World Building!

For my Critical Thesis for the MFA Program, I'm focusing on world building in Dystopian fiction.  I've read some great craft essays and books that deal with the subject of bringing the reader into the world of the story and I wanted to share a few of my personal discoveries with our contributors and readers.  First of all, these books are a must have for anyone who writes, especially if they branch out in genres such as science fiction and fantasy: Writing Science Fiction and Fantasy by Crawford Killian, Burning Down the House by Charles Baxter, and Writing Fiction by Janet Burroway.

The first one on the list has been instrumental in giving me ideas and source quotes for my paper as well as informational in my own endeavors to create bigger, better, more concise worlds.  The novels that I'm going to use as primary sources in my Critical Thesis include Uglies by Scott Westerfeld, Feed by M.T. Anderson, and either The Windup Girl by Paola Bacigalupi or Battle Royale by Koushun Takami.  I might use all four but that depends on length and on what new ideas and examples each book brings the table when it comes to world building.  Just to give you all a taste of what I'm working on right now, please enjoy a snippet from my four page intro:

What does it take to make a world? It takes time, lots of it, and a certain amount of chemistry. And what does it take to destroy one? According to Star Wars, it takes a Death Star. But the real answer is much more complicated and raises more questions than it answers. Is it too much power? Not enough? Too many cooks in the kitchen? Or perhaps no one in the driver’s seat? Historical precedent indicates that a man-made or natural disaster is often the cause, but even something as seemingly localized and specific as a political rising or falling can destroy the fragile balance of what we consider to be civilized and humane existence. Dystopian fiction deals with these unmade worlds.

Merriam-Webster defines dystopia as “an imaginary place where people are unhappy and usually afraid because they are not treated fairly,” or “an imaginary place where people lead dehumanized and often fearful lives.” Utopia, on the other hand, is “an imaginary place in which the government, laws, and social conditions are perfect,” or “an imaginary and indefinitely remote place.” In a nutshell, dystopia is the anti-utopia. Both extremes are defined as imaginary, but of the two, only one is make-believe; there is no such thing as a real utopia. Ideals are impossible to achieve, but dehumanized and fearful societies happen all the time. One of the reasons that dystopian literature has become so popular and even controversial over the past century is because it holds up a mirror. The reflection back depends greatly upon the novel. Sometimes we see the horrors of our past, sometimes the injustice and terror of the present, and, quite often, the mirror gives us a glimpse into a plausible future. ~ Amanda LaFantasie

Amanda LaFantasie © February 2014

Happy Anniversary: Looking Back and Looking Forward

As I was perusing the blog today, I noticed that it's been a year since we got this craziness going!  Our official anniversary was the 13th of this month, but we'll celebrate it a few days later because I definitely feel it's worth celebrating.  Firstly I want to congratulate everyone who has been a part of this blog, the admin, the writers, the editor, and the readers.  I know that for me, Detangled Writers has been a source of pride, enjoyment, and education.  Taking a look at our contributor profiles, I see a group of people who I hold in high esteem.  These women have taken time out of their lives to share their thoughts and knowledge with the writing community.  Some of the goals we wrote in our profiles might be a bit outdated by now - some things might be all done and checked off, some things may have been set aside, while others may be in progress.  I invite the contributors to create fresh goals lists and provide an update.  Tell us about your writing; what projects do you have going on, is writer's block bugging you, are you having trouble finding time for your craft?   Also, let's talk about what goals we have for the blog in general and how we can become an even better support network for each other.  

 

Old Goals for Amanda LaFantasie (Skoora)! 

1. Time Management 
2. Keeping the Creative Juices Flowing
3. Finishing what I start...
4. Grad School and everything to do with it!
5. Characters - working on characterizations

I accomplished part of number four by applying to and being accepted to an MFA program.  I am currently working toward completing my masters in creative writing at Pine Manor College.  Number five can be removed because, for me, the writing itself is what generates character and plot and trying to work on those independently is possible but not really a goal.  As far as the first three goals, I would keep one and three on my list!  Number two is less of a goal for me and more a goal for the blog.  My new list, a much more specific list, would look like this:

New Goals!

1. Time Management
2. Finish Death Man (my current novel in progress)
3. Work on short stories for Workshops
4. Read craft books and fiction novels
5. Attend an AWP conference (Seattle 2014)

Some goals for the blog would be to see some more blogs on hot topics such as fanfiction writing, romance versus erotica, elements of craft, literary definitions and analyses, and even book reviews and discussions.  I would love to see more vocab words!  Everyone is encouraged to post vocab builders and word exercises.  If people have personal blogs where they share writing pieces, I would like to see entries detailing the process, successes, and failures they had with the project and then a link so we can read your work.

I hope that everyone who is part of this blog is as proud of it as I am.  This post brings our total to 148 published blogs for Detangled Writers.  Here's hoping that by this time next year we have upwards of 300!  Thank you to our contributors and readers.

