Skip the explanations; just tell the story

By mcmckit on May 22, 2012

Lately, we have encountered a memoir or two that are long, explanations of someone’s life. How interesting are explanations? Think of your mother explaining to you why you should get a life. Think of the person you are meeting for lunch explaining in detail why he or she is late. And think about somebody telling a joke or a story and setting it up with a long explanation. Boring right?

If we can hardly keep ourselves in the room when people we know launch into explanations, why would we want to curl up with a book full of them?

Instead, the trick is to tell a story, complete with setting, characters and dramatic action. Here is a paragraph near the beginning of THE HOUSE AT SUGAR BEACH, a highly acclaimed 2008 memoir of growing up in Liberia by Helene Cooper:

Our house at Sugar Beach was plagued by rogues. From the time we moved into the twenty-two-room behemoth my father had had built overlooking the Atlantic Ocean, they installed themselves as part of daily life. It wasn’t hard to figure out why; we were a continent away from civilization at eleven miles outside of Monrovia, my mother was hell-bent on filling up the house with ivory, easily portable if you are a rogue, and our watchman, Balabo believed that nights were meant for sleeping, not guarding the house.

In this one paragraph you are already gripped by a story: This family is rattling around in a huge mansion overlooking the ocean. It is a long way from town and full of valuable ivory. Already, the reader is set for confrontation between the rogues and the family.

If instead of telling a story, Cooper had explained, the result might have been something like this:
We moved into the house at Sugar Beach in 1973. It had twenty-two rooms and overlooked the Atlantic Ocean. My father had it built eleven miles outside of Monrovia. It wasn’t very safe there especially because our night watchman, Balabo, was more likely to sleep at night than guard the house.

No story, no drama.

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Realish-ism: new literary genre or dancing around the truth?

By mcmckit on May 14, 2012

A report in the Washington Post this morning details the soul searching National Public Radio is doing over contributor David Sedaris. Sedaris is a well-known memoirist and comic whose quirky stories about his upbringing and later life have also been best-selling books.

The issue NPR is having is that it is a news organization and Sedaris might be making stuff up. The Washington Post:

“In a lengthy investigative article for New Republic magazine in 2007, writer Alex Heard fact-checked Sedaris’s output and found that he had invented characters and concocted important scenes in some pieces. In one story, for example, Sedaris described working as an orderly in a mental hospital with a co-worker named Clarence. Although Sedaris had once volunteered in the hospital, he told Heard that he hadn’t been an orderly and that Clarence was imaginary.”

In his most recent book, WHEN YOU ARE ENGULFED IN FLAMES, Sedaris himself called his stories “realish.”

It is easy to see why this is a problem for NPR which, as a news organization, deals in facts. But Sedaris’s books have been sold as nonfiction. Is he on shaky ground there?

This is a question that came up recently with one of our clients, who has been told by a top literary agent that he needs to put more dialogue in his story. "How can I do that," he asked, "when I don’t remember exactly how the conversations went." Our answer: make it up. But in this case, he is recreating dialogue that took place between two real people. He can make reasonable guesses about how they talked and he does know what was said.

We would draw the line at making up characters and so would Alex Heard, cited above: “Some of his characters are made up. You can’t use a nonfiction label and do that. Hilarious dialogue is the license [Sedaris] gave himself. . . . [But] if it’s nonfiction, you just can’t do that.”

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The Tortoise and the Binge-Writer, Race to Deadline

By mcmckit on May 4, 2012

It will not come as news to any of you that writing is a really hard endeavor.  Just about everybody agrees with that.

In THE CAMBRIDGE HANDBOOK OF EXPERTISE AND EXPERT PERFORMANCE (a book that examines the scientific understanding of expertise in fifteen areas of endeavor), author Ronald Kellogg writes that serious writing requires the same kind of mental effort as a chess match or musical performance. This is because it makes extreme cognitive demands. (Thank you!) A psychologist at St. Louis University, Kellogg writes that writing “is at once a thinking task, a language task, and a memory task.”

So yes, it is hard to begin with, which makes the idea that so many of us have that we should be rushing through it sort of crazy. We think of William Faulkner writing AS I LAY DYING in either six or eight weeks – depending on the source – and whip ourselves into action, setting unrealistic deadlines. Not a good idea. Most of us mortal writers don’t fare so well in short bursts. We are more likely to end up with an inferior product or blocked – and depressed.

