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Notes
on Craft
Notes on Craft
is a weblog devoted to technique in fiction. It serves as a creative
diary and a clearing house for information on the craft of writing.
For more "writing on writing," see the index
of my Master's Artist posts.
No More Notes: Write About Now
Posted by J. Mark Bertrand
on Saturday, September 29, 2007
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 Notes on Craft has moved, been re-named, and is going to be better than ever. If you've enjoyed reading this blog, you're going to love the new one: Write About Now. To make the transition smooth, I copied over most of 2007's NoC posts. The archive here is going to remain only, too, so it will always be accessible.
The sub-title of Write About Now is "a travelogue of the world as it really is." Although fiction is about making things up, it's a way to see parts of reality that we wouldn't otherwise be confronted with. Drama is its own sort of scientific method, a way of discovering different kinds of truth. The important thing, it seems to me, is being honest about the world around us -- seeing things for what they truly are. Write About Now will chronicle my own efforts at doing that.
The Mystical Cachet of Writing Manuals
Posted by J. Mark Bertrand
on Friday, September 14, 2007
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When I was a boy, I discovered a leather duffle in my dad's closet, and inside was a cache of paperbacks by Dale Carnegie, including How to Win Friends and Influence People. I was fascinated. This secret power of influencing struck me as a good thing to possess, and any book that taught it must be worth reading. So I did. My expectations weren't exactly met, but that didn't stop me from believing that, whatever arcane skill one might like to acquire, its mysteries were revealed in a book. It was only natural, when my interests turned to writing, for my shelves to fill with how-to manuals.
Again, my expectations were unmet. There are excellent books on fiction, and there are mundane ones. My guess is that you can learn quite a bit from them all. Two new ones sit unread on my desk: Sandra Schofield's The Scene Book: A Primer for the Fiction Writer and Peter Selgin's By Cunning and Craft. A couple of others are en route -- I went on a bit of a buying spree recently. For whatever reason, I have always found it impossible to read more than a few pages of a how-to manual without putting it down and writing -- and that's a great problem for a writer to have!
Reading these books, I'm always struck by how much I don't know. Just flipping through The Scene Book, for example, convinced me I know nothing about writing scenes. On the other hand, the manuals often reduce the writing process to something formulaic, mechanistic. This makes it easier to talk about and teach, but it's not really how it works. The process is organic. Even so, my organic process has benefited greatly from reading other people's formulaic, mechanistic books on writing.
Here's the thing. Like Dale Carnegie, the writing manuals don't deliver on what they seem to promise. They can't. But they serve a purpose all the same. A steady diet of these things can be motivating. The really great ones can be much more than that. While it's probably true that you can learn more about writing from reading great books than reading how-to books, I still keep buying and flipping through the things, because they still retain the mystical cachet I attributed to them in childhood. Books about writing fiction have become one of my favorite genres of nonfiction, and for all the wrong reasons.
Sponge vs. Conduit
Posted by J. Mark Bertrand
on Thursday, September 06, 2007
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Every author has his influences. Originality is a relative term. When we're asked where our ideas come from, an honest answer might be: "From other writers." Good authors borrow, great authors steal, and all that. Still, there's a right way and a wrong way to go about it. The author's mind is often compared to a sponge -- it's always soaking up ideas. I'm going to suggest that some authors behave as sponges, which is good, and others act like conduits, which is bad:
The sponge accumulates influences and gives them time to reconfigure in his mind. He takes what others have done but repurposes it in keeping with his own vision. When you read his work, you can probably identify some influences, but you aren't left thinking, "Hey, I've encountered this story before!"
The conduit is less artful, more derivative. He plunders whatever is popular and cranks out his thinly disguised version of it. In some cases, the process is so brazen that readers (or the author himself) can make one-to-one identifications. If you want to know the difference, it's that sponges are influenced while conduits merely imitate. There are some very successful conduits out there, writers who take every trend and crank out their own version of it, but I think there's something ultimately unsatisfying about such work. It's not just originality that's absent, but in some mysterious way personality seems missing, too.
