A GUEST BLOG FROM LESLIE PIETRZYK

“She smiled, he laughed, and their eyes met.” Sounds delightful, especially if one of those two is you and you’re in the mood for love (swapping out pronouns as necessary, of course). If, however, any of this resembles sentences in your work-in-progress, then it’s time for an intervention.

There’s nothing wrong with smiling. I do it myself now and then. And I even laugh in my real life. Let’s hope we all do. But I’m struck by how often characters in beginning writing smile and laugh when there are a zillion more interesting gestures or sounds the writer could choose to convey the same emotional state of mind.

I lump this annoying smiling and laughing under the broad category of “writing tics.” Many beginning and established writers don’t realize how often they rely on certain words and phrases.  We all know that writing is hard work, and so when our brain finds a shortcut, it tends to stick with it. Someone’s happy: let them laugh! Two characters first meet: how about a smile? Reaching beyond the obvious takes thought and makes our heads hurt: the happy character who twirls in a charming and precisely described pirouette. Is pirouette too corny? Does her skirt flip up or swoop out; like a bell is a cliché, so what’s another shape? What color is that skirt; is there lace on it? No wonder we simply want to slip by with a laugh.

Smiling (and its kissing cousin, the grin) and laughing (along chuckling, a sound I’m convinced doesn’t exist in real life) are two of the most universal writing tics, but there are others:

Eyes: meeting, locking, cutting, glancing, watching
Sighs: deep, gusty, forlorn, heavy
Crying: tears slipping and sliding down cheeks, hovering along eyelashes, spilling and rolling
Hearts: pounding, thumping, racing

I suspect we can blame movies and TV with their close-ups for the preponderance of written character descriptions that revolve around eyes—their color, their intensity, their shiftiness. Hair color is also up there. Certainly we notice hair in real life—but there’s much more beyond the color. Length? Texture?  Style? Don’t tell us “blonde hair”; tell us the story of who your character is with a description of what’s unique about this blonde hair.  And, honestly, in real life, how often are we noticing the “milky blue” eyes of the cashier at the grocery store? Do we really look at the parent in the carpool line and think, “Hmm…coffee-colored eyes like shimmering pools”? I scarcely notice other people’s eyes in my daily life, and consequently I suggest that characters should tone down their laser-like focus on what everyone else’s eyes look like. (Exceptions made for characters who are optometrists, of course.)

It’s tempting to think that writing tics are exclusive to the beginner, but every writer carries the baggage of beloved shortcuts. For many years, my characters were the kings and queens of the “gusty sigh,” usually while staring out a window with a pane that was often “lined with drizzle.” Way too many of my characters “shifted their weight from side to side” when they were anxiously standing around somewhere, especially as “rain drummed the roof.” And my characters should have been a little more ripped for all the times they “folded and unfolded their arms against their chests” as their mouths “tightened into a hard, straight line.”

Story after story, chapter after chapter—fists clench, jaws tighten, eyebrows are either raised or arched, lips are bitten, deep breaths are drawn in, and tension stretches like a rubber band…. And it’s not just clichés and familiar, generic phrases like the ones I’ve cited; often we return to beloved images, inserting them into our work again and again without even realizing we’re doing so. For a long while, I was big on finding any excuse for my characters to blow the seeds off dandelions, and I’m still not immune to various variations on stones in water and ripples radiating along ponds. We’re susceptible to our favorite words: I endlessly have to delete the word “faux”; despite how beautiful the word looks on the page (or screen), one use per every third short story is ample. (But see how deftly I was able to work it into this piece!)  And, actually, I endlessly have to delete “endlessly,” too…another favorite.

A writing tic that will have to be pried out of my cold dead hands is my use of food. My characters eat A LOT. When I don’t know what to do with them, I send them to the kitchen, the dining room table, or a restaurant. It happens that I love to eat and cook, so yes, I want to write about something I enjoy—but it’s a writing tic. I’m not sure I’ve ever written a story where no one eats. If a Martian landed on Earth and read any random 500 pages of my writing, it would assume that Earthlings were obsessed with food. That Martian might also note an overuse of the word “tines” as people fiddle with their utensils a bit too often, in another writing tic of mine.

