Formatting is not Writing

By The Word Process on May 4, 2010

Much is made on various writing Web Sites about how to format a manuscript for submission to agents and editors. The ms. should be double spaced, in 12 point courier font and, if in hard copy, on 8″ by 11″ white paper. An agent told us once that this is because the book industry has not gotten over the typewriter, and the goal is to make the ms. look as much like it is typewritten as possible.
If true, typewritten is not a bad goal. As editors, we dislike nothing more than having to fight the format of our clients, particularly that extra space between paragraphs. We have, in fact, given up on it and while we will edit for punctuation, grammar, and content, we will not edit formatting. In some cases, it would take an entire IT team anyway. If the anger and frustration we feel is anything to go by, fledging authors do not want to go there with agents and editors.
Yet, book after book comes to us with creative formatting as if additional spaces or italics or changing fonts tell a story. They don’t. They are not words. If the writing is good, creative formatting gets in the way. And it does nothing to compensate for bad writing.
If you are a creative formatter, it is probably a useful exercise to eliminate it and trying to say in words what you are trying to indicate with spaces and fonts. Then, once you have written your book in double-spaced, 12-point courier and are planning to skip all the publishing business hassles by self-publishing, then you may get creative with the fonts because it is your creation and it can look anyway you want. But it will be a better book to have been written in words rather than formatting.

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The manipulative narrator, is it okay to deliberately mislead readers?

By The Word Process on Apr 30, 2010

One school of thought has it that book narrators are honor-bound to reveal all they know as they know it over the course of a book. This “rule” applies in particular to first-person narrators who can only avoid it by deliberately misleading the reader. The key word here is deliberate. It is what prevents these narrators from being merely unreliable. We call them manipulative narrators.
A famous example is WHO KILLED ROGER ACKROYD by Agatha Christie. The book is narrated by Dr. James Sheppard, who attaches himself to Detective Hercule Poirot to help solve the murders of Ackroyd and his fiancé, Mrs. Ferrars. As the local doctor, Sheppard comes across as a sympathetic character with a penchant for village gossip:
“Wasn’t it sad about poor dear Mrs. Ferrars. A lot of people had been saying she had been a confirmed drug taker for years. So wicked the way people went about saying things. And yet, the worst of it was there was usually a grain of truth in these wild statements. No smoke without fire!”
The twist is that Sheppard is the murderer, something that is revealed in an epilogue after Poirot eliminates all the other suspects. Yet, the reader has been going along thinking that Sheppard is telling the truth and can be relied on. But the one salient point that he did it undermines everything. When the book was published in 1926, its manipulative narrator caused a great deal of discussion and controversy.
By contrast, Ian McEwan’s ATONEMENT inspired little similar discussion when it came out in 2001. Yet, in this book the identity of the manipulative first-person narrator is hidden until the end, the reader thinking that multiple other voices are telling the story, including a third person one.
The Scotsman of July 22, 1926 states the case:
“When in the last dozen pages of Miss Christie’s detective novel, the answer comes to the question, “Who killed Roger Ackroyd?” the reader will feel that he has been fairly, or unfairly, sold up.”
Fair or unfair, what do you think?

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Falling for an unlikely Protagonist

By The Word Process on Apr 27, 2010

Recently, we found ourselves empathizing with a plastic bag, the unlikely protagonist in an 18 minute film that has gone viral on the Internet. Directed by Ramin Bahrani and narrated by German film director Werner Herzog, “Plastic Bag” follows the endless life cycle of a super market plastic bag as it is first employed in a supermarket checkout aisle and then put to daily uses by the shopper, who the bag calls its “maker.” The bag is devastated when its maker abandons it to the garbage dump, from whence it escapes to float above the green, green countryside in a fruitless search for its maker. Finally, the bag ends up in the garbage vortex in the Pacific Ocean admiring the fish and wishing for mortality.

We were stunned at the end of the film when we found ourselves caring about a plastic bag. But that’s the point. The film wants us to examine our attachment to the use of plastic bags – by using them we cause them to be made, are their makers in effect.There is a literary point to be made here, something about the clever use of an unlikely protagonist – and also, the role of the unwitting villain: the maker who well-meaning as she clearly was – she did re-use the bag multiple times – nevertheless contributed it to the garbage vortex. Anyway, here is the link: http://www.wikio.com/video/plastic-bag-ramin-bahrani-2977468

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Point of View – Mixing it Up