Why Novels are Better than Movies
Posted by J. Mark Bertrand
on Friday, August 24, 2007
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You're being sniffy, I told myself. And defensive. Standing up for the novel when nobody's attacking it. He didn't say movies are better than books, he just said his dream was to become a filmmaker, and everyone's entitled to a dream. But for some reason I felt the need to point out just how impotent a director is in comparison to a novelist.
"With film," I said, "you have to rely on so many people. A novelist has absolute control. He writes the script, casts the roles, performs the parts and dresses the sets. He controls the camera. He doesn't answer to producers because he doesn't need a budget. No one looks over his shoulder and second-guesses. The director has to work through others to achieve his art, which means he's a manager as well as a creative. The novelist is free to sink or swim on his own merit."
I had a little experience to back this up. One of the hats I'd worn throughout the nineties involved writing and directing corporate training videos, so I knew what it was like to intend one outcome and end up with something altogether more modest. Sometimes the set designer couldn't give us the look we wanted, given our limited budget, and sometimes the cameraman couldn't get the shot. The talent we could afford to put in front of the camera wasn't always top notch. By the end of a long day of shooting, I knew that things would never turn out quite how I wanted, and I was fine with that. "It's not art," I'd remind myself.
But what if it had been? Film and stage directors who manage to put their stamp on a work have my utmost admiration, because I know just how difficult that can be. When I talk to aspiring filmmakers, I often come away with the feeling they don't know. Because the technical side of low-budget movie-making has gotten so easy, they assume that it all has. But the artistry is every bit as illusive, I think.
Still, that's no reason to discourage a beginner, and that's precisely what I was doing -- trying to convince him that novels are a nobler thing and that to write them is a much worthier goal toward which to aspire. Why was I being so petty?
My own insecurities, no doubt. When you've thrown your lot in with the novel, you can't help getting a little defensive. All the signs point to obsolescence. Fewer people are reading at all, and the ones who maintain the tradition don't exactly inspire us with their choices. (The situation seems so desperate, though, that it seems ungrateful not to say something like, "At least they're reading" or "Anything that gets people reading again is a good thing.") Aspiring to write novels feels a little bit like opening a hat shop. You spend as much time admonishing people for going around bare-headed as you do plying your trade. The fact is, people don't want what you're trying to sell, and that makes you touchy.
But the thing is, I love the movies. In another lifetime, I can't imagine anything more satisfying than to be able to point to an hour and a half of black-and-white film, or a Criterion Collection DVD, and say, "I did that." I love talking about movies as much as I love talking about books, and I find aspiring filmmakers fascinating. Whenever I meet one, I ask about influences, share favorites, and try to be as encouraging as I can be -- because let's face it, the path of the novelist is easier than that of the director. If you think convincing a publisher to put a few grand into your big trial balloon of a novel is hard, try convincing investors to dig deep and finance your film.
I wasn't being an encourager this time, though. Quite the opposite. In effect, I was telling this guy that his dream was impossible, even more so than mine. Why was I doing it?
You know the feeling. The words come out and, while they're your words, you don't exactly own them. You'd like the conversation to end, but your mouth won't stop moving. You're saying things that reveal too much about your inner life, only you don't know what they reveal because this is new territory. It's as if you're your own therapist, trying to weigh the import and implications of each sentence only to be interrupted as the next one comes. I was -- to use an archaic term -- venting my spleen. I'd stored up some resentment and something cut it loose.
I resented the fact that, having put so much into writing, I seemed to have so little to show for it. I resented my disillusionment. Because of the choices I'd made, I would never be a director, and I must have resented that too -- the idea that this guy might become something that, years ago, I might have been. It's complicated and banal, the way resentment usually is. Maybe I resented his talent, or felt I'd wasted my own. Who knows? Feelings like this don't bear much scrutiny. Better to purge them and move on.
