In the preface to their recently published writing guide, Writer's Companion, Carlos J Cortés and Renée Miller state, “we set out to compile everything a creative writer needs to write well into a single reference volume.” Over the next two months, Open Book will be posting the first chapter of the guide, “The Nuts & Bolts.” To enter our contest to win an e-copy of Writer's Companion, send an email to clelia@openbookontario.com with the subject line “Writer's Companion.” A winner's name will be selected in a draw each month.
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1. The Nuts & Bolts
From Writer's Companion by Carlos J Cortés and Renée Miller
We learn to write at an early age. As a follow-up to expressing ourselves with sounds, we add to our communication capabilities by setting strings of symbols on paper. Then, by the time we reach puberty, most of us can scribble the sensations stored in our minds.
In this sense, to communicate ideas and convey information, every literate person is a writer. Ask a boy to write about his birthday party, and he might come up with:
“I had lots of presents a big gun from granpa but mom was angry and my friend has a mouse and we eat ate cake with soda an we went to the cinema and dad got popcorn and candy.”
The young man shows promise. We understand that Mom blew a fuse when Grandpa unveiled an AK47 replica, but otherwise the boy had a whale of a time. Likewise, if we were to ask a high-school student to comment about inefficient governments he may write:
“In our country, the school system is as deficient as the sanitation, while the army, bureaucracy, police, and intelligence agencies grow out of all proportion.”
The sentence is clear, well structured, and concise: without flab. It conveys precise information: The government doesn’t provide quality services to their citizens and uses the money instead to expand their power.
We would class the student’s sentence as good writing. But good writing is not creative writing.
Among our reader friends, a few have university degrees in language or literature. They write well. Without syntactic or spelling mistakes, they structure correct sentences to convey complex thoughts and concepts. But none of them would ever consider writing a novel or short story. Why? Because being a good writer is a precondition, the starting point to learn creative writing.
Creative writing is damn hard. In the U.S. alone, there are literary agents, editors, and English professors by the thousands. It should be a sobering thought for anybody reading this book to enumerate (with the fingers of one hand) how many have written a passable piece of fiction.
The Nuts & Bolts contains the basic elements of inner structure and technique to transmute common language into fiction prose. From the structural framework of the most common forms of fiction, we explore the skeleton that sustains and gives form to the different parts of a novel — the first step in our journey to bridge the chasm that separates common writing from fiction.
The imaginary high-school student, who could have written the sentence we discussed in the opening example, used the language to relay information and state ideas. But a creative writer would have added an intangible to paint images and sensations in the reader’s mind. One of the finest craftsmen of the pen ever, expressed the same idea with a magical choice of words:
“While the small feeding bottle of our education is nearly dry, and sanitation sucks its own thumbs in despair, the military organization, the magisterial offices, the police, the Criminal Investigation Department, the secret spy system, attain to an abnormal girth in their waists, occupying every inch of our country.”1
1.1 FRAMEWORK / ELEMENTS
1.1.1 Prose
Prose is simply the language we use to communicate in both speech and writing. It has a loose structure and is the usual form we use in fiction, newspapers, magazines, film, television, broadcasting, and most other communications. “Prose” comes from the Latin word prosa, which means “straightforward.”
Verse is the only other form of written or spoken language available to humans. Unlike prose, verse has a formal structure, usually of meter and/or rhyme. Elements of prose and verse combine in prose poetry and free verse, where the writer relaxes or omits the metrical structure and versification rules. Hence, poetry is systematic and formulaic, whereas prose mirrors speech.
In writing, we can only express ourselves in prose or poetry, a point exemplified in this conversation between Monsieur Jourdain and an anonymous philosophy master in Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme by Moliére:
Monsieur Jourdain: ...I’m in love with a lady of great quality, and I wish that you would help me write something to her in a little note that I will let fall at her feet.
Philosophy Master: Very well.
Monsieur Jourdain: That will be gallant, yes?
Philosophy Master: Without doubt. Is it verse that you wish to write her?
Monsieur Jourdain: No, no. No verse.
Philosophy Master: Do you want only prose?
Monsieur Jourdain: No, I don’t want either prose or verse.
Philosophy Master: It must be one or the other.
Monsieur Jourdain: Why?