The Curious Case of the First Person Omniscient Narrator

Craft Analysis, Packet 1

Author(s): Kurt Vonnegut, John Gardner, Walter Dean Myers

Novel Title(s): Slaughterhouse-Five, Grendel, Monster

Student: Amanda LaFantasie

Semester 2, August 2013

The Curious Case of the First Person Omniscient Narrator

            What are rules for if not for breaking, or at least bending?  The Elementary school version of first person point of view might go something like this: the main character uses the pronoun ‘I’ and the story is told completely from his or her perspective limiting us to only what that character knows.  But it isn’t as clear as all that.  The phrase, ‘I learned later,’ is just one way that authors are able to provide greater scope to a scene where the first person narrator might fall short of giving a solid account of the action.  There are other ways to stretch the limits of what first person narration is capable of. 

            Kurt Vonnegut, for instance, enables the narrator of Slaughterhouse-Five – a veteran of WWII who survived the Dresden firebombing – to relay his story with a degree of omniscience that is rare even in third person point of view.  He uses a particular method to accomplish this: a story within a story.  Others have also found ways to free themselves from the strict parameters of first person.  In Grendel, John Gardner invokes the omniscience that one would commonly find on the stage in moments when the first person narrator, the famous monster from the Old English poem “Beowulf,” views the world as if it were a play.  Similar to this, Walter Dean Myers broadens the first person narrative by alternating between journal and screenplay format in the novel Monster, wherein a sixteen-year-old boy faces the possibility of jail time after a neighborhood robbery goes wrong. 

Each of these novels warp the typical portrayal of the first person narrative until the warping itself becomes part of the characterization, creating a sense of detachment and revealing the mental strain and sometimes dubious sanity of the narrator.

            For any of this to really work, the author must first establish a strong first person voice.  Chapter one of Slaughterhouse-Five is 22 pages of ‘I’ and ‘we’ and all the traditional elements associated with a first person POV, thus introducing the reader to the god-author who will make himself known in further chapters.  The narrator begins with stating, “All this happened, more or less. […] I’ve changed all the names,” and so simply sets us up for the third person story that he wrote (a story within a story), which takes place primarily between chapters 2 and 9 (Vonnegut 1).  In chapter 10, the first person narrative voice returns and wraps up the experiences not only himself but of the main character from his story.

At the end of the first chapter, the narrator prepares the audience for a leap away from the first person point of view that they’ve just gotten used to and bring us into a story he calls The Children’s Crusade (Vonnegut 15).  “I’ve finished my war book now.  The next one I write is going to be fun. This one is a failure, and had to be, since it’s written by a pillar of salt. 

It begins like this:

Listen:

Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time.

It ends like this:

Poo-tee-weet?” (Vonnegut 22).  And just as promised, the story does begin with “Listen” and end with “Poo-tee-weet,” but what he fails to mention is that he is not going away just because it’s Billy Pilgrim’s story.  Despite the appearance of third person omniscience in The Children’s Crusade, the narrator continually makes himself present through first person annotations as well as bold assertions of authorial omniscience.  During a scene where Billy and a fellow soldier are captured by German forces, the author mentions the sound of a dog barking.  He goes on to relay information that only a god-narrator could know saying, “The dog, who had sounded so ferocious in the winter distances was a female German shepherd.  […]  She had never been to war before.  She had no idea what game was being played.  Her name was Princess (Vonnegut 52).  This sort of excessive trivia appears again and again ranging from the way a stranger perceives Billy to be “in abominable taste” to the fact that Billy and a young German guard are actually distant cousins but that neither of them ever found that out (Vonnegut 151, 158).  It is almost as if the narrator cannot possibly keep from interfering in his own novel.  When Billy is set up at the first POW camp, he receives stamped dog tags and the narrative author, not Billy, makes this observation: “A slave laborer from Poland had done the stamping.  He was dead now.  So it goes” (Vonnegut 91).

The narrator makes himself unavoidably present throughout his ‘novel’ when he states boldly, things such as: “It would make a good epitaph for Billy Pilgrim – and for me, too,” and, “Now Billy and the rest were being marched into the ruins by their guards.  I was there.  O’Hare was there.  We had spent the past two nights in the blind inn-keeper’s stable” (Vonnegut 121, 212).  This insistence to remind the reader of his presence is not limited only to scenes which show him in a favorable light.  The first time Vonnegut’s narrator inserts himself into The Children’s Crusade is after Billy Pilgrim follows the sounds of grief coming to him from the latrine where he finds an American soldier wallowing in intestinal discomfort upon the toilet.  “That was I.  That was me.  That was the author of this book,” says the narrator, in full admission (Vonnegut 125).

            Another technique that Vonnegut employs to create an omniscient flavor to his story is the addition of an all knowing character or characters.  In Slaughterhouse-Five, this role belongs to the Tralfamadorians, a race of aliens who see past, present, and future simultaneously and who may or may not have kidnapped Billy Pilgrim and kept him a zoo (Vonnegut 30).  During his time with these creatures, Billy makes an assertion that Earth’s violence will play a part in the destruction of the universe and, to his shock, the creatures assure him, “’We know how the universe ends –‘ said the guide, ‘and Earth has nothing to do with it, except that it gets wiped out, too.’ […] ‘We blow it up, experimenting with new fuels for our flying saucers.  A Tralfamadorian test pilot presses a starter button, and the whole Universe disappears.’ So it goes” (Vonnegut 117).