We think that taking the slow-but-steady tortoise approach to writing is just fine. In an article for Slate last year, Michael Agger writes about strategies that do just that: “Try to limit your working hours, write at a set time each day, and try your best not to emotionally flip out or check email every 20 seconds. This is called ‘engineering’ your environment.”

Kellogg also offers some advice for writers:
1) If you haven't been writing stories since you were a small child, cut yourself some slack since you are a novice.
2) Read everything, all the time, to accumulate knowledge for storage in your long-term memory so that you can pull it out one day when you need it for your book.
3) Get outside of yourself and see your writing through the eyes of others.

For the record, Faulkner used to follow his writing binges with blackout drinking binges. Even the immortals can suffer from depression after binge writing!

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Think you have written a memorable line? Put it to the test:

By mcmckit on Apr 23, 2012

A team of scientists at Cornell University has reviewed hundreds of famous movie quotes to find out what makes them memorable. The researchers took 1,000 well-known quotes as identified by IMDb and matched them with other quotes that have not proved as durable. The pairs of quotes came from the same movie, were spoken by the same character, were about the same length and appeared in close proximity. The research team, led by Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil, showed the quotes to people who had never seen the movies and were not familiar with them. Seventy-eight percent of the time, people picked the famous quote.

So what is it about the language of memorable quotes that makes them memorable? Here is what the researchers found:

1) Memorable quotes are simple in syntax (arrangement of words) but they employ atypical word choices.

2) Memorable quotes are generic, which is to say they can be used in a variety circumstances; they are not limited to the specific instance in which they were uttered.

And here is word usage the researchers identified as making a quote widely applicable:
a) The fewer personal pronouns the better (second-person pronouns excluded). Personal pronouns limit a quote’s generality by referring to specific characters in the movie.
b) Quotes containing indefinite articles like "a" and "an" are more memorable than those containing definite articles like "the."
c) Memorable quotes tend to be in the present tense. Like personal pronouns and indefinite articles, verbs in the past tense often reference something specific, in this case a previous event.
When the researchers designed a computer model based on these principles, they found the computer could distinguish between memorable and non-memorable quotes 64% of the time.

Here are some examples of the pairs of famous (on top) and not-famous quotes the researchers used:

Jackie Brown: “Half a million dollars will always be missed.”
“I know the type, trust me on this.”

Star Trek: “Nemesis I think it’s time to try some unsafe velocities.”
“No cold feet, or any other parts of our anatomy.”

Ordinary People: “A little advice about feelings kiddo; don’t expect
it always to tickle.”
“I mean there’s someone besides your mother you’ve got to forgive.”

You can test your own ability to distinguish between quotes here: Memorability Test

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The Nov-oir: is this what it is coming to?

By mcmckit on Apr 16, 2012

In his new book, POCKET KINGS, Ted Heller has coined the phrase nov-oir. A combination of novel and memoir, it defines a memoiristic novel, which is to say a fictional book written in the first person as if it were a memoir. POCKET KINGS is just such a nov-oir (or mem-vel). The protagonist, Franklin W. Dixon (if this name rings a bell, think HARDY BOYS), writes about his unsuccessful attempts to promote his third novel before turning to online poker under the handle, “Chip Zero.” The New York Times says Heller, the son of Joseph Heller who wrote CATCH 22, is hilarious and the book is at its best when he (or Dixon) rants about publication and all its attendant rituals. Just might be a good book for writers to read…

In the meantime, the book club is reading a nov-oir, THE PARIS WIFE, by Paula McLain. This fictional memoir of Hadley Richardson, Ernest Hemingway’s first wife, has been quite successful. So here we have not only a memoir that is really a novel but one by a fictional character purporting to be an historical personage. Tangled webs, these nov-oirs! Here, from McLain’s book is the first dance between Hadley and Ernest:

“A slow number starts, and without asking, he reaches for my waist and scoops me towards his body, which is even better up close. His chest is solid and so are his arms. I rest my hands on them lightly as he backs me around the room, past Kenley, cranking the Victrola with glee, past Kate, giving us a long, curious look. I close my eyes and lean into Ernest, smelling bourbon and soap, tobacco and damp cotton – and everything about this moment is so sharp and lovely, I do something completely out of character and just let myself have it.”

