Our aunt Meterling stood over six feet tall, a giantess, a tree. From her limbs came huge hands, which always held a shower of snacks for us children. We could place two of our feet in one of her sandals, and her green shawl made for a roof to cover our play forts. We loved Meterling, because she was so devotedly freakish, because she rained everyone with affection, and because we felt that anyone that tall had to be supernaturally gifted. No one actually said she was a ghost, or a saint, or a witch, but we watched for signs nevertheless. She knew we suspected her of tricks, for she often smiled at us and displayed sleight of hand, pulling coins and shells out of thin air. But that, said Rasi, didn’t prove anything; Rasi had read The Puffin Book of Magic Tricks and pretty much knew them all, and was not so easily impressed.
Thus begins the novel As Sweet As Honey by my good friend Indira Ganesan. It’s just been published by Knopf.
Indira’s writing possesses a beautiful tone: warm, seductive, lots of colour and sense experiences. And in this book she brings to life a whole set of characters from a family whose lives take us to a fictitious island in the Indian Ocean, and then to England and the United States. It’s an intriguing and magical story about the surprises life throws in our way, and how families deal with them; ultimately, for me, it’s a book about how we make our homes.
And at the centre of the book is this amazing figure, wonderfully rendered: Meterling, the giant aunt. We’ve all had important figures in our childhoods, in our families, and we’ve also all met memorable characters in our reading. Meterling is the character who looms large, quite literally, in this book, and she does so through the simple fact that she’s so tall.
I remember Indira sharing early selections from this book at readings, and that giantess really stuck in my mind ever since. It’s such a simple yet powerful thing to do (and the most powerful things are usually the simplest): giving a character a distinctive physical attribute. And it can be helpful in letting the character take over the writing, too. Indira says: ‘Once I let Meterling become the protagonist, the book became so much easier to write.’
External features, in many ways, also define the inner lives of the characters who possess them, but not always in predictable ways. And this is where the writing gets interesting. As well as Meterling, I’m thinking of one of my favourite characters of late: Tyrion Lannister, the dwarf wit and scheming genius of George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire. But there are other traits, not just height: scars, missing limbs, extra limbs, freckles (Anne of Green Gables), hair colour, hair deficiency, hairiness, body weight, big feet, little hands, harelips (Precious Bane! Her mother: ‘Could I help it if the hare crossed my path – could I help it?’).
So, this week, write the opening page of a novel in which you introduce a character who, by dint of some physical attribute, will loom large in the lives of all the other characters.
And do read Indira’s book as well! Amazon might be the easiest place to buy in the UK, but try to support your local indie if you can, especially if you are in the US. It’s also available from HarperCollins India in South Asia, and as an audiobook from Audible (this might be a lovely one to have read to you, in fact). And here’s Indira’s Facebook Page, too.
So, after writing experiments that look at listening (overheard dialogue), tone (emotion), and personal passions and purpose, which all in some way or other are about writing instinctively and easily, let’s bring some of these things together and also extend ourselves slightly by tasking ourselves on adapting our voices for speakers other than ourselves – fictional creations.
I’ve recently read a couple of things that made me think about ventriloquists. From my dictionary:
ventriloquist |vɛnˈtrɪləkwɪst|noun a person, especially an entertainer, who can make their voice appear to come from somewhere else, typically a dummy of a person or animal.
One of these was Laird Hunt’s novel Kind One. Because it contains the sort of story that needs to be experienced directly, I’m not going to say anything about the book other than (1) it uses voices or personas for characters to great effect, and (2) you should get hold of a copy and read it for yourself as soon as you can, as it’s really really good (the judges who shortlisted it for a PEN/Faulkner award clearly agreed). Here’s a sample from close to the start:
Once I lived in a place where demons dwelled. I was one of them. I am old and I was young then, but truth is this was not so long ago, time just took the shackle it had on me and gave it a twist. I live in Indiana now, if you can call these days I spend in this house living. I might as well be hobbled. A thing that lurches across the earth. One bright morning of the world I was in Kentucky. I remember it all. The citizens of the ring of hell I have already planted my flag in do not forget.
