Looking at further examples from the Four Elements practice in writing, let’s consider Water, which is associated with emotion.
There are plenty of ways to think about evoking feeling in writing: shifts in tone can work, for example, through pacing, word choice, sentence length, and plenty of other techniques. Perspective and point of view can also make a difference in establishing an intimacy or detachment or a particular angle on events. These are tweaks or more radical changes we can experiment with during revising and self-editing: which way of telling the story creates a stronger emotional bond with the reader?
But too I am always looking for the intuitive approaches – the things that work their magic naturally, that unspool feeling without effort. When I taught the Water Ways workshop with Words Away back in February, we looked specifically at letter-writing as an instinctive act of embodying feeling in writing.
Firstly, we read some of the real-life letters of Tove Jansson. Depending on who she is addressing – family, lovers, old friends – her tone can be gossipy, passionate, newsy, sincere. The writing is also very efficient – often lyrical in its description of life in her island summerhouse, often brisk, more than a bit scary in describing air raids during the war, grateful in saying thank you for gifts sent from a friend in America, no-nonsense but revealing in relating business matters about her beloved creations the Moomins. Letter-writing doesn’t usually give you time for fussing about language; you have a message and you have to get it across. There is a direct quality of exchange and communication.
We also read selections from Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, a beautiful novel that takes the form of a letter to his mother – you can listen to the author read an extract at that link from his publisher. Again: a remarkable intimacy works through this direct quality of addressing someone – in this case a mother who has shared those experiences of being a first-generation migrant. Also, in this instance, the writing has a real charge from knowing that the mother in the novel can’t read. There have been struggles, there have been difficulties in their relationship – but there is also great love.
As a writing experiment: write a letter from one character to another with a particular purpose. In this instance, give it focus by making it a letter that is compassionate in its intent.
I’m currently taking an online class in Mindful Compassion with my alma mater Naropa University. (More info on a self-paced version here.) It’s fascinating! Not least as I’ve only dipped my toe into the disciplines of religious studies and psychology before. The science underlying various studies on mindfulness training is compelling.
I’ve been particularly interested in various thoughtfully curated readings on altruism and lovingkindness, especially as they tease out the distinctions between empathy (sharing feeling for others) and compassion (extending feeling towards others in ways that alleviate suffering).
It’s also made me question the idea of self-esteem, which can place a premium on pumped-up or unrealistic senses of the self and others. ‘Esteem’ – respect and admiration. Are we doing good things to be respected and admired, or are we doing good things for the sake – and the need – of doing good things?
Lots to think about – and too lots for writers to consider in how they contain feeling in the words they choose.
So, put this into practice: write a letter between two characters in which one of them is doing good things by reaching out to alleviate someone else’s suffering. Consider the nature of that character’s suffering, and then consider its cause and what another character can do to make that suffering more tolerable – and then let that character reach out.
Additional elemental activity: Before you write your character’s letter, try thinking – or feeling – your way into both characters as you take a shower or have a bath. (Note: there might be a difference between the experience of running water in a shower, and the relatively still water of a bath.)
Alternative Water-based writing experiment: I Remember, because so much about memories taps into emotion.
On Saturday a lovely group of writers came along to Water Ways, the newest of the Four Elements workshops that I’m running as a series with Kellie Jackson of Words Away.
Among the Four Elements, Water is identified with feeling, and as the workshop approached I realised the field of emotions presents a pretty HUGE and amorphous subject as a topic within writing. Given my ambition slash weakness of needing to be comprehensive, how would we cover it ALL?!
So we approached the subject of emotion through a few specific lenses. We started by discussing memory and symbolism as ways to activate, contain or convey feeling in writing. Inspired by Lynda Barry, we also gave ourselves watery names for the day – with my teacher hat on, I became Professor Newt.
We then looked at methods of crafting narrative tone, paying special attention to perspective and sentence structure and examining the emotional shifts within a particular scene in Brokeback Mountain. A good scene will contain CHANGE, especially in the feelings of characters – and readers. We also looked for Proulx’s use of water imagery.
And I forgot to ask: where in the story do Ennis and Jack say, ‘I love you’? What does that say?
