Jean Wilson Murray

  • Home
  • Musings on Many Things
  • Finding Your Green
  • Books and The Writing Life
  • Contact

Why Reading Inspires Me as a Writer

by Jean Murray Leave a Comment

"Ray Bradbury (1975)" by photo by Alan Light. Licensed under CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons
“Ray Bradbury (1975)” by photo by Alan Light. Licensed under CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons

What inspires you to write, to write better, to write more? For me, it seems there are three reading experiences that inspire me: reading great writing, reading interesting stories, and reading writing how-to books.

In this post, I’m going to focus on the first: great writing.

Ray Bradbury says, rather emphatically:

“I absolutely demand of you and everyone I know that they be widely read in every damn field there is; in every religion and every art form and don’t tell me you haven’t got time! There’s plenty of time. You need all of these cross-references. You never know when your head is going to use this fuel, this food for its purposes.”

All the great writers say you must read, read, read. Some examples I’ve come across recently:

Reading Great Writing

A new novel by a previously unknown writer, Christopher Scotton, who was discovered by Hachette (see, there’s hope for all of us!). His novel is The Secret Wisdom of the Earth, a coming-of-age story that’s reminiscent of To Kill a Mockingbird, Stand by Me, and a little of Deliverance. What first caught my eye was the language. Some examples, gathered from random pages:

I was up Monday morning before Pops, just as the sky was beginning its run to purple and blue. I put on a full pot of coffee for him and sat at the kitchen table until he woke–coffeepot dripping and spitting as the first yellow light from the east fired tops of the Medgar mountains. Then stirrings from upstairs and the creaking of floorboards under weight.

(from the first page, but not the first paragraph):

June was midway to my fifteenth birthday and I remember the miles between Redhill, Indiana, and Medgar, Kentucky, rolling past the station wagon window on an interminable canvas of cornfields and cow pastures, petty towns and irrelevant truck stops. i remember watching my mother from the backseat as she stared at the telephone poles flishing past us, the reflection of the white highway line in the window strobing her haggard face.

(I’m not sure if “flishing” is a typo for “flashing” or an invention, but I’ll give him credit for a new word.)

We walked over to a corner [of the attic] piled with fishing rods, discarded creels, an old baseball bat, and various retired sporting equipment: Pops’ high school football helmet, an ancient leather fielder’s glove with none of the fingers linked. I tried to put it on, but the leather was unforgiving….I wandered over to a light-blue and yellow trunk with ARP written in gold lettering under the hasp. inside was my mother’s high school career. Her yearbook from senior year, a prom picture, sheaves of A-plus papers, class president certificate, first copy of the school newspaper she started, founding president of the Student Volunteers. All of her teenage accomplishments compiled before me like an old newsreel.

I also noticed in these cases how Scotton shows instead of telling. It’s one of the important things we ingest when we read great fiction.

Here’s another example, from The Gift of Rain by Tang Twan Eng, a lyrical, poetic novel. It begins:

I was born with the gift of rain, an ancient soothsayer in an even more ancient temple once told me.

This was back in a time when i did not believe in fortunetellers, when the world was not yet filled with wonder and mystery. I cannot recall her appearance now, the woman who read my face and touched the lines on my palms. She said what she was put into this world to say, to those for whom her prophesies were meant, and then, like every one of us, she left.

(skipping a paragraph)….The day I met Michiko Murakami, too, a tender rain had dampened the world. It had been falling for the past week and I knew more would come with the monsoon. Already the usual roads in Penang had begun to flood, the sea turning to a sullen gray.

Notice how Eng sets a mood immediately, how he establishes the place and the tone. And you know exactly what the book will be about – the author and this Murakami person. And, of course, rain. When I began reading, I settled back immediately with a sigh of contentment. And I wasn’t disappointed.

I also want to note how the author makes every single word count. Not one could be removed without altering and diminishing the power of the story. This is great writing.
Finally, and certainly not last, my favorite book of 2014, and one I have re-read and given to others to read: All the Light We Cannot See, by Anthony Doerr.

The story is about the experiences of two young people during World War II. One is a blind French girl; the other is a young German soldier. They meet in the town of Saint-Malo, as it is being bombed by the Americans.

