《WRITING FICTION》

《writing Fiction》a guide to narrative craft

By Janet Burroway

P11

Forget inspiration, habit is more dependable, Habit will sustain you whether you’re inspired or not. Habit will help you finish and polish your stories. Inspiration won’t. Habit is persisitence in practice.

 

P29

The past is beautiful because one never realizes an emotion at the time. It expands later, and thus we don’t have complete emotions about the present only about the past。。。。That is why we dwell on the past, I think

 

----Viginia Woolf

 

P119

What vital for the fiction writer to remember is that the wicked, the violent, and the stupid do also love, in their way. Just as humble and loving and thoughtful people also hate.　Hate humbly, hate lovingly, hate thoughtfully, and so on

 

--- Doug Bauer

 

P165

When I was writing searches and seizure, I was living in London, and I needed to describe a hotel room, I have been in lots of hotel rooms, of course, but I didn’t want to depend upon my memory. And so I went to the Royal Garden Hotel in Kensington and rented a room, simply to study the furniture there, to feel the glossy top of the wood that is almost not wood, to get the smell of the shower, the textures in the bath, to look at the rhetoric on the cards on top of the television set. This is stuff that I could not invent, and it was important to me to have it down very, very accurately. So I took notes, Somebody watching me would have thought I was a mad man.

 

P173

“swallows, flitting over the surface of the water, twittered gaily(欢快的）.”--eliminate such common places. You have to choose small details in describing nature,grouping them in such a way that if you close your eyes after reading it you can picture the whole thing. For example, you’ll get a picture of a moonlit night if you write that on the dam of the mill a piece of broken bottle flashed like a bright star and the black shadow of a dog or a wolf rolled by like a ball, etc

----ANTON CHEKHOV TO HIS BROHTER ALEXANDER

 

P216

Tear the story in half and begin in the middle, in fact, most stories begin as close to the end as possible. Nancy Huddleston says” the first line of a story should hook readers’ attention and pull them into the middle of the action. You want readers to feel like the train is leaving without them, so they’d better get on board and keep reading as fast as they can.”

 

John Gardner described a story as being a “vivid and continuous dream” that the writer creates in the mind of the reader. The first paragraph should be designed to help readers “sink into the dream of the story”, like the opening frame of a movie, the opening paragraph entices readers into the story-dream, economically setting the tone; establishing the world, level of reality, and concerns will be dealt with over the course of the story. Often the possible ground for some change or reversal is established in the opening as well.

 

P250

In each of these plots, there is both intense desire and great danger to the achievement of the desire;generally speaking, this shape holds good for all plots. It can be called 3-D: Drama equals desire plus danger. One common fault of talented young writer is to create a main character who is essentially passive (被动，消极）. This is an understandable fault; as a writer you are an observer of human nature and activity, and so you identify easily with a character’s passivity transmits itself to the page, and the story also becomes passive. Charles Baxter regrets that “In writing workshops, this kind of story is often the rule rather than the exception.” 

He calls it: In such fiction, people and events are often accused of turning the protagonist into the kind of person the protagonist (主角） is, usually an unhappy person. That’s the whole story, When balme has been assigned, the story is over.

 

主角不快乐，不作为，被动，无趣，缺乏变化。

 

Fiction is the art of from of human yearning, That is absolutely essential to any work of fictional narrative art--a character who yearns. And that is not the same as a character who simply has problems.....The yearning is also the thing that generates what we call plot, because the elements of the plot come from thwarted(阻隔，阻挠） or blocked or challenged attempts to fulfill that yearning（渴望，盼望）.

 

P253

Pattern of power

Novelist Michael Shaara described a story as a power struggle between equal forces. It is imperative， he argued, that each antagonist (对立角色） have sufficient power that the sufficient power that the reader is left in doubt about the outcome. We may be wholly in sympathy with one character and even reasonably confident that she or he will triumph. But the antagonist must represent a real and potent danger, and the pattern of the story’s complications will be achieved by shifting the power back and forth from one antagonist to the other. Finally，an action will occur that will shift the power irretrievably in one direction.

 

“Power” takes many forms--physical strength, charm, knowledge, moral power, wealth, ownership, rank, and so on. Most obvious is the power of brute force.

 

P265

A new writer struggling to craft the shape of conflict-crisis-resolution may wonder if a story’s lack of one of these elements means the work “must be a novel”. Tempting as this hope may be, it only sidesteps the inevitable challenge of plotting, for not only must a novel have a large-scale plot structure, but individual chapters or episodes frequently are shaped around a pattern of conflict-crisis-incremental change that propels the novel onward.

