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

The Importance of Imagery

This is my craft analysis for my MFA on imagery using Deliverance by James Dickey as the main source. You do not need to have read the book to read this essay and I do not believe there are any real spoilers contained within.  Enjoy!

 

Imagery in the Georgia Wilderness

            Some say the devil is in the details, but when it comes to imagery, I say the ‘difference’ is in the details.   Imagine a picnic scene.  Vivid, sensory descriptions are all that stand between a Monet-esque afternoon, and the third circle of Dante’s hell.  On one hand we have gently swaying ash trees, rolling grasses, polished silver with scalloped edges, and starched, white doilies; on the other we have a threadbare blanket, an overcast sky, enormous deep-fried turkey legs, an ant army descending upon a glob of jelly, and greasy fingers digging into the basket for more.  Could very well be the same picnic, but the images give us vastly different impressions.  These descriptions not only color our perceptions of scenes, they give us a deeper understanding of the novel as a whole, particularly its theme. 

            In the novel, Deliverance, James Dickey reinforces the Darwinian theme – survival of the fittest, or, you have to adapt or you die – through his use of sensory and emotional imagery.  Janet Burroway tells us in her book, Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft, “... if you are to realize your characters through detail, then you must be careful to select the details that convey the characteristics essential to our understanding.  You can’t convey a whole person, or a whole action, or everything there is to be conveyed about a single moment of a single day.  You must select the significant” (Burroway 78).  This goes back to the imaginary picnic.  If the theme is ‘rich people are slobs and pigs on the inside’ wouldn’t it be better to use the latter description over the former?  Of course that depends on the context of the rest of the novel.  Looking at Deliverance, which is a story about survival at great physical and emotional costs, it would be strange if the narrator, Ed, who happens to be a novice hunter, only noticed fluffy tails, wiggling noses, and cute features when encountering animals.  Those details have a time and place, but not in this novel.  The imagery in the following passage is what separates Dickey from Disney. 

            “In the middle of this sound the tent shook; the owl had hold of it in the same place.  I knew this before I but the light on – it was still in my hand, exactly as warm as I was – and saw the feet with the heel talons now also coming in.  I pulled one hand out of the sleeping bag and saw it wander frailly up through the thin light until a finger touched the cold reptilian nail of one talon below the leg-scales.  I had no idea of whether the owl felt me; I thought perhaps it would fly, but it didn’t.  Instead, it shifted its weight again, and the claws on the foot I was touching loosened for a second.  I slipped my forefinger between the claw and the tent, and half around the stony toe.  The claw tightened; the strength had something nervous and tentative about it.  It tightened more, very strongly but not painfully.  I pulled back until the hand came away, and this time the owl took off.

            All night the owl kept coming back to hunt from the top of the tent.  I not only saw his feet when he came to us; I imagined what he was doing while he was gone, floating through the trees, seeing everything.  I hunted with him as well as I could, there in my weightlessness.  The woods burned in my head.  Toward morning I could reach up and touch the claw without turning on the light” (Dickey 89).

            Nothing is fluffy or friendly about this owl.  Dickey uses words like ‘reptilian,’ ‘stony,’ ‘claw,’ and ‘scales’ to describe an animal that, in a different setting, might be considered cute.  The image Dickey creates is that of a fit and efficient hunter, everything that Ed wants to be, and, in the end, is forced to become.  In On Becoming a Novelist by John Gardner, the author says that “... the writer who works closely with detail – studying his characters’ most trivial gestures in the imagined scene to discover exactly where the scene must go next – is the writer most likely to persuade and awe us” (Gardner 37).  So much happens in this small scene where Ed touches the owl.  Through his “most trivial gestures” we understand, or have an idea, of what has to happen next.  Already we see Ed adapting himself for survival: “I hunted with him as well as I could,” and, “I could reach up and touch the claw without turning on the light.”

            Sandra Scofield reminds us in her book, The Scene Book; A Primer for the Fiction Writer, to, “... keep in mind that you want details to be part of action, not tacked on for effect.  And do remember to engage all of the reader’s senses, not just sight” (Scofield 112).  The owl passage focuses more on touch than it does sight, but an even better example of “... integrat(ing) description – mak(ing) it a part of the flow of the action of the scene ...” (Scofield 111) occurs during a confrontation between the protagonists and two men who, “... stepped out of the woods, one of them trailing a shotgun by the barrel” (Dickey 107).  The climax moment of this confrontation occurs in sounds:

            “I knelt down.  As my knees hit, I heard a sound, a snap-slap off in the woods, a sound like a rubber band popping or a sickle-blade cutting quick.  The older man was standing with the gun barrel in his hand and no change in the stupid, advantage-taking expression of his face, and a foot and a half of bright red arrow was shoved forward from the middle of his chest.  It was there so suddenly it seemed to have some from within him” (Dickey 116).