Note the seeds of a story, a character already taking form in a particular setting and situation, and the quality of perceptions of that character as they are embodied in sentence structure and word choices. And how all that comes together in the VOICE. Laird is a long way from the reality of that character, but he’s creating a voice that’s coming from that somewhere else (though this character certainly isn’t a dummy!).
So this week task yourself on making your voice appear from someone else. Think about a character you can bring to life, putting him or her in a setting or situation that offers the seeds of a story, then as you start to write in first-person point of view be aware of the sentence structures and word choices that character’s voice uses. Embody that character, be that character, be that voice. Then write for a page, writing something that gets you started on something longer, perhaps.
If you need a prompt or a variation, root out of your library a piece of writing in first-person POV, and then type up a paragraph or two and keep on writing in that voice, but taking the story and character (the content) in your own direction. This has to be your own original creation, after all – no cheating! In fact, once you’ve finished, cut the original copied-out paragraph or two and be sure what remains is all your own.
Finally, a disclaimer: I know Laird. But a good book is a good book. Go and read it!
This week I read a remarkable post on The Deportee’s Wife, which is the blog of Giselle Stern Hernández, whom I know from Naropa.
As a piece of writing, it engages with issues that are literally a matter of life and death: medical matters, health insurance, immigration, things that many of us take for granted and are lucky not to worry about. Politicians talk about such things, and make careers out of them. Meanwhile, other people have to live the consequences.
Forgive me for doing the editor’s version of ambulance chasing and looking beyond the content here, but I also read this to understand its form, and to see how and why a powerful piece of writing is created. There’s pacing. The paragraphs are well structured. Words are well chosen, unfussy, and purposeful. Complexities are introduced and explained with great clarity. People are brought to life. A story is forged. And we really care about the outcome.
Above all her other gifts, Giselle has an incredible voice – a voice with fire, with force, a voice that wants to change the world. I’ve been doing these writing experiments about voice, and nothing perhaps gives a voice more strength than passion and purpose.
This is important stuff. This isn’t fiction. This is real life. Even if you are writing fiction, it probably needs to contain real life too.
What do you care about? Where are your passions? What is your purpose?
This week, write about something you care about. Something vital, urgent. Dig deep (or maybe it’s already at the surface). Above all, let that vital matter fuel your voice, and really let it take control of you and your writing. No filters, no censors. Just say what must be said, and understand how that instinctively gets channelled into your voice, and out on to a page. Write, write, write until you stop.
Meanwhile, deep-felt thanks to Giselle for sharing her story, and an ever deeper wish that these matters are resolved, and soon. It’s really hard to know what to say here, without sounding trite, or worrying about saying the wrong thing. Really, we call ourselves writers, but sometimes words fail.
However, we muster ourselves, because words can be translated into action, and words are the things that will change the world. Viva Giselle!
Continuing this series of exercises working with different aspects of voice, this week let’s work with tone in writing.
It’s easy to blur voice and tone, and as with many things in writing I think it’s good to establish your own working definitions as an ongoing exercise, perhaps with examples to illustrate the case.
Voice, for me, is the very vehicle of writing. It’s what carries the words. It’s something of a physical thing too (I always think of the stick man from my French class labelled with captions: le bras, la jambe, la voix). Voice starts somewhere inside then rises up through the lungs and the throat, carried on the breath; this idea can help make voice more concrete, embodied. Voice can also be a way of describing the particular prose style in a piece of writing.
Tone, on the other hand, is a particular quality or subset of voice. Tone can reveal the prevailing attitude of a speaker or narrator, and ultimately the writer, and it is one of the particular tools with which a writer can convey emotion.
In writing, tone can be expressed in a variety of ways: word choices; punctuation; sentence length; pacing; the level of description; the use of particular parts of speech; a particular mode of address.
It is also useful to consider the use of tone in other fields: music (high-pitched, harmonious), painting (dark, light), and anatomy (muscular, flabby). What tone is achieved by the play of sunlight on snow (plus the application of fancy filters) in that photograph above? Perhaps these analogies can affect how you think about your own writing: do you need to introduce more shades? Do you have too much fat?