 

Further, while no literary form is superior to another, few novelists achieve publication without first having crafted nay number of short stories. The greater the limitation of space, the grater the necessity for pace, sharpness,and density. Short stories ask the writer to rise to the challenges of shaping, “showing,”and making significance again and again,experiences that later may save that writer countless hours and pages when the time to tackle a novel comes along.

 

The form of the novel is an expanded story form. It asks for a conflict, a crisis, and a resolution, and no technique described in this book is irrelevant to its effectiveness.

 

《Dialogue》

 

P6 “Dreams run like streams” Hoary proverbial wisdom, I know you well. And in reality most of what one dreams is not worth a second thought---loose fragments of experience, often the silliest and most indifferent fragments of those things consciousness has judged unworthy of preservation but which, even so, go on living a shadow life of their own in the attics and box-rooms of the mind. But there are other dreams. As a lad I remember sitting a whole afternoon pondering a geometrical problem, and in the end having to go to bed with it still unresolved: asleep, my brain went on working of its own accord and a dream gave me the solution. And it was correct. Dreams there are, too, like bubbles from the depths, And now I come to think of it more clearly---many a time has a dream taught me something about myself, often revealed to me wishes I did not wish to wish, desires of which I did not wish to take daylight cognizance. These wishes, these dreams, I’ve afterward weighed and tested in right sunlight. But rarely have they stood up to daylight, and more often than not I’ve flung them back into the foul depths where they belong. In the night they might assail me anew, but I recognized them and, even in dreams, laughed them to scorn, until they relinquished all claim to arise and live in reality and the light of day.

 

P22 The Three functions of dialogue

Exposition

Pacing and timing: Pacing means the rate or frequency with which exposition is spliced into the telling. Timing means choosing the precise scene and the exact line within that scene to reveal a specific fact.....Therefore, you must pace and time the placement of exposition with care and skill.

 

P24 Showing versus telling

Seek her unspoken thoughts and feelings....

Finally, showing speeds involvement and pace; telling discourages curiosity and halts pace. Showing treats readers and audiences like adults, inviting them into the story, encouraging them to open their emotions to the writer’s vision, to look into the heart of things and then forward to future events. Telling treats them like a child who a parent sits on a knee to explain the obvious.

 

P28 The reader/audience’s constant search for answers to questions aroused by revelations of exposition propels narrative drive.

 

The second technique for passing exposition unnoticed to the reader/audience relies on the story-goer’s emotional involvement. Empathy begins with this thought: The character is a human being like me.Therefore, I want that character to get whatever the character wants because if I were that character, I’d want the same thing for myself.

 

P29 Revelations

In almost every story told, comedy or drama, the most important expositional facts are secrest, dark truths that characters hide from the world, even from themselves.

And when do secrets come out in life? When a person faces a lesser-of-two evils dilemma: If I reveal my secret, I risk losing the respect of those love” versus “But if I do not reveal my secret, something even worse will happen.”

 

P37 The craft of rendering exposition invisible takes patience, talent, and technique.

 

Do exposition with the intellectual power and emotional impact of fully dramatized dialogue.

 

To make this point for yourself, do an exercise in exposition as ammunition. Rewrite the scene above so that the two characters use their expositional facts as weapons during a fight in which one character forces the other to do something that he or she dose not want to do.

Or put the same facts into a seduction scene。。。。

 

Characterization

Human nature can be usefully divided into two grand aspects: appearance (who person seems to be) versus reality (who the person actually is). Writers design characters around two corresponding parts known as true character and characterization.

 

Character’s true self can only be expressed through risk-filled choices of action in the pursuit of desire.

 

Characterization

1) to intrigue. Readers will wonder “that’s who she seems to be, but who is she really? Is she actually honest or a liar?Loving or cruel? Wise or foolish? Cool or rash? Strong or weak? Good or evil?What is the core identity behind her intriguing characterization? What is her true character?

2) To convince

Capacities (mental, physical) and behaviors (emotional, verbal)

3) To individual

A well-imagined, well-researched characterization creates a unique combination of biology, upbringing, physicality, mentality, emotionality, education, experience, attitudes, values, tastes, and every possible nuance of cultural influence that has given the character her individuality. Moving through her days, pursuing career, relationships, sexuality, health, happiness, and the like, she gathers behaviors into a one-of-a kind personality.

 

Through mental action and physical action

 

The said and unsaid, let the unsaid to be sensed by implication

The unsayable : the unsayable energies in the subconscious mind are real and demand expression.