The moments of Vonnegut’s book that tend toward a third person omniscience are the moments that solidify the first person authorship off the war vet narrator who knows everything about every character and about every object in his book.  While Vonnegut is responsible for  Slaughterhouse-Five, the first person narrator is very much the author of The Children’s Crusade and can and does get away with saying impossible to know things about side characters and how they feel toward Billy Pilgrim.  The layering of authorship – even Billy Pilgrim becomes an author and public speaker in the story (Vonnegut 142) – creates a certain tug on the reins, strains the reliability of the narrator and reveals a bit of the fragmented psyche of an old man desperate to chronicle his time as a prisoner of war. 

            Some of the omniscience in Gardner’s Grendel comes from the bird’s eye view that the title character often assumes.  In this way the world comes to him via the Shaper’s (Bard’s) songs and the extrapolations Grendel is able to make based on what he sees and hears from the near and far.  Grendel would, “… be watching a meadhall from high in a tree, night birds singing in the limbs below me […].  Inside the hall I would hear the Shaper telling of the glorious deeds of dead kings – how they’d split certain heads, snuck away with certain precious swords and necklaces – his harp mimicking the rush of swords, the heroes’ dying words” and through his observations the narration becomes more and more omniscient (Gardner 34).   He learns of the surrounding peoples and the shifts in alliances and even knows somehow from his perch that “…two groups would fight as allies […], except that now and then they betrayed each other, one shooting the other from behind for some reason, or stealing the other group’s gold, some midnight, or sneaking into bed with the other group’s wives and daughters” (Gardner 37).

            Just as in Slaughterhouse-Five, Grendel’s omniscience relies heavily on the establishment of a strong first person narration.  This book, for the most part keeps true to this form, even stating quite obviously who the narrator is such as in the passage: “The harp turned solemn.  He [the Shaper] told of an ancient feud between two brothers which split all the world between darkness and light.  And I, Grendel, was the dark side, he said in effect.  The terrible race God cursed” (Gardner 51).  There are other places where Grendel proclaims his own name in relation to the ‘I’ of the story it is when he begins to say Grendel as a separate entity that things really take on an omniscient point of view.  Here is the first time the narrator breaks from first person:

What will we call the Hrothgar-Wrecker when Hrothgar has been wrecked?

(Do a little dance, beast.  Shrug it off.  This looks like a nice place – oooh, my! – flat rock, moonlight, views of distances!  Sing!)

Pity poor Hrothgar,

Grendel’s foe!

Pity poor Grendel,

O, O, O!

Winter soon.

(whispering, whispering.  Grendel, has it occurred to you my dear that you are crazy?)

(He clasps hands delicately over his head, points the toes of one foot – aaie! Horrible nails!! – takes a step, does a turn:

[…]

It will be winter soon. 

Midway through the twelfth year of my idiotic war.

Twelve is, I hope, a holy number.  Number of escapes from traps.  (Gardner 91-92)

            It takes all the way until the end of the section before Grendel reclaims himself as ‘I.’  Through this technique the reader has a clear idea of the loss of control Grendel feels and the effect it has on his mental stability, which is, obviously, debilitating.  Toward the end of the novel, Gardner demonstrates Grendel’s emotional destruction further by ambiguously presenting dialogue in italics, therefore making it seem either imagined or telepathic: 

His syllables lick at me, chilly fire.  His syllables lick… A meaningless swirl in the stream of time, a temporary gathering of bits, a few random specks, a cloud…Complexities: green dust, purple dust, gold.  Additional refinements: sensitive dust, copulating dust… The world is my bone-cave, I shall not want… (He laughs as he whispers.  I roll my eyes back.  Flames slip out at the corners of his mouth.) (Gardner 170)

Preceding this italicized conversation are a myriad of places within the text where the first person narrator moves further and further into objectivity and omniscience, consequently moving detaching himself further and further from himself.  At one point he seems to have an out of body experience which is presented parenthetically in italics.  (He lies on the cliff-edge, scratching his belly, and thoughtfully watches his thoughtfully watching the queen.) (Gardner 93).   Gardner takes it a step further in this strange mixture of first person commentary and third person stage play:

Theorum: Any action (A) of the human heart must trigger an equal and opposite reaction (A¹).

Such is the golden opinion of the Shaper.

And so – I watch in glee – they take in Hrothulf;

quiet as the moon, sweet scorpion,

he sits between their two and cleans his knife. 

SCENE: Hrothulf in the Yard.

Hrothfulf speaks:

In ratty furs the peasants hoe their fields,

fat with stupidity, if not with flesh.  (Gardner 113)

            The semi-mathematical word choice also lends itself to the omniscience of the piece as it comes across as grossly anachronistic.  In Slaughterhouse-Five the all-knowing characters are the Tralfamadorians; in Grendel that role belongs to the Dragon.  With the inclusion of such characters/elements into their first person narratives, both Vonnegut and Gardner are able to make the overall concept of omniscience much more palatable.  The Dragon tells Grendel, “’Things come and go […] That’s the gist of it.  In a billion billion billion years, everything will have come and gone several times, in various forms.  Even I will be gone.  A certain man will absurdly kill me.  A terrible pity – loss of a remarkable form of life.  Conservationists will howl’” (Gardner 70).

