writer does not want his reader confused, even momentarily, so he watches his pronouns as carefully as he does his briefcase in a restaurant.

Doug relentlessly stalked my stories for pronouns without antecedents. I often revised sentences with the sole intent of taking out as many pronouns as I could. Clarity, again. (See #10.) Pronoun use often simplified my sentences at the expense of clarity.

Up Next: #8: My Dirty Little Secret: Grammar Issues.

-Rich Farrell