And now I wonder, what would it be like if novels were made like films? A separate author for each character, specialists to supply scenery and sensory detail, a director to shape it all into a coherent whole. Some novels, of course, are collaborative efforts -- but not usually in the sense that movies are. When I contemplate such a change, I can't help thinking the novel would suffer. You can't do art by committee, I tell myself. But a lot of art is done collaboratively. Some art can't be accomplished any other way. Why should the novel be any different?
Really, it's a question of temperament. Some of us hunt in packs, others alone. The loners tend to gravitate toward the forms where their sensibility is respected. If I'd been more outgoing, more willing to work with others, I might have found directing a more amenable project, but since I preferred to be in control of everything, with no responsibilities except to myself, writing fiction proved more hospitable. It's not as if artistic disciplines are mutually exclusive -- actors can write novels, poets can direct films, etc. -- but I wonder whether practitioners of the lonely arts tend to stick with those avenues, and practitioners of the communal arts do likewise?
Perhaps in every art, we must be sometimes lonely and sometimes communal. My resentment, come to think of it, must have stemmed from the frustration that my lonely art had not yet flowered into something communal. I had been forced to keep it too long to myself, and it began to erupt and assert itself in inappropriate ways. I'll never know. Fortunately, my bad mood seemed to go unnoticed by the would-be filmmaker. He indulged me the way you would a crazy uncle, but didn't take anything I said too much to heart. I'm glad. Sometimes our feelings prompt us to say things we don't really believe. Sometimes we don't know what we believe. This is one of those occasions when, in retrospect, I was happy to be ignored.
The Alley is Becoming a Runway: Tone in Fiction
Posted by J. Mark Bertrand
on Friday, August 17, 2007
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We found a teenaged girl sprawled on the pavement in the alley behind our building. Her shoulder dug into a brick wall and an impossibly long leg -- pale and bare -- extended straight out. The other was bent, like she'd slipped, and it must have been a terrible slip the way her body was twisted around. I stopped in my tracks, but Laurie kept going.
"This is a popular spot for them," she said over her shoulder. "I've been running into them all summer."
Them? Who were they? I peered into the doorway beside the girl and sure enough there were several others standing around, conferring with one another in whispers. I gazed again at the girl on the ground, and she looked more dazed than hurt. Eerily thin, too, with a pallor than glowed in the shadowy doorway. Ah, I thought. Drugs.
Shouldn't we do something? Laurie kept moving and, indifferent Samaritan that I am, so did I. As we neared our car, though, I stole a glance sideways to see if the girl had managed to get up. That's when I noticed the people with her in more detail. Two women in their mid-thirties. One of them held a piece of what looked like shiny foil, and the other hefted something black and menacing in her hands. A camera. Then it dawned on me. The contorted, heroin-thin girl on the pavement wasn't a junkie. She was a model.
That was the first of several encounters I've had with models in the past two weeks. Whenever I fetch the car from the alley, I can't seem to steer clear of them. Once I had to step aside to let a file of statuesque blondes march past, each one a little taller and a little older than the last. A family of models, presumably. Monday, I had a conversation with my pastor out in the alley, standing beside his parked car, and as we spoke a girl in a pink tutu ran and leapt in the air. Again and again, right over his shoulder. The photographer was tucked near the wheel well of an SUV, clicking away with intensity.
"Are we in the way?" I asked nervously.
"If you are," she replied, "I'll tell you."
I certainly felt like I was in the way. It's hard not to notice when someone's jumping a few feet away -- hard not to stare -- but I'm the sort of person who insists on not taking notice, not gaping like an idiot. My ideal facial expression at all times is unsurprised. The models make it hard, though.
My alley is a runway -- but it's hardly glamorous. The pavement's broken up and often slick with oil. The buildings that back onto the alley are uneven and slipshod in comparison with their facades. Layers of painted signs cover most of the surfaces, the newer ones slapped on over the obsolete without quite covering them. In comparison to the picturesque streets all around, our alley is a scarred, dystopian cityscape. In other words, it has atmosphere.