            While Burroway tells us, “A detail is ‘definite’ and ‘concrete’ when it appeals to the senses.  It should be seen, heard, smelled, tasted, or touched” (Burroway 75), Dickey often creates images using a combination of abstract and sensual details.  In the following passage there are a number of details that help us see the river on its surface level, “... as if [we] were a movie camera” (Gardner 71), but we also see it as Ed sees it, as something mindless, indifferent, and uncomprehending. 

  

            “What a view, I said again.  The river was blank and mindless with beauty.  It was the most glorious thing I have ever seen.  But it was not seeing, really. For one it was not just seeing.  It was beholding.  I beheld the river in its icy pit of brightness, in its far-below sound and indifference, in it large coil and tiny points and flashes of the moon, in its long sinuous form, in its uncomprehending consequence.  What was there?

            Only that terrific brightness.  Only a couple of rocks as big as islands, around one of which a thread of scarlet seemed to go, as though outlining a face, a kind of god, a layout for an ad, a sketch, an element of design”  (Dickey 171).

            Gardner introduces the concept of the originality of the writer’s eye in On Becoming a Novelist.  Essentially, “Getting down what the writer really cares about – setting down what the writer himself notices, as opposed to what any fool might notice – is all that is meant by the originality of the writer’s eye” (Gardner 71).  The above passage is a great example of that originality.  This isn’t just a river anymore; it’s Dickey’s river.  It’s Ed’s river.  Through his narrator, Dickey captures things about this river that are different from ‘what any fool might notice’ and uses these things to develop his survival theme.  Ed’s life before the river begins to merge with his life now: “outlining a face, a kind of god, a layout for an ad, a sketch...”  He sees the face of a god in recognition of the divine power of nature and he relates it to things he knows from his job, from his life before the canoe trip.  Only this character, presented by this author, could view things this way.  That is the power of imagery and the originality of the writer’s eye. 

            One of the lengthier scenes in Deliverance depicts Ed climbing a mountain cliff.  It is a simple enough action: man climbs mountain.  But the massive amounts of sensory detail that go into the scene’s composition turn it into an intense conflict of man versus nature.  

 “I got on one knee and went cautiously outward, rising slowly with both hands palm-up on the underside of the fissure top.  I was up, slanting backward, and I felt along and around the bulge over my head.  To the right there was nothing I could do, but I was glad to be back.  To the left the crevice went on beyond where I could reach, and the only thing to do was to edge along it, sidestepping inch by inch until only my toes, very tired again, were in the crack” (Dickey 175).

“Time after time I lay there sweating, having no handhold or foothold, the rubber of my toes bending back against the soft rock, my hands open.  Then I would begin to try and inch upward again, moving with the most intimate motions of my body, motions I had never dared use with Martha, or with any other human woman.  Fear and a kind of enormous moon-blazing sexuality lifted me, millimeter by millimeter” (Dickey 176).

            What starts out as ‘man climbs mountain’ turns into ‘man f***s mountain.’  It makes sense in a way.  There is an enormous amount of risk and physical exertion involved in climbing and in love making and Dickey uses this relationship between activities to not only create a visceral image for the reader but to also how Ed’s development in becoming a survivor.  Scofield says, “... ‘description’ isn’t a discreet element in narrative” (Scofield 111), and there is certainly nothing discreet in Ed’s triumph over the mountain:  “It was painful, but I was going.  I was crawling, but it was no longer necessary to make love to the cliff, to f*** it for an extra inch or two in the moonlight, for I had some space between me and it” (Dickey 177).

            The example of the picnic from the beginning gives us a taste of the spectrum of choices an author has to make when writing imagery into a scene, but Dickey’s text shows without a doubt the importance of making the right choices.  In The Scene Book, Scofield says, “Forget those high school classes where you talked plot, setting, character, theme.  Those things aren’t separate!  You want your descriptions to exist as part of action and emotion, part of the meaning of your scenes” (Scofield 111).  Imagery is just one piece of the puzzle.  It’s a piece, if done well, that is entirely unique to each author, and even each character, and it’s the one that makes all the difference. 