By The Word Process on Apr 23, 2010

Some writers choose to write from multiple points of view. There are reasons to do this if say a personal perspective is needed along with a third person overview to describe events at which the first person narrator is/was not present.
In Edith Wharton’s ETHAN FROME, a first person narrator speaks in a prologue and epilogue while a third person voice is used to tell the story in the middle. The narrator, whose name we never learn, moves to Starkfield, New England, where he meets the eponymous Frome and at the end of the book, is forced to spend an evening at Frome’s house where he bears witness to the effects of a tragedy 24 years earlier.
The third person voice then tells the story of that long ago tragedy, of the adulterous love between Frome and his wife’s cousin Mattie, and of their pact to die together in a sledding accident. It is left to the first person narrator to discover firsthand the dreadful effects that accident.
The catch here is that the unnamed narrator is also telling the third person story which he says he has pieced together, apparently from gossip.
The reader is meant to believe him, we think, because he offers the only link between the bleak world of Frome and that of the reader. Also, Wharton offers no other view of the story. But the narrator-disguised-as-a-third-person cannot possibly have gleaned the whole, true story of the closely guarded accident from the townspeople and what he has garnered is slanted towards Frome’s point of view. Who knows what Mattie and Frome’s wife think? The limits on the narrator undercut the believability of the story.
These are the kinds of considerations to be made when considering a multiple viewpoint. Other first/third examples include TREASURE ISLAND and BLEAK HOUSE. Tim O’Brien makes an effective switch between third person omniscient and third person limited to one character’s point of view in the title chapter/story of THE THINGS THEY CARRIED. He uses the omni point of view when writing about Alpha Company and Lieutenant Jimmy Cross’s viewpoint when writing about his love for Martha. It is beautifully specific.

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Omniscient Point of View: It is hard being God-like

By The Word Process on Apr 20, 2010

Many classic novels were written from the omniscient third person point of view, an all-seeing God-like perspective. Jane Austin, Joseph Conrad and Leo Tolstoy all wrote this way. While it was commonly used historically, it is a less comfortable form for today’s writers. Here is an excerpt from PRIDE AND PREJUDICES that illustrates this:

“Mr. Bennett was so odd a mixture of quick parts, sarcastic humor, reserve, and caprice that the experience of three-and-twenty years had been insufficient to make his wife understand his character. Her mind was less difficult to develop. She was a woman of mean understanding, little information, and uncertain temper.”

It is Jane Austen and we love her. If anyone is entitled to a God-like point of view, it is she, but really whose opinions are these? They are not universally held as we find out later in the book, but they are the truth. We know this because the narrator tells us. Would we buy this from a modern novelist? Under what circumstances?

The omniscient narrator knows the past and the future and can dip into the head of any character in the story. From The Writers Craft Website (www.the-writers-craft.com) comes the following description of the omniscient POV:

“Think about true omniscient POV as having a camera panning throughout the room at a party scene, dipping into anyone’s head and perhaps more than one person at a time, by taking on the collective group perspective.”

Think about writing like that and how hard it would be to choose which of all the details known to your God-like self to reveal and to do so without indulging in dreaded head-hopping (see previous blog).  Limitations have their uses in writing and each writer has to set her/his own before embarking on a book.

Third person omniscient is often used now to tell epic stories with large casts or multiple subplots. A modern example is BEL CANTO by Ann Patchett.

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He, she, it and they: third persons

By The Word Process on Apr 12, 2010

The third person point of view is the most commonly used in literature. It gives the author the most flexibility. It uses the pronouns, he, she, it and they. If you are writing along in third person and find yourself breaking into an I, me or you, you have broken the third wall of literature as it were and need to back track or rethink your POV.
In the third person, the narrator is NOT a character in the story, but is uninvolved, an unidentified speaker. (This, by the way, does not mean that as a writer you can afford to neglect this voice. You have to have some understanding of it, some feeling about where it is coming from and how it speaks.)
Third person POV is often divided into two categories, objective and subjective. The objective is the fly-on-the-wall voice. Sheer observation, it does not include thoughts or feelings of any characters. We can’t think of a novel written from this point-of-view. If we could, we probably would not want to read it. Newspaper articles are largely written from an objective POV.
The subjective third person conveys the thoughts and feelings of one or more characters using the he, she, it and they words. If you are going to do this, you need to make decisions before you start about which characters’ thoughts you are going to reveal and when. You can’t simply hop into any old character’s head when you need to convey a thought. (This results in something called head hopping that is universally deplored by agents and editors – and gives readers the impression that the writer has multiple personalities. As people, we operate only out of our own heads so hopping about has an unnatural feel even if readers can’t identify the source of their discomfort.)
You have to limit yourself to one or more characters’ thoughts and feelings. In THE OLD MAN AND THE SEA, Ernest Hemingway tells the entire story from the perspective of the old man:
“The clouds were building up now for the trade wind and he looked ahead and saw a flight of wild ducks etching themselves against the sky over the water, then blurring, then etching again and he knew no man was ever alone on the sea.”
If you choose to write from more than one viewpoint, you have to be very clear about which one you are writing from at any given time and why. This means that you can only be in one character’s head in any one scene. Steig Larsson switches from Mikael Blomkvist’s POV to that of Lisbeth Salander in THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATOO. Note, they each have their own chapters.
Next, the omniscient point of view, do you want to play God?