Philosophy Master: Because, sir, there is no other way to express oneself than with prose or verse.
Monsieur Jourdain: There is nothing but prose or verse?
Philosophy Master: No, sir, everything that is not prose is verse, and everything that is not verse is prose.
Monsieur Jourdain: And when one speaks, what is that then?
Philosophy Master: Prose.
The levels of prose are difficult to define because their boundaries nebulous. Most of us write informal prose. Literary prose aspires to create art with language, character studies, and representations of reality.
1.1.2 Narrative
The word “narrative” derives from the Latin verb narrare, to recount, and comprises the unique set of tools of the storyteller. With these, the writer can organize a story to relate a sequence of fictional or non-fictional events.
The soul of narration is the mode, or the set of communication methods encompassing not only how the story is described or expressed but also the identity of the narrator.
Stories have been with us since the dawn of time, and the storyteller was the first educator and entertainer. Every ancient culture, be it Indian, Chinese, Egyptian, or Greek used storytelling to transmit lessons, legends, exploits, and memories.
Imagine a cave with a large hearth hemmed with stones, a roaring fire, dancing shadows on the walls, a varied group of listeners, and the voice of the storyteller.
“When night arrived, Auk curled under an overhang. ‘Mountain gods be merciful and show me a spring, for without water I will surely die.’ Hungry, thirsty, and exhausted, Auk wrapped his bear pelt around him and fell asleep.”
After delivering Auk’s lines in a querulous voice, our master storyteller alters his countenance, changes his stance, puffs up his chest, casts a fierce glance at the audience, and bangs his staff on the ground.
“‘Who is this?’ Tabor, god of the mountain, flew from the heights and roared at Auk’s sleeping form.”
In his narrative performance, our storyteller has used every tool of the trade to convey the plot to his audience: tense, point-of-view, structure, and voice. Our prehistoric storyteller and modern writers have the same narrative tools at their disposal — these and no others.
The narrative tense reveals the sense of time in a story, whether the events happened in the past, belong to the present, or will take place in the future.
The narrative point of view (POV) determines the perspective from which the story is told, perhaps that of an independent narrator, an all-seeing perspective, or a character or characters within the story.
The narrative structure controls the order in which the narrator lays down the events.
The narrative voice shapes how the narrator conveys the story and how the audience receives it.
In fiction writing, narrative is storytelling that communicates to the reader. The narrator can be a character created by the writer for the sole purpose of telling the story. He can be a non-participant, an omniscient voice that relates only to the reader. Most modern fiction, however, relies on the characters to narrate the story, hence the importance of tight viewpoint control.
1.1.3 Mode
Fiction is prose with distinct forms of expression, each with different purposes and conventions. These forms of expression are called “delivery modes.”
Experts disagree about the numbers of delivery modes and the role of each, and to date there’s no consensus. Some schools list action, exposition, description, dialogue, summary, and transition; others prefer action, summary, dialogue, feelings/thoughts, and background; others still advocate action, dialogue, thoughts, summary, scene, and description.
We agree with the first list since thoughts are an integral part of dialogue, while we can include background in exposition or description. Thus, we have chosen the delivery modes:
Action
Exposition
Description
Dialogue
Summary
Transition.
1.1.3.1 Action
Action is the description of events as they happen, chronologically, in a linear fashion, or with actions presented through flashbacks or flash forwards in a non-linear form. The action follows the story and one of its roles is to immerse readers in the plot. Some writers rely heavily on action as the main technique to carry a story through (Clive Cussler). Some favor characterization and description (Albert Camus). Still others blend action and description in their work (John Le Carré).
1.1.3.2 Exposition
A writer uses exposition to convey facts, establish place, add color, and relate past events.
Stories are fragments of reality, limited in time and location, which seldom take place in a vacuum. Often, a writer needs to introduce background information, history, or the character’s routine for the story to make sense.
Naturally, the amount of exposition is relative to genre and place. A writer considering a story set in Antarctica needs to acquaint urban readers with the difficulties of surviving the most inhospitable place on earth. The more unusual the setting (unusual to the target reader) the more exposition the writer needs in order to paint the scenes. Science fiction, fantasy, and works dealing with unusual social conditions, groups, or environments require well-developed exposition.