By all accounts, McLain has done her research well and some, if not most, of the appeal of this book is the history it recounts. Isn’t that what we like about straight up memoirs too? But here, we have it without having to take the narrator very seriously because, after all, her voice is fictional. She’s not real.

With the market for memoirs in sharp decline, the nov-oir is a curious development. Does it simply piggy back on the memoir craze or present an alternative in which the reader does not have the inconvenience and sometimes, discomfort of having to deal with a real narrator or in most cases real facts? Will more nov-oirs be making appearances on the market? These are questions we will ask the book club when it meets this week. And we would love to hear what you think.

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Book Tour via Twitter

By mcmckit on Apr 9, 2012

As hard as many of us work at our writing, we may never get sent on a book tour. Author Anne Lamott might well say that is a blessing. When her latest book SOME ASSEMBLY REQUIRED came out recently, she tweeted about the whole experience: publication, reviews and book tour. Written with her son Sam Lamott, SOME ASSEMBLY REQUIRED is the story of her grandson (and Sam’s son) Jax’s first year of life. It follows a 1993 book in which Lamott chronicled Sam’s first year of life.

Lamott has written some 13 books. Most notable for writers is her 1994 BIRD BY BIRD which is full of advice and lots of comfort for writers. “(Readers) will be seduced by Lamott's witty take on the reality of a writer's life, which has little to do with literary parties and a lot to do with jealousy, writer's block and going for broke with each paragraph,” writes Amazon on its website. Lamott extols writing but is less enthusiastic about publication.

Her book tour tweets reflect that in typical Lamott tone: on the edge of hysteria, pain-seared and very funny. Here, you can go on tour with her:

3/15 Hell in handbag; comparing SAR's sales # hourly at Amazon w/ great Marilynne Robinson. Maybe not as bad as year I got into it w/ Dalai Lama
3/15 When Dalai Lama had book at same time, if his Amazon # was higher, I'd be bitter– unfair advantage! If lower, I'd think What a loser.
3/15 My publicist urged to stay off Amazon, and to relax about HH Dalai Lama. Easy for her to say. She's never had to go mano a mano with him.
3/16 So self-serving BUT great review of Some Assembly Required in People, w/ photo Sam took of us w/ 5 minutes to spare–in Lucy and Ethel mode
3/18 New low @30,000 feet–checked Amazon sales rank of Some Assembly…@SAMLAMOTT trying to wrestle Ipad out of my hands. I need air marshall.
3/19 On plane 7 hours; got to hotel late and there's no room service; no tiny fridge with snacks, juice: no food. Wild 1st night of book tour.
3/20 It's pub date & I'm totally the princess! Sam's asleep down the hall or I'd wake him to jump up & down w/me, wearing fine newspaper crowns.
3/21 I have TINY problem w/criticism–hah. Mixed review sent me running to my rat wheel, till God handed me a newspaper crown & escorted me off.
3/22 Live radio tour now; 10 shows/ 2 hrs. OOPS: thought last one was youth Christian station so was cross betw Joyce Meyers & Eminem. Nope-News
3/23 Blissed out in DC. Slept well, the morning is cherry pink & the coffee is strong, & I'm awash with gratitude, the definition of the Kingdom.
3/23 Now in Atlanta. Sam just ate a c-burger the size of his head, plus 10 chicken strips.
3/23 @SAMLAMOTT and I have been on tour 6 days, 4 cities in 4 nights, & we're still talking–that's proof enough for me there's a God in heaven.
3/24 Love our tour but SO miss my dogs,cat,hills. Doing radical self care but todays granola tastes like palek paneer; sigh. gold-plated problem.
3/25 Saying bye to Sam @ airport. Secret of tour was to ask, WAIT: Why Am I Talking? God, keep one arm around my shoulder, one hand over my mouth
3/25 Book tour at an end for me, sad I don't get to see the other cities but SO happy to see jax again and sleep in my own bed.
3/25 Was so beat in Chicago that I cried at bookstore.
3/26 Trying to write at hotel. Am scared; bogging in same old war btwn big ego & low self-esteem. Bird by bird, shitty 1st drafts, butt in chair.
3/27 Twitter and you guys have been my little buddy on tour. A hand-held R2D2 (May the force be w/ you is distillation of ALL wisdom traditions.)
3/27 Lonely in Denver, very Sloop John B. All hopeless. 3 kinds of elk on the menu–elk breakfast sausage, elk chili, & of course, grilled elk
3/28 Books: mano a mano at Amazon w/ HH Dalai Lama was child's play; now its Maddow & me. She has msnbc, genius & a topic, but I have Twitter.
3/28 Told students , Success will make u more mentally ill than u already are. It won't fill or heal you–that's an inside job–but writing will.
3/28 Good news, Some Assembly #9 on next NY Times bestseller list. @SAMLAMOTT & I are elated. All w/o NYT or national NPR. Twitter & bookstores!
3/29 Every (book) tour, you have to let go of control w/o leaving clawmarks. That's the victory. If you want to make God laugh tell Her your plans.
4/4 1st, tailspin: book dropped off the NYT list to #17. Called Sam to break bad news. He said, "So what, Mom?" Laughter IS carbonated holiness.
4/4 My 1st response to setbacks is ALWAYS to figure out whom to blame–NYT &NPR ignored this book 100%. But YOU didn't; real people didn't–Wow.
4/6 How did I used to get thru publication? You're like a Medevac Taco Cart. Thru Jesus, my dogs,chocolate & Twitter, I can overcome all things.