To consider an example, how might you describe the tone in Jamaica Kincaid’s ‘Girl’ (you can watch the author read it here, too)? I was thinking it’s hard to attribute a particular emotion to this speaker, but then I realise that is the point: this piece has a forbidding, almost cold tone. The tone here is controlling, domineering, and most definitely superior. The choice of the list as a form is in itself relevant: the speaker is handing out a largely uninterruptible list of orders and instructions that reinforces her authority.
This piece brings up something else. When using tone in a piece of writing, writers might have to decide if they are going to be literal or ironic: should the voice be taken at face value, or should the reader infer meaning from things beneath or around the text? What should the reader take away from the experience?
In ‘Girl’ we have a first-person speaker, but I don’t think we should identify Kincaid with that fierce mother. Instead, she is making a statement through a character and what she has to say, and through our experience of this character we come away with Kincaid’s observations on, among other things, the nature of power in that sort of relationship. It’s useful to consider another term here: persona. Kincaid has created a character with a particular persona, or mask, to convey the things she needs to say.
Another list piece with a different but very effective tone is ‘How To Write About Africa’ by Binyavanga Wainaina. Who said sarcasm is the lowest form of wit? (Though I have encountered college students whose responses suggested they read this in the most literal of ways.)
In all of these examples, note how the writers use concrete and specific details to bring their worlds and their messages to life: salt-fish, sewing on a button, the slut; monkey-brain, a nightclub called Tropicana; majoring in child psychology, the Names For Baby encyclopedia. Sarcasm and irony are strongest when they are pointed, and so is writing in most contexts.
The exercise So, this week let’s use tone:
* Write a piece based on a list in which a speaker (perhaps embodied in a persona) directly addresses another person. Like Kincaid, instruct them in what to do, or perhaps like Wainaina or Moore show them how to do something specific. Alternatively, you could do a version of How To Become A Writer based on your own history.
* Give that list a particular emotional quality. (A list does not have to be a bossy form. It could be cheering, cajoling, sarcastic, angry, bitter. As with any form, work and play within its limits, and own whatever it is.)
* Be aware of your own use of language: word choices, punctuation, sentence lengths, pacing, description, and parts of speech. As ever, specific and concrete will probably win over abstract and vague.
* Above all, be passionate about what’s said. Know the things that you (as a writer) need to say, and then in service of that cause know how your voice (or persona) can say things to convey that message effectively, either directly or indirectly.
Following up on some of the things I discussed at last Saturday’s workshop, I thought I’d devote the next four weeks to writing exercises that work in different ways with the idea of VOICE in writing. In particular, I’m keen to consider how we can use the natural speaking voice as a foundation for our writing.
Overheard dialogue To start us off, this week let’s do some overheard dialogue exercises. The oldest and most trusty exercises are so often the best. So take yourself to a public place where you can listen to and record what people say to each other.
Where to record? Coffee shops are good. When I was at Naropa, we were told that hanging out in the psych department guaranteed some good gleanings (the freedom – and colour – of expression of Buddhist psychologists is probably rarely surpassed). Or you could try bookshop cafes, college refectories, or workplace cafeterias – places where you can not only hear people having interesting, banal, surprising, or strange conversations, but places where you can record what you hear without being obvious. You can pretend you’re tapping away at the keyboard typing up that report, when in fact you are copying down as fast as you can the account of someone else’s disastrous date last night.
How much to record? As much as you can, right now, including every um and er. It’s all raw material, for you to look at later. (Editing real dialogue can be a great supplementary exercise in listening as well as in shaping words.)
And how to record? My friend and teacher Bobbie Louise Hawkins used to tell us to buy those small audio recorders and actually to record what you hear on the sly, then type it up (her tip was to plug in earphones to pretend you were listening to a recording, rather than making one). A few years later, of course, we have mobile phones that work for that purpose. But there are disadvantages. You do get background noise. And in certain jurisdictions audio recording of people who’re unaware of it might be illegal, and at the very least probably unethical. Hmmmm. But hey, that’s something for us to sort out later – if you are not using it in any way, this is just good practice. And writers borrow from the world around them ALL the time. Alan Bennett has said he’s got a lot of his good stuff eavesdropping on buses.