Thinking about tone in relation to pitch, it also occurs to me now that we use the word pitch to describe that brief description we use to sell books. Which makes me think how a good sales pitch really goes to the heart of a book, and ideally grows out of the narrative tone and voice and style of telling the story.
We ended the day looking at the emotion created within the intimate space of a letter with reference to works by Ocean Vuong and Tove Jansson. And then we wrote thank you letters of our own.
I wish we’d discussed the idea of the unconscious a bit more. But it was certainly present; we talked plenty about Ocean Vuong, and only now do I realise: the clue is in his name! OCEAN = WATER, right?! There: the unconscious in beautiful action.
A highlight of the day was our brilliant guest tutor and resident wavemaker: author and illustrator Sally Kindberg. I am really keen in this series of workshops to experiment with practices and viewpoints from creative fields that rely less heavily on verbal forms, because words are so often the problem with writing – words can get in our way, just as writers often need to get out of their own way too, and it often makes sense to develop writing without actually doing any writing. So on Saturday we drew.
At the start of the day, instead of a meditation we did a contemplative drawing exercise using our hands and lines. And then in her drawing workshop Sally got us to make some (hilarious!) self-portraits, and, using her magic top hat, guided us through the creation of characters that we took on adventures in four-frame comic strips. Clouds became potatoes, and much mirth was had. Under my student pen name of Simon Seahorse, I was very pleased to learn how to draw wings in flight.
Comic strips also prompted a brief discussion about yonkoma manga and kishōtenketsu, and we bonded in questioning the necessity of conflict as the central drive in writing (an idea that many of us are fed up with – more on that anon).
Sally inspired me so much I spent the following afternoon watching the wild and brilliant Studio Ghibli classic Porco Rosso and then playing drawing games with a friend who’d come to visit. Thanks, Sally! I finally got to art school.
And thanks again to Sally for bringing drawing into our class so purposefully, and to everyone who came for joining in so fully.
Our next Four Elements workshop is Earth Works, where our guest earthshaker will be dancer and Physical Intelligence expert Claire Dale. It’s held on 21 March, which is the spring equinox; I promise we shall be marking the wRites of Spring in appropriate style!
The first version of this post described how I got emotional at a workshop at York this year, but every time I go back to my earlier drafts I feel I’m just adding to the shit-heap of whine and opine, so I decided to spin gold out of shit and turn it into a writing experiment.
Let’s just say: we live in a divided culture. We squabble over politics, over our place in the world, over other people’s places in our small world, over our leaders. Some of our political leaders qualified for office on the basis of careers as newspaper columnists whipping up emotions with falsehoods, so it’s no surprise that in public life logic counts for little, facts count for little, and experts and expertise have been derided. The people have spoken, and that’s that.
No, it’s not. The people spoke on the basis of a pack of lies, and I think the main reason I got emotional in that workshop (called Raising The Tone) was that words are my livelihood, and this summer words have been devalued. The tone of public discourse has been debased.
So how do we work ourselves out of this mess we’re in?
No answers to that. But I do know that one of the most helpful things was reading a couple of very thoughtful articles. They were written by proper writers, not pedlars of tabloid falsehood. Writers can help. Reading and writing can help.
Few places have produced as many great writers as Ireland, and few places understand the UK’s relationship with power better than the Irish, so it was not surprising that great clarity came from a piece in the Irish Times incorporating a cross-section of views from Irish poets and novelists: UK Was Groomed. Published on 27 June, it came as a sobering but necessary read: elegiac, raw, and not a wasted word. Two different writers there chose a particular word to describe the leader of the opposition: pointless. That word lodged in my mind all summer, and it’s still there, defining. Pointless.
So: 1. one thing writers can do is choose their words carefully.