            There is no alien race or dragon to unveil the past, present, and future in Walter Dean Myer’s novel, Monster, rather this time it is through a camera lens and a journal that the audience comes to understand what happened and what could happen to the first person narrator, Steve Harmon.   He establishes a first person base line with a journal entry indicating, “Sometimes I feel like I have walked into the middle of a movie.  It is a strange movie with no plot and no beginning.  The movie is in black and white, and grainy.  Sometimes the camera moves in so close that you can’t tell what is going on and you just listen to the sounds and guess” (Myers 3).  

This novel teeter-totters between this journal format and that of a screenplay.  Unlike Vonnegut’s novel, Monster does not spend a great deal of time in the first person to start out, instead, Myers inserts journal entries throughout, frequently and powerfully enough to keep the audience from forgetting the narrative voice.  There is another key difference between Monster and the other two, Slaughterhouse-Five and Grendel, this being that the first person and third person omniscient do not bleed into each other.  There are some sudden shifts between the two forms, but Myers keeps screenplay and journal separate.  The following is an example of the omniscient portions which are structured to resemble a screenplay:

FADE IN:  INTERIOR: Early morning in CELL BLOCK D, MANHATTAN DETENTION CENTER.  Camera goes slowly down grim, gray corridor.  There are sounds of inmates yelling from cell to cell; much of it is obscene. (Myers 7)

            While the traditional first person point of view does not make an appearance in these segments, the narrator does find a way to insert himself without saying ‘I’ or ‘me’ but with just as much potency.  The rolling credits appear on the page in this fashion:

Starring

Steve Harmon

Produced by

Steve Harmon

Directed by

Steve Harmon

(Credits continue to roll.)

(Myers 9)

The direction in the action line indicates that the credits are to roll like the opening of Star Wars and while this isn’t as direct as plastering his name all over the place, it keeps Steve’s voice present for the audience.  Something even as simple as a line of direction can create a duality within a story.   On one hand, the audience reads the bare bones of a screenplay and on the other hand, when it comes to action lines, they are reading only the things that Steve feels are most important concerning his trial and that makes it almost more intimate than his journal entries.  We learn of his past through scenes of the movie:

CUT TO: FILM WORKSHOP at Stuyvesant High School.  A film on a small screen is just ending.  It is a class project.

[…]

We see STEVE raising his hand, looking much the same as he does in court.

STEVE

I liked the editing. (Myers 18-19)

           

Whereas we learn of his now through the journal: “Notes: I can hardly think about the movie, I hate this place so much.  But if I didn’t think of the movie I would go crazy.  All they talk about in here is hurting people” (Myers 45).  As mentioned before, there are some quick shifts between journal and movie, and it is when these two styles meet, but do not mix, that the audience gets an idea of the narrator’s emotional duress as he immediately chooses to switch over to a detached persona rather than put this court appearance into a real time journal entry. 

When we got in the court, there was a delay because the stenographer had brought the wrong power cord.  The court officer was talking about termites. 

[…] 

OFFICER 1

So this guy comes to the house and tells Vivian we got

termites.  I get home and she’s all upset.  I said no way

we got termites.  No way.

JUDGE

You ever see any termites? (Myers 65)

            It becomes clear that Steve is using the movie as a way to forget that this horrible thing is happening to him.  At one point, Steve has a death fantasy involving lethal injection and eve this appears as part of the movie, the camera focusing on his face as imaginary executioners put in a plug to keep him from messing his pants as he dies (Myers 73).  The final movie moment of the novel captures the fragmentation left by this false sense of security – that the objective world (third person omniscient) doesn’t hurt as much as the subjective one (first person limited).    

CUT TO: CU of O’BRIEN.  Her lips tense; she is pensive.  She gathers her papers and moves away as STEVE, arms still outstretched, turns toward the camera.  His image is in black and white, and the grain is nearly broken.  It looks like one of the pictures they use for psychological testing, or some strange beast, a monster.

The image freezes as last words roll and stop mid screen.

A Steve Harmon Film (Myers 276-277)

So it goes, that breaking the rules of first person and expanding a fairly limited point of view to the point of omniscience has many effects on the story.  For these three novels, the most compelling effect is that of escape.  These narrators – the veteran, Grendel, and Steve – are all prisoners in some way or other.  The first one was a POW and spends much of his life trapped in the memories of that time.  The second narrator tries and fails to understand and walk among the humans.  He becomes a prisoner of his condition, trapped in his cave with only his mother for constant companionship.  Lastly, Steve is, quite literally, a prisoner.  When he is not in court, he is in a prison cell – guilty until proven otherwise so it seems.  For each one of these characters, it is the idea of escape that propels them toward omniscience.  The drive to know and be done with it.  To finally be free of their prison.