Rosecrans Baldwin wrote in Slate about the overuse of these phrases: “somewhere a dog barked” and “a dog barks in a distance,” discovering instances in writers as varied as Woolf, Eggers, Vonnegut, Faulkner, and Stephen King. As for me…guilty! I don’t even especially like dogs, yet they often bark in my fiction on a dark night. It’s easy to see why this phrase feels promising to the writing brain: the pleasing sensory sound of a dog, the detail providing a pause in action to let tension mount, the writer’s sense that a barking dog is conceivable in most neighborhoods. One barking dog is interesting, but this pack of yappers surely is a writing tic.

The reason I’m opposed to writing tics—with the exception of my fascination with characters eating—is that the tic is the familiar. It’s the first word/phrase/image our brain comes up with, so surely it’s the least interesting. It’s too easy. What would we discover if we forced ourselves to keep thinking? These tics of ours are bland and comfortable. While vigorous writing can appear easy on the page, I want my work to create discomfort in the reader and the writer. I want angles in my words and images, not soft, smooth edges. Or, to retreat into imagery I’m comfortable with: there’s only so much vanilla pudding a reader can spoon down before hoping for a plate of fiery, New Mexican red chile enchiladas.

I first learned that my characters sighed too much when a helpful teacher circled each and every sigh with his wrathful red pen. If you don’t have that sort of helpful teacher in your life, you can word search your document to see how often eyes show up or smiles or whatever words you think you’re susceptible to. I suggest putting several stories into one large file and doing the search, to show a larger pattern. Or take some time and simply read many stories and/or chapters all in one swoop; maybe ask a careful friend to help. Read slowly, and try to focus not on editing, but on the words. You’ll probably get better results if you print out your work on real paper, changing to a font you don’t normally use: there’s nothing like the rigidity of Courier to add a bracing splash of cold water to the process.

I’m not sure how helpful this next bit of advice is, but it’s fun: put your novel (or several short stories) into a word cloud and see which words loom largest in the resulting picture. The reason this strategy might not be helpful is that often the character’s names are gigantic, meaning they’re used the most, which makes sense. But the reason this strategy might be VERY helpful is because of what I learned when I recently created several work clouds using a novel-in-progress, an unpublished novel manuscript, and an older collection of stories that never appeared as a collection. Here are the results:

Novel-in-progress: Character names, and then the words, one, like, back
Unpublished novel: Character names, and then the words, one, baby, man, back
Old collection of stories: Character names, and then the words, one, like, didn’t

The persistence of “one” and “like” was surprising, so I tested out the last ten or so entries on my blog where there would be no character names, and the biggest word was… “one.” Such results leave one feeling slightly convinced, no? Here’s the site that creates word clouds: http://www.wordle.net/

Don’t hyper-panic right now and struggle for three days about how to convey a character’s pleasure. In draft, sometimes you just have to write “she smiled.” At least I do. Revision is the time to think about tics and review work with the harsher, editor’s eye. Smile and laugh away in that first draft; hearts can pound if later in the process they rattle in the ribcage like a rock in a sieve.

And my final bit of advice is to remember that every writing rule can be broken. Flannery O’Connor often noted her characters’ eyes, so much so that a brave person might suggest that was one of her writing tics. But how those eyes were described!

“The child looked at him with a kind of half attention, his eyes forward but not yet engaged. They were a paler blue than his father’s as if they might have faded like the shirt; one of them listed, almost imperceptibly, toward the outer rim.”
~”The Lame Shall Enter First”

“Only his left eye, twisted inward, seemed to harbor his former personality. It burned with rage. The rest of his face was prepared for death.”
~”Why Do the Heathen Rage?”

“The skin on her face was thin and drawn as tight as the skin on an onion and her eyes were gray and sharp like the points of two icepicks.”
~”Parker’s Back”

All we have to do is that.
****

Leslie Pietrzyk is the author of two novels, Pears on a Willow Tree and A Year and a Day. Her short fiction has appeared in many journals, including Shenandoah, Gettysburg Review, Iowa Review, The Sun, and River Styx. She edits the online journal Redux, blogs at Work in Progress, and teaches fiction in the Converse College low-residency MFA program and the graduate writing program at Johns Hopkins University. For more information: www.lesliepietrzyk.blogspot.com

 

And, as August dawned, two novellas and a novel behind me – DeLillo’s Point Omega (post-Iraq), J. L. Carr’s  A Month in the Country (post- WWI), Frederick Busch’s The Night Inspector (post-Civil War) – all leaving me wondering if you can have a war story (or a war recovery story) without a love story.  Depends, of course, upon definitions.