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The Strange You –More of a Cautionary Tale

By The Word Process on Apr 9, 2010

In the second person, the narrator tells the story to another character using you and the action is experienced through the you’s point of view. Few books and stories are written in the second person. But you may know songs that are sung from the you viewpoint.
An often cited example of a book written from the you is Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City. Notice how the use of you makes you, the reader, feel like part of the story:
“You are not the kind of guy who would be at a place like this at this time of the morning. But here you are, and you cannot say the terrain is entirely unfamiliar, although the details are fuzzy. You are at a nightclub talking to a girl with a shaved head. The club is either Heartbreak or the Lizard Lounge. All might become clear if you could just slip into the bathroom and do a little more Bolivian Marching Powder. Then again, it might not. A small voice inside you insists that this epidemic lack of clarity is a result of too much of that already.”
What the second person does is place you in that nightclub, chatting with the hairless girl. Notice that the narrator is also in the story. He is really the one slipping into the bathroom for a little Bolivian Marching Powder. So the you-voice is actually an I-voice in disguise.
Obviously, the second person point of view is a complex one. And for beginning writers, it is more of a pitfall. We find that clients writing along in the first or third person, sometimes out of nowhere start using the you, as in:

Stefen put down the gun he had been pointing at me. Relief washed over me and I looked up at the blue sky. It was the kind of sky that would reassure you, the kind that you look up and see on normal Tuesdays when you are going to the grocery store or hurrying home from work. Stefen started to sob.

In the above example, the you, generic and undefined, just takes the reader out of the action of the story and drags things down. So, beware of yous.

Third persons next.

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Me, Me, Me – the I Voice

By The Word Process on Apr 6, 2010

We all live our lives in the first person. And in many ways we narrate our lives, when we tell stories about things that have happened to us or when we simply report the day’s events to our spouses or friends. Some of us engage in internal narration: I put on my red pea coat and walk outside. It is dark and cold, but if I get to the office early, I can leave early to go to the dentist…
Since everybody has one, the first person voice is familiar to everybody. That should make it an easy and obvious choice when writing a book, right? Yes and no. Not every character, witness the one above with the dentist appointment, makes an interesting first person narrator. Not every book lends itself to the first person voice.
So when might you consider writing in the first person? Since everything has to be filtered through the eyes of the narrator in the first person voice, the narrator has to be in a position to know the action of the book first hand, or to learn it from another character. Therefore he/she is usually the main character in the book. Since that character will be taking up a lot of space, it helps if she/he has a distinctive voice like Holden Caulfield in CATCHER IN THE RYE.
First-person narrators can also be reporters, relatively minor characters who observe and report on primary characters as in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s THE GREAT GATSBY, where Nick Carraway tells the story of Jay Gatsby.
Once you have opted for a first person voice, then you have to decide:
1) How the person is telling the story. Is it an interior monologue? A tale the narrator is telling to someone else? A letter or series of e mail messages? A dramatic monologue? Something the narrator is sitting down to write?
2) Past or present tense. Is the story ongoing? Did it already happen?
3) Is your narrator reliable? Beginning writers should probably always use a first person narrator who is telling the truth. To adopt a narrator who isn’t factual is to add a whole level of complexity to the writing of the story.
4) Voice. How does your narrator talk or write? This is the hardest part of writing in the first person. It can be very difficult to separate your voice as the writer from the voice of your character. Yet, book narrators speak in very different ways from our own narrative voices. Writers of successful first person narration do not just pour out what’s in their heads. Try it some time, and see if you produce great prose or if it is just annoying. The truth is that characters in books do not write or speak the way people do in life. You will find that developing a first person voice takes considerable working and reworking. You will want to consider your character’s regional and social background. You will want to choose your first person narrators words carefully.
Below are the participants in the conversation from the last blog, all of them great examples of first person narration:
1) JANE EYRE, Charlotte Bronte
2) INVISIBLE MAN, Ralph Ellison
3) ELOISE, Kaye Thompson
4) Holden Caulfield, CATCHER IN THE RYE, J.D. Salinger
5) Balram Halwai, THE WHITE TIGER, Aravind Adiga
6) Ishmael, MOBY DICK, Herman Melville
7) HUCKLEBERRY FINN, Mark Twain