At the end of Myer’s novel, there is an Extra’s section where the author answers various questions.  When asked why he chose to use the screenplay format, he explained, “In interviewing inmates I noticed a tendency for the inmates to attempt to separate their self-portrayals from their crimes.  In Monster I have Steve speak of himself in the first person in his diary, but when he gets to the trial and the crime he distances himself through the use of the screenplay” (Myers, Extras 7).  What Walter Dean Myers sums up in this response is more than just the reason why Steve hides behind the camera lens, it is the reason for the war veteran’s story within a story and the logic of Grendel’s stage play projections.  It is why the disintegration of first person into third is a fascinating ride for the audience; it exemplifies humanities ever present need to cope.

Works Cited:

Gardner, John. Grendel. New York: Vintage, 1989. Print.

Myers, Walter Dean, and Christopher Myers. Monster. New York, NY: HarperCollins, 1999. Print.

Vonnegut, Kurt. Slaughterhouse-five: Or, The Children's Crusade, a Duty-dance with Death. New York: Dell Pub., 1999. Print.

An Update & Possible Genre Change

Tomorrow I leave for my second residency at the Solstice MFA program in Boston.  My first time around left me with a whirlwind of ideas as well as a fantastic bunch of writers to count as friends and comrades.  This time I head back with one semester under my belt, a yearning to catch up with my Boston buddies, and a strong desire to learn as much as I can.

For the first semester I read twelve books and wrote around fifty pages (more than that but fifty semi polished pages) for my Dystopian novel.  This novel does have the potential of being marketed as YA but I'm not going to push that at all.  However, this time around, I have a list of several YA books that I want to read and I am suddenly inspired to work on a very clear cut YA story.  I actually wrote out this story in screenplay format several years back.  I never finished the screenplay but I did chart out the entire ending up to the 'FADE OUT' via long notes.  One reason I'm wanting to rekindle this story is because of the strong female lead (and I don't write many females even though I am one), and another reason is because it's already plotted.  This plot may change here and there but the fact that it is plotted will help me write out scene after scene and also give me a chance to really tackle writing a synopsis. 

In order to work on this however, I would need to change my major from Fiction to Young Adult Fiction.  From what I understand this is totally doable and that it's only in my third semester that I have to decide on what genre to graduate out of - some people switch in their second semester and never go back, but I think I will return to Fiction a better person for having honed another side of my literary interests.  

Amanda LaFantasie (Skoora) 

Craft Choice: Tone

Made in MS Paint

Something in craft that can often escape the writer's train of thought is, tone. What is tone? To put it simply it is the voice your writing takes on, the mood it exudes. How do you want to make the reader feel? Do you want to grip their heart with an emotional roller coaster, or do you want to make them laugh out loud at witty humor? What feeling are you trying to portray? That is tone; but why is it important?

Tone is what draws a reader in, what makes them sympathize with characters and settings and what makes them cry, what makes them laugh. Tone to put it simply, is the backbone of your writing, and it is what helps get the meaning of the story across. So what can a writer do to get the tone across? Is it all emotion? Or is there an  rubric towards immaculately writing a story with good voice? That's not so easily answered, and every writer's opinion will differ on the topic. Below are some suggestions of my own that I've picked up during my time as a writer, as well as the advice from my professors and other great writers.

One method, that I spoke about earlier on in Detangled Writers, is verb consistency. Everything in your story is going to work to create your tone, including the tense you use, so yes, in a way there is a rubric. How does your character relate to time and place? How does he/she respond to the reactions around them. Another hint towards tone is internal dialog. A characters thoughts and feelings can set the tone for the entire story. Another thing about tone to consider is your own feeling as the author when you're writing and how your own emotions can influence the story. It is sometimes a real challenge to actively influence while at the same time trying to proactively keep yourself from influencing your story. However the real challenge is knowing when to consciously and subconsciously pull in the reigns.

Sounds like a breeze doesn't it?

Try thinking of writing as a labyrinth. There is a beginning, there is an end, and then there are a million and a half wrong turns and challenges you will have to face between the two. However, with enough diligence and a good dose of  humor, you can make it past the hurdles and you will find the end. That's where the real work begins.

Many an acclaimed writer would tell you for your rough draft, just write! And this is good advice, great advice in fact. Just write, get it out, don't care how horrible you think it is, or how wonderful you think it is. Your second draft will be nothing like your first draft, and this is because that's when the real work begins. That is when you as the writer will have to make the tough decisions, and tone is one of those decisions. It will be your job to make sure the tone is consistent and flows, and moves the story. It will be your job to make sure that you're saying everything in a way that is tangible to the reader, while keeping the story true to its roots. It is during this phase that you will really have to make choices about your craft, and this is where you'll have to pay particular attention to tone.