That's what brings the photographers, I think. They're looking for more than an interesting background. They want their photos to have a tone. Sure, they may be shooting local girls on behalf of some homegrown retailer, but they want to do it with a certain amount of style. I've never seen the resulting pictures, so I don't know how well it's turned out -- but the fact that so many different photographers bring so many different models here suggests that something's working.
Tone is one of those qualities authors often struggle to bring to their work. Tone is treacherous, easy either to forget or overdo. In other arts, tone might consist of a certain sound, or a certain look. It suggests mood and theme. It helps bring unity to the work. In prose there is nothing to see, nothing to hear. We can't bring out laptops out to the alley and start writing. For writers, tone is an abstraction waiting to be embodied.
Some basic words we use to talk about tone are dark and light. When we say something's light, we either mean that it's comic or that it's inconsequential (which is not the same thing). When the tone is more serious, we might describe it as weighty. Tragedy is dark, but darkness sometimes implies cynicism, too. The book of Ecclesiastes is dark, while the Song of Solomon is light. Revelation is dark, too, and the Old Testament prophets are weighty. This isn't very precise language, but it's our way to describing the feeling that goes along with the content.
As an artist, you can juxtapose content and feeling. The photographers in my alley are doing just that. They take fresh-faced girls in nice clothes and pose them against a patch of scorched brickwork, constrasting light and dark. This time of year, the way the sun filters down through the alley, choked back by the high buildings, creates a similar contrast. An author who handles tragedy with a light touch creates the same effect, and so does the one who takes trivialities seriously. The safe thing is to match tone and content, but the safe thing doesn't always produce the best results.
It would be safer, for example, to put pretty girls against pretty backgrounds and take pretty pictures of them. I'm guessing that's what at least some clients would prefer -- just as some readers or editors might. But the artist's instinct seems to stray unerringly toward these juxtapositions of light and dark. We do the unexpected -- and do what's expected in unexpected ways. It's not a question for originality as much as it's a search for texture.
Drifting
Posted by J. Mark Bertrand
on Sunday, August 12, 2007
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Maybe readers are better off giving contemporary authors a wide berth. With the classics, you encounter books that have stood the test of time. Each of them is a voice in the great conversation and, taken together, they balance each other out. Read widely enough and a kind of synthesis emerges. That's what T. S. Eliot says in his essay "Religion and Literature." With contemporary art, though, you don't really experience the back-and-forth dialectic. Time has not yet thinned the ranks, so instead of a counterpointed conversation between individuals, spanning centuries, in today's books -- whenever today happens to be -- you get a chorus of the zeitgeist. As Eliot points out:
... the reader of contemporary literature is not, like the reader of the established great literature of all time, exposing himself to the influence of divers and contradictory personalities; he is exposing himself to a mass movement of writers who, each of them, think that they have something individually to offer, but are really all working together in the same direction. This is a daunting consideration if you happen to be a contemporary author. On the one hand, I hear Eliot's advice and it rings true. As a reader I set great store by old books. But as an author I wonder if this doesn't cast a shadow over my own efforts. Am I just another cog in some contemporary 'mass movement,' or am I one of the few individuals? Eliot considered it harder than ever in his own day to be an individual, and I don't imagine it's gotten easier since then. I would be flattering myself, I suspect, to classify myself in the sacred camp, which means that by passing along Eliot's advice with approbation, I am in essence telling you not to bother to read my work. At the very least, you should wait until I'm dead and history has had an opportunity to give its verdict.