Another good piece came from Zadie Smith in the New York Review of Books: Fences: A Brexit Diary. Zadie Smith is another special writer, with her own type of insight and brilliance, and in reading this I was reminded of something she said about politicians in an interview in the Standard in 2013. Her interviewer reports:
Certainly, she would run a mile from politics. When I ask about Barack Obama, she shudders and expresses her horror at his drone strikes, and the ‘inhuman’ decisions that anyone who enters politics must make. ‘Any artist who aligns themselves with a politician is making a category error,’ she asserts, ‘because what politicians do is not on a human scale, it is on a geopolitical scale. Individual humans are being killed by anonymous planes in the air, and artists should be interested in individual humans. I would no more give support to Obama than I would to David Cameron — the decisions they have to make are not conceivable to me.’
So: 2. we don’t align ourselves with politicians. Writers and wordsmiths are the tricksters. We can (and must) tackle political topics, but we align ourselves with politicians at our peril. We are here to see through the bullshit and lies, and keep politicians on their toes. Only connect. That’s what E.M. Forster urges in his epigraph to Howards End. Our guiding principles should be truth and empathy. The Buddhist ideal of Right Speech is handy too.
I was also reminded of attending a Zadie Smith reading for her novel NW. It features, at one point, a character walking across London, and during the Q&A someone asked if she felt intimidated by Mrs Dalloway and Virginia Woolf, one of her literary heroes. She replied very simply that we have to write ‘from love, not envy’.
So: 3. Write from love, not envy.
Truth and love and empathy. We’re not getting these things from our political leaders, so let’s write them into the world. I certainly felt empathy from writers at York (thank you to those people attending that workshop). Writers might be weirdos, but we’re writers for a reason.
For this week’s writing experiment: Walls seem popular among many of our politicians, so write about a wall: some description, perhaps, that’s concrete and specific and creates some mood out of its presence.
And then tell us what and especially who is on this side of the wall.
Then describe what and especially who is on the other side of the wall: that what and who will be markedly different in some way.
And then write about a door in that wall. And then tell us how things on either side of the wall can be made to connect. Maybe a miracle will happen (more on miracles another time).
Feel free to adapt, e.g., a fence instead of a wall, a gate instead of a door.
As you write, really work with the symbolic power of doors and walls and maybe the idea of the miracle in. Dig deep. And remember:
Yesterday I returned from my fifth Festival of Writing. I’m tired, and overstimulated, and typing on three devices; I have email, Twitter, two Scrivener projects, three Word documents, and an infinity of Safari tabs on this very screen right now. (No Facebook, though. I’ve deactivated that. For now, for good?)
But I have to say I really love that buzz I get when I come back from York. Here is a quick wrap-up including links to various things I mentioned (perhaps to be updated as my monkey mind remembers bits and pieces).
I hope I didn’t sound too biased in my advocacy of the self-help model over educracy (or crookademia, as we called it on a train heading home). But looking at the cost of an MA should really give anyone pause, and in this class I wanted to give practical suggestions and resources for writers who wanted to build their own programme of studies.
We all agreed that doing the necessary studying then drafting and completing a book is probably going to take longer than the usual year of an MA. We thought three to five years was reasonable, maybe seven or eight.
I brought into our discussion a couple of case studies where I had asked two writer friends (one published, one about to be published) how they would put to good use a budget of about half the cost of an MA.
Both said they would spread the learning and writing across three to five years (which seems pretty accurate), and they included things such as: courses, writing retreats, the services of a freelance editor who can also give some market advice, a writing conference where they could pitch to agents, and membership of genre organisations and attending their conventions. Both writers also stressed the importance of networking and building community through such activities – and especially the joy of making like-minded and lifelong friends. Childcare is an additional expense that can be worth the investment at key times.
One came to £4,200, and the other to £3,600. (Gym memberships can cost more!) This is significantly cheaper than most MA courses, which anyway would probably need to be supplemented with other courses or input as the writer extends what is usually a 15,000-word dissertation, give or take, into a book.
And while we are talking about costs, here is a clip that might give further thought on a subject that came up in the class: ‘Fame costs, and right here’s where you start paying’. What is writing going to cost you? How are you going to pay for wherever you want to get in terms of making time, and making space? Time and space are going to be more important than money. (One of my case studies also built a very lovely writing shed, but this is shared with writer’s partner and would blow any MA budget. At least visitors can be slept there at Christmas.)