Questions you can ask yourself during your revision/rewriting phase in regards to tone:

• What is my message? Is there a message?
• Do you have an agenda in your story? If you do, be it personal, political, etc, your prose will take on a tone to match that agenda.
• What is my genre? 
• For example, Mystery writing tends to have a very different tone than romance.
• What kind of characters am I employing for my story? 
• How do the characters interact with the world, interact with each other? Do they look at the world with optimism, pessimism, indifference? How do their interactions affect the world around them?
• What is the setting? 
• Setting can play a HUGE role in tone. For example, are you in a fast paced city where it just feels like you never get a moment to breathe? Well then your tone will probably be quick, with twists and turns that leave the reader's head spinning. This is okay as long as you don't lose the reader in the processes. On the contrary, if you're writing a story that takes place on a smooth, languid lakefront, your tone will probably be slower, perhaps more philosophical. 

There are many other questions you can ask yourself too, but not to overwhelm you, I'll leave it there. The point of these questions are simple: What are you trying to say? And really, that is the purpose of tone. Writing is an art form, and just like a painter will paint and expressive piece of work to invoke feeling into the viewer, that is what you're doing in your writing. Tone is how you do that. So next time you write, ask yourself the tough questions, and when you finish a draft, read through it. How is the story moving? Is it consistent? Does it feel right for the story? If not, well you might have to rewrite it, but understanding the role tone plays can certainly help. 

Finally, consider the elements of your story piece by piece. Consider the symbolism, the atmosphere, the setting. Consider how your world works on it's own, and then how the world works integrated with the characters. Lastly, consider the senses, how do the senses work to influence tone? How does your character see? Hear? Feel? Is your character deaf or blind? Are they emotionally detached? Does the world exude a feeling all its own? Is the setting its own character? These are all things to consider during your revision phase. You might be surprised by how your story changes.

So here is my question to you: How often do you think of tone in your writing? Does it play a role in your writing? Is it conscious or subconscious? Has this helped you re-evaluate the role of tone/voice in your own writing?

Craft Choice: Point of View

When composing a narrative, one must examine point of view.  There are many different types, some of these are rather common while others are obscure and typically only attempted by the masters of craft.  This is meant as a refresher for POV since most of us, if not all of us, are familiar with and have written in the vast majority of different POVs.

• Third Person Limited: 'he' or 'she' is used to denote a POV character and it is through this character that we experience the story.  We see through his/her eyes.
• Third Person Unlimited or Multiple: the POV character changes throughout the story usually by chapter.  In one chapter we experience things through character A and then in the next we experience it through character B and so on.
• Third Person Omniscient: it still uses 'he' and 'she' but now the narrative voice is above and beyond a single character.  We see through the eyes of every character and 'head pop.'  It can be difficult to do this and keep the audience clear and who's head we are in and when.  
• First Person: 'I' is used and the POV character is the narrator.  
• Second Person: 'You' is used and the narrative tells 'you' what to do or what you are feeling.  This is mainly used in 'how to' type writing and text books.  The choose your own adventure tales also employ this technique.

These are the building blocks of narrative and once you learn to use them, you are more than welcome to abuse them.  Mix it up!  Jonathan Stroud's Bartimeaus Trilogy employs the use of third person multiple as well as first person depending on which character's head we are in.  

In college (undergrad) I had a professor who stated most adamantly that female authors should only write from the POV of female characters and male authors should only write from the POV of male characters.  He also said that most, if not all, stories should be written in third person limited and keep with one character throughout the entire novel.  Recently, during grad school, I met several accomplished and aspiring authors who awakened me to the freedom we have in writing.  They encouraged me to play with POV and also reaffirmed my belief in the commonality of human experience, a.k.a women can write men and men can write women.  For me, being given a sort of permission to mix up POVs and play with alternating POV characters in a story, was extremely liberating.  I encourage our contributors and readers to never feel limited in delivery.

Please visit the following sites for other definitions and explanations of POV: The Beginning Writer, Humboldt.Edu, and Learner.Org.  For further discussion on this topic, comment below!

Amanda LaFantasie (Skoora) © 2013

Grammar Corner: Gerunds and Particples

Most of us know what these little critters are even if not all of us know what they are called.  Let's start with gerunds.  A gerund is a verb ending in 'ing' that has been re-purposed in the sentence to act as a noun.  You can find another definition and several examples here, but I've also included my own take on this grammar component below.

• Teaching is my favorite profession. (In this sentence teaching becomes a noun and the subject.)
• Sometimes all I can think about is teaching.  (Again, teaching is a noun but it become the direct object of the subject.)
• I don't like running on sand.  (The gerund is still running but it now acts as a gerund phrase for the entire direct object is 'running on sand' as the thing that is disliked.)
• Running never held much enjoyment for me, particularly when done on sand.  (Running is clearly the subject.)

When it comes to participle phrases, the 'ing' verb remains a verb but does not act as the link between subject and predicate.  These phrases appear at the beginning of a sentence and let us know what has happened, or is happening, at the time of the sentence which they accompany.  A past particle phrase indicates something happened and a present participle phrase indicates it's happening right now.

• Tossed about during the boat ride, she felt like throwing up when they finally reached shore.  ('Tossed about during the boat ride' is the participle phrase and as it is in the past tense, it is a past participle.)
• Glaring, he imagined his fist making contact with his brother's smug face. (Glaring is a stand alone present participle.)
• Glaring at his brother's smug face, he imagined punching him. ('Glaring at his brother's smug face' is a present participle phrase.)
• Thoroughly drenched by the sudden downpour, Elaine changed her mind about meeting Mr. Sampson for tea.  ('Drenched by the sudden downpour' is a past participle phrase and thoroughly modifies it.)