If I'm not an individual, I would at least like to believe that I'm striving to become one, and that self-awareness is the first step. Last summer, I was much inspired by something Evelyn Waugh said on the subject:
An artist must be a reactionary. He has to stand out against the tenor of the age and not go flopping along; he must offer some little opposition. Most of the artists I know are not reactionaries. The opposition they offer is very much in tune with the tenor of the age. They have quite conventional views on most subjects and are only able to fancy themselves as rebels by imagining some great unwashed Other that opposes their principles. In fact, the uniformity of moral and political opinion among the creative class is somewhat notorious. Our art may transgress, but our opinions rarely do. Or if they do, the people they offend are the uncouth, easily-manipulated masses. We tend to side with the elites.
George Orwell understood this. In an unfinished essay on Waugh, he wrote:
. . . the opinions which a writer feels frightened of expressing are not those which are disapproved of by society as a whole. To a great extent, what is still loosely thought of as heterodoxy has become orthodoxy. It is nonsense to pretend, for instance, that at this date there is something daring and original in proclaiming yourself an anarchist, an atheist, a pacificist, etc. The daring thing, or at any rate the unfashionable thing, is to believe in God or to approve of the capitalist system. Not that Orwell did either. But Evelyn Waugh did, and it made him stand out as a novelist. Orwell continues:
In our own day, the English novelist who has most conspicuously defied his contemporaries is Evelyn Waugh. Waugh's outlook on life is, I should say, false and to some extent perverse, but at least it must be said for him that he adopted it at a time when it did not pay to do so, and his literary reputation has suffered accordingly. According to Orwell, Waugh's is the "only loudly discordant voice" of his generation. Naturally, Orwell had no sympathy for Waugh's Christianity or his conservative politics, but I think we'd all agree that George Orwell was an individual and it appears from this essay that he recognized Waugh as one, too. Over the summer, I finished Waugh's Sword of Honour trilogy, which follows the adventures of a WW II officer named Guy Crouchback, who begins the conflict with chivalric ambitions and ends it with the desire to imitate Christ through self-sacrifice. Waugh is not content to tell us that war is hell, or even that war is crazy; instead, he shows that while its horror and absurdity make sport of the desire to pursue glory, they are redeemed by the decision to pursue Christ. This is a perspective which, as Orwell says, does not pay, but it is certainly out of step with the mass movement of Waugh's contemporaries.
Abraham Kuyper, in his Stone Lectures, speaks of marching "under the banner of the Cross against the spirit of the times," as if to be under the one is invariably to be against the other. It's an implication worth pondering for a Christian in the arts. "When the contemporary novelist is an individual," T. S. Eliot writes, "thinking for himself in isolation, he may have something important to offer to those who are able to receive it. He who is alone may speak to the individual. But the majority of novelists are persons drifting in the stream, only a little faster." And a Christian novelist has more reasons than most to come up out of that stream.
Eliot did not mean, of course, that we should have a stream of our own to swim in, with cleaner water and less traffic.
And the last thing I would wish for would be the existence of two literatures, one for Christian consumption and the other for the pagan world. What I believe to be incumbent upon all Christians is the duty of maintaining consciously certain standards and criteria of criticism over and above those applied by the rest of the world; and that by these criteria and standards everything that we read must be tested. Christian readers, in other words, must be individuals too, people of whom something more is expected, not just something different.
These reflections leave me with a greater desire for independence from my artistic and intellectual influences. They prompt me not to be so beholden to what I admire. For me, the rhetoric of individualism is largely bankrupt, but now I want to find a new way to talk about becoming an individual, not out of a desire to be rugged or self-sufficient, but in the hope of being more than just one more voice in the contemporary chorus -- the supposed cacophony that is all too regular in pattern.
Together in the Same Direction?
Posted by J. Mark Bertrand
on Thursday, August 02, 2007
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... the reader of contemporary literature is not, like the reader of the established great literature of all time, exposing himself to the influence of divers and contradictory personalities; he is exposing himself to a mass movement of writers who, each of them, think that they have something individually to offer, but are really all working together in the same direction.
T. S. ELIOT
"Religion and Literature," in Essays Ancient and Modern, p. 107
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