Works Cited:

Burroway, Janet, and Susan Weinberg. Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft. New York: Longman, 2003. Print.

Dickey, James. Deliverance. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1970. Print.

Gardner, John. On Becoming a Novelist. New York: W.W. Norton, 1999. Print.

Scofield, Sandra Jean. The Scene Book: A Primer for the Fiction Writer. New York: Penguin, 2007. Print.

Amanda LaFantasie © October 2013

Grammar Corner: Forget Grammar

That's what the editor is for! Not to mention the second draft.

Now this grammar suggestion, this one is quite controversial in the writing world, and has been a point of contention between authors and the different schools of writing. However, as far as I am concerned this is one of the most important rules. Allow me to explain.

Grammar is a necessary and innate part of our culture as a writer. This we know. The key word in that phrase is innate. If we want to call ourselves writers, something we are already quite familiar with is the English language (or any language in which you are writing in), and how to use it. We have a lot of practice in the realm of grammar just out of practice alone. We know simple sentences have a noun, verb, and predicate, and end in periods, questions end in question marks, and exclamation marks can be an eyesore when there are too many in unison. We get this and our hands and brain know how to deal with it naturally.

So what do I mean when I say forget grammar?

Simple.

I mean literally, forget it. Not in the sense where you completely disregard it, or go out of your way to make every sentence you write a grammatical fallacy. No, nothing like that. What I mean is simple. Do not let grammar dictate your writing. Do not spend hours and hours letting the sentence structure of one section of your prose keep you stuck for hours because it's just not right. We're all guilty of this, I know I am. When a sentence doesn't flow right, we fixate. Every writer is a little bit OCD in my opinion, and like any OCD it starts to interfere not only with the writing, but the life of the writer.

So forget it.

Now this is easier said than done of course, as is anything with writing. Because we've been trained, no conditioned from a very young age to be very attentive to grammar and grammatical fallacies. We've been taught to worship the academic essay and the 9 sentence structure.

Stop! Right now! Just throw that all out of your mind, because if you're here, you are writing for pleasure, you are writing because it's something you enjoy, because you're embracing something deeper than the academic essay. Any manual can teach you how to write a good research paper, but no manual in the world can tell you how to properly break all the rules and become a New York Times Bestseller.

One of the greatest things about being a writer is the freedom we are given. When we let go of the mental constraints that grammar puts on us, the need to make sure we always use the right word at the right time, the right, right or write, then or than, or even where we put a comma in a sentence. Constantly watching for little mistakes that are easy to spot and edit later, we are inhibiting our natural writing process, and inhibiting our ability to write all together.

And sentence structure, that's another matter all together. We are given all these rules that tell us how to write a sentence, but those rules often lead to dry and frankly boring commentary that wouldn't be fit in a 'How-To' manual. So forget about those rules. Writing is an art form, and one of the greatest achievements an artist can make evolving the art. Many authors have adopted a lyrical or poetic approach to their writing, replacing periods for commas, or quotations with never underestimating the intelligence of the reader. Play with your writing, build on your writing, and worry about grammar later.

Those little mistakes that everyone nags and nitpicks about, those can be edited in the future. But losing your story because you're not able to focus because all the rules are holding you down, that can sometimes be devastating. So just write, and enjoy what you're writing. Grammar, sentence structure, rules; all of those can wait until later.



Note: This is merely the thoughts and ideal expressed by me personally and may not be shared with other contributors on this blog. And remember, editors are there to help you.

Prompt - Stanza Story

Sometimes professors have the coolest prompts.

Last week our class was assigned a prompt to write a story based off of a stanza from a famous poem.  So I want to challenge you all to do the same.  The poem we were provided was, "Resurrection of the Dust," by John McKernan, because of copyright issues, I will not be using this poem, but rather a classical work, that has no risk of Copyright infringement. So for this prompt I shall use "The Phoenix and the Turtle," by William Shakespeare.

The purpose of this poem is to choose one stanza. That stanza will be the beginning of your story.  You should challenge yourself by limiting your story to one or two pages.  Practice quick and concise writing, however, if you go over, that is okay too!

The Phoenix and the Turtle

By William Shakespeare

Retrieved from here.