Busch’s novel of a brilliant financial manipulator, who was horribly disfigured while conducting his work as a sharpshooter during the hostilities, involves a lust story that is also a love story and a story of remarkable betrayal.  William Bartholomew, his face so damaged that he must wear a mask and eat behind a veil, lives amid the squalor of New York City’s infamous Five Points, but he moves among the great and powerful and patronizes an African American prostitute who has pity on him, but for ulterior motives, and not the noble ones she eventually admits to.

This plot line gains momentum and gravity as it braids with Billy’s newfound friend, a customs inspector referred to as M but whose references to the books he has written (including some about exotic islands and one about a great white whale) makes him anything but anonymous.  The book gains even greater heft through Billy’s memories of the war, not only the meticulous and expert performance of his own specialty, but also the results of massacres and atrocities perpetrated by both sides.

The Night Inspector is an exciting and horrifying book, spun in Billy Bartholomew’s voice, steeped in historical details and atmosphere, often (though not always) persuasive in its diction and metaphors, though sometimes the word play is intrusive, and I’ll admit that I often winced at the gore, and I don’t think I’m quick to wince.  Busch seems to have been especially fascinated with the sounds and smells of exploded and decaying human flesh, and I think he’s out-McCarthyed Cormac at times with both the sexuality and violence of the tale.  And yet, it’s hard to deny the hard-core reality of the wrenching scenes, even if they throw the tone of the novel off at times with their Bosch-like quality.

This is the story of the waterfront community exposed in the BBC America’s gritty drama “Copper” (which owes much to “Deadwood,” “Hell on Wheels,” “Justified”).  Busch weaves together the actual and the possible so skillfully that he can often work in the improbable with impunity.  It’s a story of urban America still steeped in the habits of war, all the characters wounded, nearly all both vulnerable and culpable.  And there are celebrity cameos – Twain, Dickens, Winslow Homer – and lots of discussion of morality and aesthetics, all rendered in the almost-convincing monologue of the protagonist.

Much as I appreciated (“enjoyed” would seem too casual here) the story of post-war NYC and the backstories of life at the front and in the heat of the hunt, I closed the book thinking that Billy and M so overwhelm the other characters that the novel’s balance is problematic at best.  The horrors of the on-going mystery’s conclusion and solution seem hastily contrived, impatiently concluded, but I find the book as fictional testimony of the war and its casualties moving and transformative.  It’s the kind of book which, warts and all, is likely to secure its own place in the pantheon of novels about the American Civil War, and the literal and metaphoric lessons concerning wounds to identity and integrity make it a worth the time and discomfort.

*
It’s hard to say much definitive about DeLillo’s enigmatic Point Omega, which takes cryptic turns, leaves its “plot mystery” (as opposed to the moral mysteries) unsolved and hinges heavily on the reader’s understanding of the frame device, which I admit to not fully understanding.  But it’s an afternoon’s worth of work that is also pleasure and left me with some conundrums that have refused to release me, questions concerning language and action, intellect and emotion, violence and form.  That frame?  Various characters visit a conceptual art piece in which, within a small room, the entirety of Hitchcock’s Psycho is projected on a wall, slowed down until the film takes 24 hours to reel out.  Various characters observe scenes, find surprising details and discrepancies, ruminate and are awakened and struggle with the shift in time frame and its attendant discoveries.  There is much gazing among spectators in the room, and gestures of contact are attempted.  Pace and expectation, however, are clearly explored in relation to brutal content.  Incongruities prevail.

Between the two scenes in the Psycho room, the story is simple, but inconclusive, a haunting long/short story of our time.  Filmmaker Jim Finley is the guest in an arid desert retreat of Elster, a shadow intellectual apologist for the Pentagon during the Iraq War, a philosopher brought in to give to the airy nothingness of Bush Gang aggressive policies a palatable intellectual habitation and a name.  De Chardin’s notion of the Omega Point, the extreme of intricacy and intensity, plays an important role as the two men explore war’s rhetoric and silences.

Jim attempts, unsuccessfully, to persuade Elster to speak on film, ex tempore and extensively, against a simple wall, to unfold his current thoughts on his role in the selling of the war.  As Elster resists and the pair bond, DeLillo presents the scenes in spare, hypnotic language, occasionally humorous, almost Beckett-like in the dialogue’s lack of progress.