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The (Neuro) Science of Good Writing

By mcmckit on Mar 28, 2012

When you make an effort to use strongly evocative words in your narrative you are not just creating a richly textured piece of writing, you are also stimulating the brains of your readers. We were interested to read in the March 17th New York Times that neuroscientists are finding that reading not only activates the areas of the brain that are involved in interpreting written words, it also stimulates other areas as well.

For instance, Spanish researchers (NeuroImage, 2006) found that when people read words with strong odor associations, like “perfume” and “coffee,” their primary olfactory cortexes lit up. When study participants read words like “chair” and “key,” this region remained dark.

The article cites a French study that showed the same thing to be true of movement. Lines like “John grasped the object” and “Pablo kicked the ball” stimulated activity in the motor cortex, which coordinates the body’s movements. And last month a team of researchers from Emory University weighed in regarding texture:

“(They) reported in ‘Brain & Language’ that when subjects in their laboratory read a metaphor involving texture, the sensory cortex, responsible for perceiving texture through touch, became active. Metaphors like “The singer had a velvet voice” and “He had leathery hands” roused the sensory cortex, while phrases matched for meaning, like “The singer had a pleasing voice” and “He had strong hands,” did not."

The NYT article, which is about reading fiction, goes on to say that the brain does not make much of a distinction between reading about something and experiencing it in real life.

We are interested in the article’s implications for writing. It would seem to make an argument for richer, evocative wording. Lighting up all those parts of the reader’s brain is probably a good way to get them hooked on your narrative.

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Nasty Little Birds, a Little Madness, and Perpetual Astonishment. Oh yeah, Spring

By mcmckit on Mar 19, 2012

Here in Washington D.C. the cherry blossoms are expected to hit peak bloom this week, about two weeks earlier than the average. This is to say spring has arrived here. We have had a stretch of unusually warm weather; the trees are greening up fast; and the bulbs have popped. All of this makes it hard for us to focus on our work including the blog. We confess that we spent yesterday afternoon in the garden rather than dreaming up a blog.

As a result, we have fallen back on the experts. Below is a selection of quotes by great writers on the subject of spring. While we are embarrassed that this is the best we can do by way of blogging this week, we are really blown away by some of the descriptions of spring. Who would have thought?

“It’s spring fever. That is what the name of it is. And when you’ve got it, you want – oh, you don’t quite know what it is you do want, but it just fairly makes your heart ache, you want it so!”                                                    ~Mark Twain, Tom Sawyer, Detective

“Spring has returned. The Earth is like a child that knows poems.”
~Rainer Maria Rilke

“Spring is when you feel like whistling even with a shoe full of slush.
~Doug Larson

“Poor, dear, silly Spring, preparing her annual surprise!”
~Wallace Stevens

“A little Madness in the Spring
Is wholesome even for the King.”
~Emily Dickinson

“You expected to be sad in the fall. Part of you dies each year when the leaves fell from the trees and their branches were bare against the wind and the cold, wintry light. But you knew there would always be the spring, as you knew the river would flow again after it was frozen. When the cold rains kept on and killed the spring, it was as though a young person had died for no reason.”
~Ernest Hemingway