The Phoenix and the Turtle

Let the bird of loudest lay

On the sole Arabian tree,

Herald sad and trumpet be,

To whose sound chaste wings obey.

But thou shrieking harbinger,

Foul precurrer of the fiend,

Augur of the fever's end,

To this troop come thou not near.

From this session interdict

Every fowl of tyrant wing

Save the eagle, feather'd king:

Keep the obsequy so strict.

Let the priest in surplice white

That defunctive music can,

Be the death-divining swan,

Lest the requiem lack his right.

And thou, treble-dated crow,

That thy sable gender mak'st

With the breath thou giv'st and tak'st,

'Mongst our mourners shalt thou go.

Here the anthem doth commence:—

Love and constancy is dead;

Phoenix and the turtle fled

In a mutual flame from hence.

So they loved, as love in twain

Had the essence but in one;

Two distincts, division none;

Number there in love was slain.

Hearts remote, yet not asunder;

Distance, and no space was seen

'Twixt the turtle and his queen:

But in them it were a wonder.

So between them love did shine,

That the turtle saw his right

Flaming in the phoenix' sight;

Either was the other's mine.

Property was thus appall'd,

That the self was not the same;

Single nature's double name

Neither two nor one was call'd.

Reason, in itself confounded,

Saw division grow together;

To themselves yet either neither;

Simple were so well compounded,

That it cried, 'How true a twain

Seemeth this concordant one!

Love hath reason, reason none

If what parts can so remain.'

Whereupon it made this threne

To the phoenix and the dove,

Co-supremes and stars of love,

As chorus to their tragic scene.

THRENOS

BEAUTY, truth, and rarity,

Grace in all simplicity,

Here enclosed in cinders lie.

Death is now the phoenix' nest;

And the turtle's loyal breast

To eternity doth rest,

Leaving no posterity:

'Twas not their infirmity,

It was married chastity.

Truth may seem, but cannot be;

Beauty brag, but 'tis not she;

Truth and beauty buried be.

To this urn let those repair

That are either true or fair;

For these dead birds sigh a prayer. 

Obviously a problem arises in that this is not a modern poem, so your story may take the feel of this poem. Feel free to use the stanza in quote form.  Use it for characterization, whatever purpose you need.  Just have fun with it. If this poem is too difficult, choose a different one. Just keep in mind copyright laws when you do so. 

~Beth

Dream a little dream for me

I think just about everyone has dreams. Happy dreams, sad dreams, and dreams that make you want to spit nails when you wake up, wake up in a cold sweat-heart-racing-terrified dreams, and dreams that are so outlandishly crazy and chaotic that they just don't make any sense. Sometimes our dreams are influenced by something we've watched on TV, a movie, something we've read or played. Sometimes they are influenced by food, cheese and popcorn seem to really make mine colorful. But whatever it is, in the end, we all end up dreaming (unless you're a person who can't dream).

I have a hard time winding down at night to go to sleep. My head races round and round, passes itself on the racetrack and generally makes me cranky. I've had this problem since High School and the best way to get my head to focus one thing so I can settle down, is to tell myself a story or in some cases, I demand that Skoora tell me one. Occasionally what ever I've told myself or what ever she's told me sneaks into my dreams thus creating something strange, although most of the time it doesn't, or I've slept too hard to remember.  What's important here are not the stories, what you ate, or anything else except the dreams themselves because sometimes, just sometimes you can take something from those dreams to add to a story or create an entire story from them.

Now just hear me out, I know dreams are freaking weird. I once had a dream that John Travolta in his Battlefield Earth costume/make up was chasing me along a beach. I hid in some cave and ended up running through them and coming out in a forest. From there I ran along a path to gate which protected fifty or so tree houses that made up a convent of nuns. To top it off Angel from Buffy the Vampire Slayer was out in the day light helping the nuns with something, what I can't remember. What I do remember is that I had to get my butt into the tree house convent else John would get me. I'm not joking, this dream happened, and I've never even seen Battlefield Earth. But I kept a dream journal next to my bed and the only reason I remember this dream is because I wrote down as much as I could remember before I lost it. In this particular instance, I haven't used anything from the dream in a story. However, I've used elements or ideas that come from my dreams in other stories.

My challenge to you, try keeping a dream journal next to your bed. Try to get in the habit of writing down your dreams if you have time and can remember them. See if you can spin a story out of one or all of them, or maybe even add little things from one dream into a story and something from another.