The plot thickens when Elster’s daughter arrives – sexual tension, family dynamics revealed, regret and affection replacing rationalization but not reticence.  It was a rainy Sunday when I read the book, and the evocation of desert topography and atmosphere was sharp against the downpour.  The story’s puzzles and intimations became personal, and I found myself deeply engaged with the characters (whom some critics found puppet-like in their embodiment of ideas) and less frustrated about the unsolved mystery than challenged by Elster’s responses to the unanswerable.

Point Omega was not exactly entertaining or openly instructive, but it was full of shadows whose sources and movement are poignantly challenging, and its pertinence to the current (and continuing) political, aesthetic and psychological arenas seems undeniable.

Where does the love come in?  Both permeating and obliquely, but that would be telling.

*

Another rainy Sunday, and in a friend’s guest house I picked up J. L. Carr’s novella A Month in the Country (1980), which begins in a downpour.  The stranger in town/narrator is looking back on a quietly miraculous summer (not just a month) in Oxgodby, where a deceased benefactor has left a small bequest to the Anglican (but once Catholic) church for the uncovering of a painted-over mural in the chancel.  Birkin, this narrator, has recently returned from the trenches of WWI, and his stammer and facial twitches are more evident than the psychological damage he has suffered.

Birkin (Is it only American readers who will swiftly associate him with Lawrence’s Women in Love?) meticulously brushes and dabs, scrapes and dissolves toward the vast and eccentric ecclesiastical scene with its “wintry” Christ who promises justice but not mercy, he slowly assimilates into this variegated northern community.  His principle ally is Moon, another veteran, who is pursuing archeological evidence (primarily a grave) to discover the fate of a long-dead gentleman.  The story is full of suspense, but conjured and resolved through the small gestures of village life (with a touch of Hardy).  The vicar and his wife, the Colonel, the inquisitive Kathy Ellerbeck, festivals, Wesleyans, a drafty manse and secrets – is this beginning to sound Agathan?  It isn’t.  What I’ve omitted is an element of sensual eeriness that – again, very whispery – resembles Fowles’s The Magus.

In the seventies, I was wild for Fowles, and even with all its meandering portentousness, The Magus was the book that most haunted me.  (The film, with Anthony Quinn and Michael Caine, ought to be delicious but isn’t.)  In A Month in the Country (film not bad — Firth, Branaugh, Richardson), the setting is far from the exotic island Phraxos, and the protagonist is no randy Nicholas Urfe, but everything that makes Fowles’ juggernaut flame makes Carr’s novella simmer.

Primarily, the two works present a young man seeking his identity after a trauma, and the war that provides the trauma for Birkin is one of the two great conflicts that permeate The Magus.  In an era of catastrophic shell shock (or PTSD, if you must), such common denominators can emerge as the most important aspects of the story.  In both works, parallel searches for the truth of the present take the principles on symbolic journeys in dreamlike isolation.

What Birkin discovers is not a clear path or a clear past, but perhaps a masterpiece whose fate is yet to be determined.  Just such a minor masterpiece is A Month in the Country, re-released as a New York Times Book Review Classic in 2000 and was a Booker finalist, perhaps for the rain-sodden and soporific charm that made me want to turn from the ending, with Birkin as he “closed the gate and set off across the meadow” but back to the first page with its rural train debarcation and torrential rain.

One more brief interlude, then back to Summer Reading.

CLYDE
A friend recently told me he’d heard a successful writer of short fiction proclaim that there is no such thing in literature as foreshadowing.  That someone believed this was not news to me; 25 years ago a colleague, also notorious for believing Beowulf had nothing to say to contemporary readers, told me the same thing, but I have never been able to see the notion as other than preposterous.

Set aside the famous case of “Chekhov’s Gun” (“no one should put a loaded gun on stage,” he said in a letter, “unless someone is thinking of firing it”).  After all, he wrote it in a letter and it’s in Russian, two conditions that may not argue for divine authority.