Amanda LaFantasie (Skoora) © 2013

Craft Choice: Speaker Tag

"I shan't go overboard with speaker tags," she said, "I find them to be horribly dull!"
"Then don't!"  He retorted.
"Oh, I certainly won't!  And when I do use speaker tags, I'll keep it nice and simple and only use 'said' for the communicative verb."

Having just finished rereading Golding's Lord of the Flies, I am left to ponder the usage of speaker tags in fiction.  In this book, lines of dialogue get their own paragraph and are often left without a tag of any kind.  It is the preceding or following paragraph that give us a hint as to who spoke.  Many people, authors and the like, have expressed a desire to minimize speaker tags in writing as a way to keep the story moving along or to limit the temptation to add unnecessary exposition to 's/he said.'  Some people feel quite the opposite and demand a tag on almost every line of dialogue because losing track of who's speaking is more detrimental to your story than a moment of extraneous detail.  Personally I hate not knowing who is talking though sometimes keeping it a bit obscure, such as in Golding's novel, can add to the setting of chaos.  But don't let that be your only element of chaos either.

Then there is the subject of what to use in your speaker tag.  Most Fiction authors agree that 'said' is more than enough, yet, Venice Berry (a very successful author herself) informed my workshop class in Boston that 'said' is fine but can get a little boring after a while.  She encouraged us to reach for other ways to express the verb.  There was a time when I steered clear of 'said' figuring that it was what 'learning writers' used and not the mark of a matured author.  I've been corrected.

What do I do when it comes to speaker tags?  I use them generously and I often fall into the trap of adding exposition right along with it.  And I primarily use 'said' but I am not afraid to change it up when I feel it better expresses how or why the character spoke in the first place.  This is a topic of interest to me and may end up working its way into a critical analysis at some point during this semester.  Just as a casual question: how do you - readers and fellow contributors - typically handle speaker tags?  I'm not asking what you think is best or better or more professional or more likely to get you published.  I'm just curious what works for you at this point in time.  Everyone has a different style and sometimes it helps to know you're not completely alone in your craft choices.

Amanda LaFantasie (Skoora) © 2013

Getting Ready for Solstice

This Wednesday I head out for Boston, Massachusetts.  I have been accepted into the Solstice MFA Program for Creative Writing at Pine Manor College and will be attending my first of five residencies.  These next ten days include a rigorous schedule of craft and seminar classes as well as nightly readings by professors and early morning workshops.  There are eight people in my workshop groups and I have read all but one of fourteen pieces.  I will finish that up tonight and then, upon my second read through, I am going to mark up and annotate all the places that pique my interest, confuse me, or otherwise deserve some type of comment.  It's been very interesting reading what others, outside my specific circle, are writing.  A trend I am seeing is the need to put everything in present tense or first person and sometimes both.  I don't mind this really and, in fact, I am looking to explore this a bit myself.  Some of the pieces I've read so far leave me wanting more while others leave me fairly content (or not very content) and not really looking for anything further from them.  The workshops should be very eye opening as I've not had a read workshop since I was in college at Mesa State about seven years ago.

On my Prime Cuts Goal List for this blog, I mention five things I want to work on as a writer: time management, perpetuation of creative juices and inspiration, finishing what I start, Grad school, characters, and my letter of intent as part of my admission into an MFA Program.  I am very excited and nervous because once I arrive in Massachusetts and engage in the residency, I will be working on all of these goals simultaneously.  Well, all except for the letter of intent which I can put a huge slash through as I not only accomplished it, but used it successfully to get in to Solstice.  

I hope to get in a blog post from Massachusetts and share the valuable tidbits that my classes and seminars promise to be peppered with, but in case I don't get a chance to do an update in the next two weeks, you now all know why.  My classes for this residency are as follows: Craft Analysis, The Future Now: Dystopia, Magic Realism, Unforgettable Characters, Teaching Composition, Adjusting the Sails, Raw Material, and Changing Lives Through Literature.  Massachusetts here I come!  Also, as a side note, one of the several novels that I was encouraged/required to read prior to attending the residency is The Drowned Cities by Paolo Bacigalupi.  So far I find it to be a fantastic young adult read.  It's not for the squeamish, that's for sure, but, just like any good Dystopian novel, it is sure to frustrate and invigorate.  I recommend it highly. 

Amanda LaFantasie (Skoora) © 2012

Craft - Revise - Revise - REWRITE - Revise

Something that has been mentioned in my Intermediate Fiction Writing course, and something I've come to learn as an increasingly important truth in the dogma of writing, is the importance of rewriting.  We all know that we have to revise a draft, one time, thirty times, sometimes a hundred times before it is worthy of being sent off for submission.  In our day and age, with technology to assist us, it's much easier to go through the revising process. However, something that is often neglected is rewriting a draft entirely.