I mentioned the highly practical and very brilliant self-editing course run for the Writers’ Workshop by Debi Alper and Emma Darwin as a sensible investment too; I always feel a bit sheepish touting the house wares, but I did point out that, among people who have taken it, this course seems to be more highly rated than any other I know, and it turned out that several of its graduates were in the room to back me up.
When signing up for any course, check out the tutors (and note not all the best are famous writers either … or have even published books – at least in that sense). Personal recommendations are always good.
I also recommend highly David Gaughran for his wisdom and fire about self-publishing, and his generosity with resources for the writer. His book Let’s Get Digital is free to download right now (and perhaps you can buy one of his novels in exchange).
Back to the course: we did a few brainstormy exercises on the fly, and I used one to challenge writers to produce a short story, and offered to read and comment on any sent my way by Monday morning. And I got one story first thing this morning, and it’s really good! The constraint within that exercise worked really well.
Many other resources, including stuff from the handouts and plenty more, can be found in the Resources pages on my site.
The better you are, the more sweat I’m gonna demand. – Lydia Grant of the New York City High School for the Performing Arts
TRUSTING YOUR VOICE This workshop focused on trusting your natural speaking voice as the foundation of your writing. It’s natural, it’s easy, it’s how we’ve been telling stories all our lives. My friend and teacher Bobbie Louise Hawkins from Boulder has been a great influence on my sense of using the speaking voice.
We discussed how different types of writing have different purposes (informing, selling, arguing a case, telling a story, creating an atmosphere). And this creates different needs in the syntax. Fiction needs mood, as do many forms of narrative nonfiction, and sometimes, if we’ve grown used to writing in other forms (academic writing, journalism, business writing) we need to adapt and perhaps return to the simplicity of getting the natural speaking voice on to the page.
Related to voice, I also gave a mention to narration, the narrator, and the persona. We also looked at ways to adapt and extend your natural speaking voice and using dialect in writing. How much can we get away with? Not much is needed, probably. As in many things, sufficiency is a useful principle in writing.
I’ll end on a quote about a voice’s distinctive qualities from Stephen King:
A novel’s voice is something like a singer’s — think of singers like Mick Jagger and Bob Dylan, who have no musical training but are instantly recognizable. When people pick up a Rolling Stones record, it’s because they want access to that distinctive quality. They know that voice, they love that voice, and something in them connects profoundly with it.
BOOK DOCTORING The manuscripts I read were a good bunch. One was outstanding, and made me wish I was a publisher again, or even (scary) an agent. A couple of others showed a lot of potential. Actually, quite a lot of them did.
In fact, is it too pollyanna of me to think everyone has potential? I had a meeting with someone I’d first met at the Getting Published day in the spring, and he’d gone away and studied the books I recommended and taken Debi and Emma’s course and (most importantly) done lots of writing, and his prose style had truly come on leaps and bounds. Improvement comes through application.
In general, tweaks for mood and pacing are often the things I was paying attention to – things that bring a distinctive style out in the voice and help build an emotional connection. With content, there was sometimes a need for a clearer narrative focus: what’s at stake in the story as a whole? And by extension: on every page? I told one writer I chatted to in passing that every page should offer a gift to the reader. It is helpful to think of writing as an act of giving.
I had to see a few people at short notice – if any of those good folk are reading this and need any points clarifying, drop me a line via my contact form.
Further to that, though, I want to recommend this post for anyone who’s figuring out what to do after meeting with agents and editors: Working With Feedback On Your Writing.
(To come: a post on choosing an agent or publisher.)
TILL THE NEXT TIME As ever, the Festival of Writing was great fun. A real meeting of minds and especially hearts – there are a lot of good-hearted people at the festival, and that is because writing is fundamentally a good-hearted practice. Group hugs all round! (Man hugs especially.)
Thanks to everyone at the Writers’ Workshop for having me along, and to everyone I spoke with: it made for a very enjoyable weekend.
And a special thanks to those left behind …
PS for anyone in or near London: I’m joining Kellie Jackson and Emma Darwin at the Words Away Salon at the Tea House Theatre in Vauxhall next week. We’re going to be talking about editing your writing. And networking and building community (see above).
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.