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The View From Here

By The Word Process on Apr 2, 2010

So you are going to write a novel. Will it be from the narrative point of view? Epistolary? First person, third person or the seldom-used second person? Alternating viewpoints? Subjective or omniscient?
You really, really do have to make a decision about point-of-view before beginning to write or writing much anyway. It is intrinsic to producing effective fiction. But the list above probably does not seem helpful. It is more a set of diagnoses drawn up from  previously written books. Most writers, we would bet, let their plot and subject matter determine point-of-view.
So, herewith, a series of blogs on point-of-view, starting with first person and looking at how a writer might chose to write from that perspective.
First person is the I/me-voice. It is limited to what the narrator, the I, knows, experiences and feels. The narrator has to be a character in the story and is to some degree observer and/or participant in everything that happens. This narrator can be trustworthy or not. But he/she cannot see into other characters’ heads. Their thoughts are walled off except when they revealed by facial expression or gesture. Plots of first person books can only unfold to the extent that the narrator is aware of them.
First person novels may be limited but the really good ones have seared themselves into our memories with characters so vivid we think of them as friends.

We have invited some of them to a cocktail party. You can catch snippets of their conversations below. Do you recognize them? All, but one, are classics.

1) “I see the narrow stile with stone steps; and I see–Mr. Rochester, a book and a pencil in his hand: he is writing. Well, he is not a ghost; but every nerve I have is unstrung…”
2) “I remember that I am invisible and walk softly so as not to awaken the sleeping ones. Sometimes it is best not to awaken them; there are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers.”
3) “I always go to the Persian Room after 4 to see my friend Bill He is a busboy in the night and goes to school in the day and his eyes water…”
4) “I’m the most terrific liar you ever saw in your life. It’s awful. If I’m on my way to the store to buy a magazine, even, and somebody asks me where I’m going, I’m liable to say I’m going to the opera. It’s terrible.”
5) “I read about your tale in a book, Exciting Tales of the Exotic East, that I found on the pavement, back in the days when I was trying to get some enlightenment by going through the Sunday secondhand book market in Old Delhi.”
6) “Now when I say I am in the habit of going to sea whenever I begin to be hazy about the eyes and over conscious about my lungs, I do not mean to have it inferred that I ever go to sea as a passenger.”
7) “I set down, one time, back in the woods and had a long think about it. I sez to myself, if a body can get anything they pray for, why don’t Deacon Winn get back the money he lost on pork?”

In Tuesday’s blog: material that lends itself to the first person.

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The Search for Writing Voice can Yield Many Voices

By The Word Process on Mar 30, 2010

The answer to the question posed on Friday is William Faulkner. The excerpt is from his second book, MOSQUITOES. MOSQUITOES is the satirical tale of a Lake Pontchartrain boat trip out of New Orleans with an assortment of colorful passengers including as our paperback jacket says, “the rich and the aspiring, social butterflies and dissolute dilettantes.”
According to Faulkner, he wrote MOSQUITOES “for the sake of writing because it was fun.” Possibly his writing got less fun (or at least more personal) after that because his next book took up the subject matter that would occupy him for the rest of his life, fictional Yoknapatawpha County and his own upbringing in rural Mississippi.
MOSQUITOES had gotten good reviews: “…a brilliance that you can rightfully expect only in the writings of a few men”-Lillian Hellman, New York Herald Tribune . But Faulkner could not find a publisher for FLAGS IN THE DUST which was finally published in a scaled back version as SARTORIS.
It is wrong to say he found his voice with FLAGS because Faulkner spoke with many voices in his books. That incredible range is one reason he is among the greats. In AS I LAY DYING (1930) he writes from the multiple viewpoints of the Bundgren family. Here’s patriarch Anse:
“But it’s a long wait, seems like. It’s bad that a fellow must earn the reward of his right-doing by flouting hisself and his dead. We drove all the rest of the day and got to Samson’s at dust dark and then that bridge was gone too.”
In the long, long sentences of ABSALOM, ABSALOM! (1936) (our personal favorite) Faulkner writes from the point of view of Quentin Compson:
“It was a summer of wisteria. The twilight was full of it and of the smell of his father’s cigar as they sat on the front gallery after supper until it would be time for Quentin to start, while in the deep, shaggy lawn below the veranda the fireflies blew and drifted in soft random–the odor, the scent, which five months later Mr. Compson’s letter would carry up from Mississippi and over the long iron New England snow and into Quentin’s sitting-room at Harvard.”
Each of these excerpts and the one on Friday are all Faulkner’s voices. We think they demonstrate that the search for voice is not something that occupies first time writers alone. It is a career long quest.

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