Since too much exposition at one time slows story pacing, dosing it out and embedding parts of it in with other modes creates one of the most challenging tasks a writer must face. The section “Exposition,” in pages 116-118, explores a number of techniques for this judicious dosing.
1.1.3.3. Description
Description is often confused with exposition. While exposition deals in facts, history, and events, description is the mode for transmitting mental images of the story. It engages the reader’s senses with choice and arrangement of words, bringing scenes to life.
As an example of the difference:
Exposition: Bernini’s Cesar in Drag, a monumental marble statue brought at great expense from Carrara in Tuscany, Italy—a city bathed by the Carrione River, some 62 miles west-northwest of Florence—commanded a central position in the cemetery.
One would expect that Bernini’s authorship of the statue and the excruciating geographical detail surrounding Carrara, would be crucial to the story. Otherwise, readers may be annoyed.
Description: The cemetery looked bleak and dark, as any cemetery should at midnight.
1.1.3.4 Dialogue
To exchange information between characters and to express thoughts, writers use dialogue delivery modes. Dialogue can portray conversation between two or more characters or it can be used to reveal introspection, also referred to as internal dialogue, to give the reader insight into the unexpressed thoughts or feelings of the characters.
“Are you willing?”
“Need you ask?”
“Able?”
“You bet...”
“The fence needs mending.”
In most works of fiction, dialogue plays a critical role in plot and characterization. Writers will agree it’s a difficult mode to master. Though we use dialogue everyday in our exchanges, writing it is another matter. What we would actually say or think has little to do with the way our characters should express themselves.
Dialogue, contrary to popular view, is not a recording of actual speech; it is a semblance of speech, an invented language of exchanges that builds in tempo or content toward climaxes.2
Summary
To summarize is to condense the story. This delivery mode skips people, details, places, and events that are irrelevant to the main plot. It condenses timelines, connects diverse parts of the story, and skims over points that, although important to the tale, only need a brief mention.
A writer working on the story of an Irish immigrant, might need to dedicate several chapters to the ocean crossing, and several more on the harrowing passage of third class passengers through Ellis Island, but only if these issues are germane to the story. Otherwise, a paragraph of summary, opening in Cork and closing in New York, would suffice.
Transition
A story revealed on a chronological continuum would be mind numbing. Imagine writing a story framed within a week and describing every minute of these seven days. No doubt, there would be key events interspersed to shape the plot, but most of the time characters would be waiting, eating, sleeping, taking a shower, or dressing. While these instances may compose the backdrop of plot points, the writer will need to skip over most of them. For this, transitions do the work. These are words, phrases, sentences, paragraphs, and punctuation that mark changes in time, storyline, location, or POV, to skip over the mundane and get on with the story.
To handle transition, the writer uses section and chapter breaks, dialogue, flashes, summary, and introspection, among other resources. Transition also links, or paves the way, for a new paragraph, new setting, or new chapter so that even great leaps in time or place make sense.
In the excerpt that follows, the writer needed to prepare the set for a transition, a flashback, a technique we’ll review on pages 125 to 126.
Jolene stood at the sagging screen door. Shaking her head she sighed and turned. She’d spoiled the girl, and now it would be difficult to make her see that sometimes in life you had to take a few lumps. Not everyone had the opportunity to live a life full of fine things. Some would pay more than Rowan had to. Far more. The pain in her chest distracted her for a moment. Taking short breaths until it passed, she lay down on the lumpy couch.
By early afternoon, the heat would make breathing harder and she would need her strength when Rosaline’s man arrived and she had to drag her daughter back. Perhaps she should have arranged for him to take her when Henri finished. No matter. Rowan could only have run to one place, and Jolene was not afraid to go after her, black magic or no. Closing her eyes, she wandered back in time. Where had she gone wrong? At what point did she lose control?3
Transition is an important delivery mode neglected by many writers, until they discover that pace, tension, and story flow, all depend on the use of transitional elements.
Footnotes
- Rabindranath Tagore, Nationalism.
- Sol Stein
- Renée Miller, Bayou Baby
"The Nuts & Bolts" is an excerpt from Writer's Companion (2011) by Carlos J Cortés and Renée Miller. Reprinted with permission.
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