 

Nothing is what it seems

What seems is the surface of life--what strikes the eye and ear, the things people say and do....outwardly, what is is the actual life of thought and feeling that flows inwardly beneath the things said and done.

 

P51 In story, subtextual levels enclose the hidden life of characters’ thoughts and feelings ,desires and action, both conscious and subconscious--the unsaid and unsayable.

Skillful dialogue creates a kind of transparency. The text of a character’s spoken words conceals her inner life from other characters, while at the same time allowing the reader to see through the surface of her behavior.

 

P57 To create a complex story, the writer must master the double dimension of dialogue--the outer aspect of what is said versus the inner truth of what is thought and felt.

 

One of the great pleasures of story is staring,self-absorbed, into the mirror of fiction. Dialogue shows us how we lie to others, how we lie to ourselves, how we love, how we beg, how we fight, how we see the world. Dialogue teaches us what could or should be said in life’s harshest or most rapturous moments.

 

P81 Line design

--The suspense sentence: Curiosity drives the thirst for knowledge--our intellectual need to solve puzzles and answer questions. Suspense, simply put, is curiosity charged with empathy.

 

--The cumulative sentence: puts its core word up front, then follows with subordinate phrases the develop or modify the point

 

--The balanced sentence: put its core words somewhere in the middle with subordinate phrases on either side.

 

P97 Credibility flaws

Incredibility :

empty talk

overly emotive talk

overly knowing talk

Overly perceptive talk

Excuses mistaken for motivation

 

Do the hard work, surround your character with all the knowledge and imagining you can. Test his traits against the people around him and, most importantly, yourself. Ask yourself : “If I were my character in this situation, what would I say?

 

P105 Language flaws

Cliches:To create fresh, original dialogue, set high standards and never settle for the obvious choice. Indeed, never settle for the first choice. Just write it down, then improvise, experiment, go a little crazy, pour out as many choices as your talent can create. By playing with every wild thing you can imagine, you might discover that one of your lunatic choices is crazy but brilliant.

 

P147 Creative writing calls on two sources of creativity:story talent and literary talent

 

P

 

You will write as only you would

 

P173 《Sideways》

-Why are you so obsessed with Pinot? That’s all you ever order.

--I don’t know, It’s a hard grape to grow. As you know. It’s thin-skinned, temperamental. It’s not a survivor like Cabernet that can grow and thrive anywhere....and withstand neglect. Pinot’s only happy in specific little corners of the world, and it needs a lot of doting. Only the patient and faithful and caring growers can do it, can access Pinot’s fragile, achingly beautiful qualities. It doesn’t come to you. You have to come to it, see?It takes the right combination of soil and sun....and love to coax it into its fullest expression. Then, and only then, its flavors are the most thrilling and brilliant and haunting on the planet.

 

I am a hard guy to get to know. I’m thin-skinned and temperamental. I am not tough, not a hard-hearted survivor, I need a cozy, safe little world and a woman who will dote on me. But if you are patient and faithful and caring, you will bring out my beautiful qualities. I cannot come to you. You must come to me. With the right kind of coaxing love I will turn into the most thrilling and brilliant man you could ever have the luck to know.

 

P255 Narcissists can call attention to themselves, never others. For Daisy(The Great Gatsby), it is critical that Gatsby seek her out. Gatsby must come to her. Fitzgerald uses those beats and many others elsewhere to express the dueling spines of action that drive The Great Gatsby: Gatsby’s obsession with Daisy and Daisy’s obsession with herself.

 

P264 《The museum of innocent》

Obsessive romantics devour the rites of romance: quiet walks in moonlight, tireless lovemaking, candlelit dinners, champagne, classical music, poetry, sunsets, and the like. But these enthralling rituals are pointless without an exquisite creature to share them, and so the man-in-love-with-romance tragedy begins when he falls for a woman becuase, and only because, she is gorgeous. Young kemal, in other words, suffered from the curse of beauty: the insatiable craving for the sublime that makes living a simple life unthinkable.

 

But, Docent Kemal portrays Romantic Kemal’s passion with a powerful and yet self-obsessed intensity. When Fusun doesn’t show up, he might have thought: “My God, did something happen to her? Is she hurt?” But he didn’t, Instead, he dissected his painful anticipation of pleasure to the microsecond. For the romantic, it is, as we say, always about him.

 

P289 Mastering the craft

Listen: to master the technique of saying little but expressing much, first train your eye to see into the depths of the unsaid the the unsayable inside the people around you, then train your ear to hear the said.