I have tended to find audio recording a bit too cumbersome and/or I’m a bit too cowardly, or too clumsy to use technology. So I’ve preferred writing in a notebook very quickly in a shorthand of sorts. For this reason (and others), it’s good to carry notebooks at all times. Bobbie told us to buy a bunch of cheap little notebooks, and have one in your coat, one in your bag, one by the phone, one on your beside table, etc., for those moments when things strike you, or you overhear gold.
But you could write at a keyboard too. You can probably type faster at a laptop than you can handwrite. Or you could always pretend you are sending an email on your phone or iPad, when in fact you’re tapping out that juicy conversation between that couple in the seats in front of you on the train.
What to do with this writing? Using your findings is a separate process: some overheard gems might provide content, sparking some brilliant idea for a story, or a new direction for something you’re having trouble with. Other things could provide stretches of dialogue you can shape or adapt for your work. Some snatches of dialogue can be lifted verbatim into your own dialogue.
But let’s not just be utilitarian. This week I’m mostly interested in how you LISTEN.
Listening Listen for the shapes of the sentences. Listen for the rhythms of sentences. Note the halts and repetitions (some or most of which we’ll probably prune in later drafts of writing). Note the use of questions or other rhetorical flourishes. Observe patterns in syntax, e.g., the position and choice of the grammatical subject in a sentence, the active vs the passive voice. Also note the use of parts of speech: verbs and nouns in particular, and where and when adjectives and adverbs are deployed (not so often, you’ll note). Speech is economical: little description, little fat. Speakers can assume that whoever they are talking to will get the gist of what they are saying without too much back story or explanation (something to note in our writing – too many manuscripts labour detailed and mechanical explanations). Note how people telling stories often have a particular way of speaking that’s easy and direct.
In particular, work out where the ENERGY lies in the voices you hear. Maybe even write notes to yourself identifying some of these features in the writing.
Later on, if you’ve been recording this, you can type it up. Think about where you might pepper the sentences you hear with punctuation such as exclamation marks, dashes – e.g., for interruptions – or ellipses … e.g., for pauses and gaps … Consider where you might add semi-colons or commas. You might also want to start spacing out the dialogue with dialogue tags and/or physical description (though that’s another exercise).
When I took a workshop on monologue with Bobbie, we’d start every class by sharing our overheard dialogue from the week before. We’d whip out our notebooks and read our gems aloud for half an hour or maybe more. It’s a lot of fun. People are fun, and funny, and tragic sometimes. And overheard dialogue taps right into that.
Do as much overheard dialogue as you can this week. Even when you are not actively recording, or unable to record (eating in a restaurant, standing on a crowded tube train, waiting for the lift at work, shopping, watching a rugby game), keep your ear out. LISTEN. Absorb the patterns made by the human voice. Slow down and listen. Grow that instinct for the sound of words, and how words can be used and put on a page.
Listening is one of the greatest skills a writer has. Learn to listen to the world around you. Learn to listen to yourself.
Some overheard dialogue I’ve recorded * ‘Would you mind if I sit with you for dinner again tonight?’ ‘Erm, no – I have my Goethe, and I think I want to sit and read that tonight.’ (In the restaurant of a pensione in Venice.) * ‘He knew all of the crowned heads of Europe. He married one of the Barton-Johnsons. I knew Jenny way back. Almost the first girlfriend I ever had. He can be a bit chippy … He’s a very good man … I don’t think the magnums will go very far. He’s a very witty man. Beautiful manners. It’s very easy for people like him to become pompous and patronising.’ (On a train to Waterloo.) * ‘Let’s get into one that’s not being rained on’ (Tourists at Windsor station.) * ‘I don’t want to spend my Saturday mornings sitting in a church hall listening to other people’s problems. They’re all so stupid. They were asked to sit there and come up with two things they could do to improve their marriages, and they did. One couple said it was really helpful. They’d never talked about these things before. Like, how stupid can they be? What sort of people are they?’ (At Wahaca’s burrito booth on the SouthBank.)