But here’s my half-informed perspective.  Can we assume, for practical reasons, sequence, at least in narrative.  The story unfolds word by word, seemingly linear (and vertical, in English).  Things don’t all happen at once in fiction.  Sydney Carton has to get to France before he can be guillotined.  Addie has to die before Anse can get those teeth.  And yes, this is conventional.  The Discovery Channel is staffed with people who’ll tell us that everything is happening right now.  Still, are we also perceiving it all simultaneously?  Too much work, so the fictioneer doles it out in portions, delivers according to this or that pace.  Action, information.  But also –  and here’s where the convention of foreshadowing comes in – we have insinuation.  Call it adumbration, if you like.  Or Gumby.  I call it seepage.  Readers are not getting the goods (the emotional or political or intellectual bullion) laid out on a table like a patient etherized on a table.  We have to observe and respond to connotative clusters and repeated morphemes and phonemes.  Sort, arrange, discard, reorder, recover, remember.  Little detective fanfare here, as the reader engages with the work and, quite curious to know what’s going to unfold, forms surmises, hypotheses, which evolve, some falling by the wayside, some gaining in persuasiveness.  Suspects are eliminated,  emotions rise or fall with the narrowing of options.  After all, fiction depends on suspense.  You don’t have to be James Lee Burke to understand that the reader has to be fed but denied, offered both momentum and resistance in a plan of not quite predictable reinforcement.  I call it seepage.

To be nearly literal for a moment, what are all those early water images doing in The Mill on the Floss?  Do they presage a flood, make the coming flood plausible, start the trickle?  Or is the novel just a meditation on fluid mechanics?  George knows what she’s doing, and she believes we dear readers know or suspect or hope, fear, expect that we’ve got an inkling, too.  I think it’s about the conversation between author and reader where those inklings are sown, apprehended, seized, then clung to and employed or abandoned as other seeds crowd them out.  The foreshadowings are the phrases sown (or bird-shat, those “wings”), cultivated and brought to flower in ways that matter to the characters and the reader.  Seepage.  And what’s all that water doing early on in The Virgin and the Gypsy?  And just how many dams break with a gushing overflow as the novella reaches crescendo?  Doesn’t matter what you call it.  Name it Clyde, if you like, but it’s about setting the stage, nocking the arrow, then providing motivation for the reader to hold that set, that shaft in mind until the lights come up and the string is allowed to twang.  Setting the stage credibly, mind you, in keeping with early premises and atmosphere, historical time, season, possibilities that bond to become probabilities.

Here’s an exercise: go through Joyce’s “The Dead” front to back, then back to front, and see if second time through  you don’t see hints, keys, tips, whispers, traces whose presence helped you shape your expectations and move you forward, even when you barely registered them.  Peripheral vision is important for a writer to stimulate and a reader to employ.  The mind will herd it toward the center.    Some whispers are crucial to the final discovery, imagery, snow on the river and the graves and all.  Others were just temporary guides, but no less useful.  They foreshadowed something intermediate rather than enterprises of great pith and moment.

And I don’t mean that foreshadowing is forecasting.  That there are witches at the beginning of the Scottish play is foreshadowing.  What they predict, even to concussed broadsword wielders, is forecasting, and when that happens in stories, it’s often misdirection.  William Stafford wrote of the kindred sounds in a poem linking together and setting up the final music. He called it “a little touch-by-touch trail through the mountains.” A little seepage music, please.

Perhaps the real most suitable arena for conducting this discussion is not literature (or music; now there’s a country of careful, ingenious seepage) but in practical human discourse.  Telling a story, making a rhetorically intricate argument delivering a sermon.  We repeat and vary our themes in those (going literary again) microcosmic ways that prepare the field for what’s to be harvested.

But to contradict myself, sort of, maybe all these tactics are part of the sublime lyrical simultaneity of every work of art, All the King’s Men happening or just shimmering between the covers whether anybody reads it or not, and what some call “foreshadowings” are just part of the loop stitch of the text, not to be viewed in linear fashion.  Let’s say I could go on like this, let’s even say I did, but I’ll spare us.

I’m not inclined to do much fencing over nomenclature, but I see a narrative tactic, feel certain it’s deployed consciously, even do it myself; I want a name, and Clyde will suffice.  There are great and momentous briefs to be filed and cases to be argued on both pro and con and every nuance in between, so let the games begin.  And perhaps I can be converted, convinced to swap sides and, as turncoats said they did during the Civil War, “swallowing the puppy,” but before that can transpire, somebody’s going to have to persuade me that, when Melville finished correcting his final proofs he didn’t grin (if grimly) a little about Ishmael “involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses” on page one and all that business about coffins and hearses in the last chapter, culminating in “the great shroud of the sea.”  Seepage, foreshadowing?  I think I’ll say “Clyde,” just to avoid ruffling feathers.  But as for those who would dismiss foreshadowing as a fraud, a ghost or a failure of the bicameral mind, Horace had a phrase: Tu parem castis inimica mittes lucis.  (In my ponied translation, “Send this enemy back to the woods with lightning speed.”)