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On Writing |
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Mentoring
Without Meeting One of the most profitable techniques I have used for improving my writing is the acquiring of a mentor I have never met. Though I did pass him in the hall at a convention once, I don’t think that constitutes “meeting,” and certainly he has no idea he has served me in this capacity. Yet I have learned much from him just by studying his work. And by studying, I don’t mean reading one of his novels twice. I didn't deliberately set out looking for a mentor — certainly not one in absentia. I just found a writer whose novels I loved and who also happened to have written a book on writing fiction. I read both. One of the novels I liked so much, I read it twice, ostensibly to “study” it, though I ended up so engrossed in the plot again, not much studying occurred. Exasperated with myself, I decided to type out the entire chapter. For the first few pages I attempted to categorize each sentence as description, exposition, dialogue or action. Yes, typing it out sounds tedious, but it forces you to go over the words more slowly and thus focuses your attention on them in a way it isn't otherwise. (Even better is to copy a page or two out long hand — that really slows you down.) It was not easy because some of the sentences did double duty, but it taught me a lot. You see things you don’t see just reading — how fiction is structured on a sentence by sentence basis, how dialogue can provide description and advance the plot, how exposition can be salted in instead of dumped on as a smothering pile. How to create and build tension . . . Finally I began to get some inkling of how it was all put together.
Still, I didn’t really get down to business until I received a critique on my own first chapter which was deemed "slow to start," "confusing as to the pressures and conflicts bearing upon the protagonist," and "lacking in tension," among other things. I didn’t understand why the critiquer had reached these conclusions, so I decided to compare my chapter to the first chapters of a couple of my mentor's novels.
I went through the first paragraph of each of my samples sentence by sentence and lined up my observations in a table for comparison:
Which story would you rather keep reading? Following this, I went through my first chapter with markers, highlighting the various elements: pink for description, orange for subjects and verbs that described physical action, blue for exposition. After four pages I saw that all that had happened was that the barge on which my protagonist is standing has docked at the wharf.
Well, physical action isn’t everything, I told myself. So I went through it again, sentence by sentence with a special eye to elements that advanced the plot or main conflict. In paragraph two, the barge sways, and continues to approach the dock. In paragraph three I discuss my hero's background — he has defied family tradition to enter religious orders and been disowned for it. Conflict flickers briefly, only to expire under the onslaught of five sentences of description. By the fifteenth paragraph, now on page 4, there still isn’t any plot. Worse, I began to see why some readers felt my “hero” was wimpy and uninteresting. He was. I knew who he was and what he was to become, but a reader would have only the things I had given them in those fifteen paragraphs. And what I'd given was not flattering, endearing nor even particularly interesting. But it took this careful, almost clinical analysis for me to see that . To reinforce the lesson, I listed all the things I revealed about my hero in the first nineteen pages – things like he “did well” in his novitiate, he’s wearing a linen shift, he has long blond hair, he doesn’t want to be a prince, he's nervous, he doesn’t like the limelight. In nineteen pages I came up with nineteen vague, mundane and largely wimpy qualities. I returned to my mentor’s novel and listed the qualities he revealed about his protagonist. I reached nineteen items by page six. Things like he’s wearing boots, jeans and a blue plaid shirt, that during the two and half hour drive he does not sing or hum or listen to the radio, that he is lean, sinewy, with deepset brown eyes, brown hair and narrow patrician nose, that he hasn’t smiled in a long time. Again, the difference was considerable. But only in thinking about his work in this way could I see my own in a new light. Another flaw the critiquer noted in my chapter was the failure of my “narrative hook” to be compelling. Narrative hooks was a subject my mentor discussed at some length in his book on writing, but it wasn’t until I analyzed some actual hooks that I began to understand better how they worked. For this exercise, I collected a number of openings from my mentor’s novels, then categorized them as to type. Thus, the two I analyzed earlier (see table) fit into the category of the puzzling hook – why is this guy hiking alone on his birthday with Kool Aid, Oreos and a gun? What is he gonna do with that gun? And why is the other guy waking up in the closet? As for mine – well, it falls into the category of the non-hook. Why should anyone care that the guy is standing on a barge? In another hook, the viewpoint character is realizing his death is imminent. This is a "startling" type of hook. So is, "Tuesday was a fine California day full of sunshine and promise until Harry Lyon had to shoot someone at lunch." Then there are the hooks that grab you by being eerie – “The night was becalmed and curiously silent, as if the alley were an abandoned and windless beach in the eye of a hurricane . . ..” A great image, and it automatically builds tension. Or how about, “An entire world hummed and bustled beyond the dark ramparts of the mountains, yet to L. H. the night seemed empty, as hollow as the vacant chambers of a cold, dead heart”? Subtle hooks can appeal to your curiosity, making you want to know why the author has begun with the statement he has. For example, “That was the year they murdered our president.” There’s just something about that that makes you want to read on. I won’t say I’ve mastered the art of the narrative hook, or the techniques of maintaining reader interest afterward, but I think I’m getting closer, and I know these methods of close and objective analysis have helped a lot. No, this method won’t appeal to a lot of people, and maybe won’t even help them. Some don’t need it, for they have a different way of learning. But for me, it’s been a great way to get a hands on experience in the absence of a regular, flesh-and-blood mentor or critique group. Copyright 2002
Karen Hancock __________ Illustrative material used from the following novels by Dean Koontz: Watchers Strangers Dragon Tears The Bad Place Hideaway Twilight Eyes |
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