“Every year, back comes Spring, with nasty little birds yapping their fool heads off and the ground all mucked up with plants.
~Dorothy Parker

“Every spring is the only spring, a perpetual astonishment.”
~Ellis Peters

“Break open a cherry tree and there are no flowers, but the spring breeze brings forth myriad blossoms.”
~Ikkyu Sojun

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Making a list can be lazy writing unless you are going grocery shopping

By mcmckit on Mar 11, 2012

Writers sometimes use lists to bring a person or place to life through a sheer abundance of detail. When they work, lists are a groundswell of images that lift and transport the reader. Below is an example from an essay in John Updike’s memoir, SELF CONSCIOUSNESS (1989):

A few housefronts farther on, what had been Henry's Variety Store in the 1940s was still a variety store, with the same narrow flight of cement steps going up to the door beside a big display window. Did children still marvel within as the holidays wheeled past in a slow pinwheel galaxy of altering candies, cards and artifacts, of back-to-school tablets, footballs, Halloween masks, pumpkins, turkeys, pine trees, tinsel, wrappings reindeer, Santas, and stars, and then the noisemakers and conical hats of New Year's celebration, and Valentines and cherries as the days of short February brightened, and then shamrocks, painted eggs, baseballs, flags and firecrackers?

Clearly, Updike had reasons for using a list here. A variety store is jam packed with new sale items that present exciting choices. A list is appropriate here because the store is the sum total of its many contents. Updike uses his list to connote, not only a multiplicity of items, but also to give the reader a sense of time. In a year, the merchandise changes from footballs to firecrackers and this, one guesses, has been the cycle for more than forty years.

Notice also that Updike does not substitute the list for a description of the store. He describes Henry’s display window and concrete steps.

Lists are great when there is a good reason to use them. But lists can also be a lazy approach to writing: The room was large, painted green, well-lit, carpeted and furnished in antiques (carrots, celery, eggs, milk, cheese…). These may be the attributes of a room you are writing about, but they don’t add up to anything. The reader doesn’t see this room. (We’re sitting in it as we write this, and we don’t see it in that list.)

One thing you can do with your list is sprinkle it in the action of your story. When we used the list above in a made-up story, we found we also wanted to add detail:

The key was on the Queen Anne dresser. All Mabel had to do was get to it across the thickly carpeted floor in broad daylight. Standing in the doorway, she took a deep breath. Would he hear her down in his study? It was a large room and seemed gargantuan with the task ahead. She would be completely exposed as she walked in front of the big bay windows, not only from the inside of the house, but to anyone walking by on the sidewalk outside. She would be caught, like a fly against the green William Morris wallpaper.

If you find that you are using lists often as a way to describe something or someone, think about why you are doing it. Ask yourself how the list, as a technique, enhances the story and how you might say the same thing in a different way.

Lists should be used sparingly.

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Saying things twice and being redundant: Cut it out!

By mcmckit on Mar 5, 2012

Most of the books we edit are shorter when we are finished with them than they were when we started. Cutting out extraneous words and sentences is by no means all we do, but it is almost always a part of it.

Something we always try to cut is redundancy. This crops up more than you would think. Writers are awfully fond of saying things twice. We suspect it is easy to get carried away with the poetry of what they are writing and miss the actual sense. But readers can get lost in extra words.
Below is a graph we wrote that contains at least six redundancies. Can you spot them? If so, let us know.

As the purple sky darkened, the twilight birds – notably a persistent owl – repeatedly called out from the adjacent woods. Shivering, Judy turned from the evening’s chill into the shelter of the cabin on the edge of the treeline to make dinner for Jim and the exhausted kids who would be arriving home soon from soccer practice, tired and hungry for their dinner. She sighed, weary with the onerous burden of cooking dinner every night which the kids never appreciated because they had no reason to, never having known anyone else to take on the role of cooking the evening meal.

If you can pick out the redundancies above, then you can apply the same eagle eye to your own writing. (Hint: it helps to let the material sit for a period of time so that you approach it with a fresh eye.) Learning how to choose words and keep them spare and to the point is a writer’s job. This kind of analysis will improve the quality of your work. And – since most editors charge by the word – it will reduce the cost of professional editing if you decide to go that route.

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