In the past it would take years and years for authors to finish a manuscript, sometimes having to stop and rewrite the entire thing thing from scratch, not once but up to ten times. Since drafts were written on typewriters or in journals having more than one copy at a time wasn't exactly a viable option. To revise authors would need to cut out sections move them around, and examine the.  This could obviously create an astronomical mess and a lot more confusion. With word editors we don't have to worry about that so much now. Yet something that may afflict the 21st century writer is laziness.  With all these technological advances to help us, why should we go through all that effort?

Maybe it's time to drop the computer, leave the cellphones, and take a pen and paper out into the woods for a few days. What do I mean by this? I mean that we as writers in the 21st century would be well off (in my honest opinion) to just walk away from all our helpers and handicaps and explore our craft in the ways of old.  Hemingway and Dickinson, Thoreau and Emerson.  They didn't have word processing, they had time, patience, and an uncanny connection with nature that made their writing something unique and pleasant. Their writings are filled with imagery, characterization, and what many authors lack now, philosophy. Something was written because it was meant to be written, every word had room on the page, worked for the page, and the entire narrative arc. And writers from the 1900's and earlier, they had to depend upon their patience and whit to become published.

They rewrote, and they rewrote everything over and over before it was ready to send off to a publisher. Hundreds and thousands of pages of the workings and reworkings of their craft.  Perhaps we should follow their example, to take a short story, and just put it away, leave it for a month, maybe two, and then rewrite it without ever looking at that old draft. Once rewritten, pull out that old draft, and see what works, then revise and revise some more.  Many authors attest to this being a fundamental step in their best work.  So I would challenge all of us to do this. To consider rewriting when we make headway into our revision process.

Since it is hard to do this, I would suggest, write a one to two page story. Put it away for a week to start. Rewrite it, and just see what happens. You may be pleasantly surprised by the results.

Playing with Tenses

Photo Credit: OnBloggingWell.com

With NaNoWriMo fast approaching I've been considering my comfort zones as a writer, and particularly the use of tense in my writing. For clarification, while I'm sure all of us here know what that is for our readers, NaNoWriMo is short for National Novel Writing Month, which is exactly that, write a novel in a month, sort of. The goal is to push yourself to write 50,000 words in a month. The main website link can be found on the right hand corner of the blog.  That is neither here nor there however, so let me get back on track. In response to Skoora's most recent update, and several other conversations I have been a part of recently where tense is  point of topic, it has truly had me wondering about my own use of tense.

Let me start by saying, that there are a great deal of tenses, far more than I ever anticipated, such as the 9 past tenses Skoora introduced yesterday, there are also many different forms of Present Tense, and then future tense is just a whole different ballpark I don't even want to enter. Mixing the tenses with Point of View (POV) also creates an interesting albeit complicated algorithm for writers.  What I mean by this, is there are just so many, how do you choose? Some tenses come naturally, such as past tense. We as humans are just so at ease with writing in this form. It just comes - as Skoora said - naturally.  However, what about the often neglected Present Tense?

As of recent I've been reading more and more Present Tense stories, these stories are difficult to read a great deal of the time because they take so much thinking to write, and on that same token, they are also extremely difficult to write.  I have started dabbling in Present Tense writing, with a story that I started writing in 2009 that I've neglected for a long time.  This story originally started out in Past Tense, Third Person, Limited Point of View.  A fairly standard approach.  Yet inspired by some of the  Present Tense  stories I've read - yes I am intentionally capitalizing these even though it is not grammatically correct I want to bring focus to them - I decided to tackle the story again from a different angle. I must say I was surprised by how different, and unnatural Present Tense feels.  There are many rules to flow I've discovered - though haven't read up on - that stuck out to me. First, 'is' vs 'was' these words in Present Tense are obviously not interchangeable, because one clearly signifies the past.  'She was dancing' vs. 'She is dancing,' and so on. However, when I'm writing, my fingers long to use the latter.  'Was' feels natural, while 'is' feels like I'm trying too hard.

Is also makes the POV feel that much more close, which in some cases, is a wonderful dynamic between author and character. For example, mystery novels. Many thriller writers make the mistake of letting us see more than the protagonist thus losing some of the mystery, however with Present Tense, a boundary is made, because it is very difficult to create a fluid paragraph in Present Tense that is far away.  This tense seems, at least to me, to push towards limited or close point of view.  I am not sure if there are grammatical rules that follow this assumption, and I will be looking into it and writing a research article on the idea of tenses for Detangled Writers in the near future. Yet I cannot help but wonder.  I have decided for NaNoWriMo that I am going to attempt to write 50,000 words in this tense, and see where it takes me. So now I pose a question to you:

What have you noticed about tenses? How have you dabbled, as well as POV, are there any among us who actively write using Present Tense, if so, how do you work with the limitations this tense form presents.  What about future tense, which is something I rarely see done, if ever now that I think about it. What are your experiments with tense usage, and how have they helped you grow as a writer.

This article is strictly contemplative with no empirical backing, but simple observation, however I am still interested to know if any of you have had the same experiences as myself. What other experiences have you had?

Please look forward to a more indepth and research based article on the topic of Tense and POV in the near future.

~Beth