From the prologue:

At dusk they pour from the sky. They blow across the ramparts, turn cartwheels over rooftops, flutter into the ravines between houses. Entire street swirl with them, flashing white against the cobbles. Urgent message to the inhabitants of this town, they say. Depart immediately to open country.

The tide climbs. The moon hangs small and yellow and gibbous. On the rooftops of beachfront hotels to the east, and in the gardens behind them, a half-dozen American artillery units drop incendiary rounds into the mouths of mortars.

What a great beginning! It really grabs you as a reader. Doerr took ten years to write this novel, and it’s just about perfectly written. In another place, chosen at random:

Werner walks home oblivious to the rain, trying to absorb the immensity of what has happened. Nine herons stand like flowers in the canal beside the coking plant. A barge sounds its outcast horn and coal cars trundle to and fro and the regular thudding of the hauling machine reverberates through the gloom.

See what I mean? “Nine herons” (sounds like haiku, doesn’t it?) and “the regular thudding of the hauling machine…” One more – you really need to read this book:

Marie-Laurie wakes and thinks she hears the shuffle of Papa’s shoes, the clink of his key ring. Fourth floor fifth floor sixth. His fingers brush the doorknob. his body radiates a faint but palpable heat in the chair beside  her. His little tools rasp across the wood. He smells of glue and sandpaper and Gauloises bleues.

Read excellent fiction. Don’t read junk; you won’t learn anything from reading junk, and you’ll absorb the junk and think it’s okay. It’s not; not all fiction is NOT created equal.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Filed Under: For Readers, The Writing Life Tagged With: All the Light We Cannot See, book review, fiction writing, novel writing, Ray Bradbury, writing advice, writing tips

Using the Iceberg Principle to Improve Your Fiction Writing

by Jean Murray Leave a Comment

I came across the Iceberg Principle a while back, and found many references to it in connection with Ernest Hemingway. But there isn’t much about how to specifically apply it to your writing. So here goes:

First: the Iceberg Principle, as explained by Hemingway

If you’re read Hemingway, you know he writes in a very concise, even terse, style. See this NYTimes article (or below in this article) for a sample, and note the dialogue – short, almost brusque sentences, and an occasional short paragraph of narrative, with very little description.

Old_Wikisource_logo_used_until_2006
Wikimedia commons: original image by Uwe Kils, Wiska Bodo-Losslessly

As I understand what Hemingway said about the Iceberg Principle, you have to know what you are writing about, but you don’t need to write every word of what you know. “If the writer does his job,” Hemingway says, “the reader almost innately gets a sense of the underlying story, even without all the details.”

Here’s a scene from The Sun Also Rises, from the NY Times article I mentioned above:

“It’s cold.”

“Want to walk back?”

“Through the park.”

We climbed down. It was clouding over again. In the park it was dark under the trees.

“Do you still love me, Jake?”

“Yes,” I said

“Because I’m a goner,” Brett said.

“How?”

“I’m a goner. I’m mad about the Romero boy. I’m in love with him, I think.”

“I wouldn’t be if I were you.”

“I can’t help it. I’m a goner. It’s tearing me all up inside.”

“Don’t do it.”

“I can’t help it. I’ve never been able to help anything.”

“You ought to stop it.”

“How can I stop it? I can’t stop things. Feel that?”

Her hand was trembling.

“I’m like that all through.”

“You oughtn’t to do it.”

“I can’t help it. I’m a goner now, anyway. Don’t you see the difference?”

“No.”

“I’ve got to do something. I’ve got to do something I really want to do. I’ve lost my self-respect.”

From this short scene, you can get a sense of:

  • the setting
  • how the characters feel about each other
  • their moods
  • the mood of the scene
  • the conflict between the two characters
  • a sense of foreboding
  • and an anticipation of what will happen next.

All in 156 words!

Hemingway had to know a lot about what was going on, he had to know the characters inside/out, and he had to have a strong sense of the setting and background. And, most important, he needed to know what was going to happen next in the story.

BUT, he didn’t need to tell you everything. He could show you in a subtle way, the tip of the fictional iceberg.

If you want another example of Hemingway’s style, to see the iceberg principle played out, read his short story Hills Like White Elephants.  

Then, the Iceberg Principle Applied

This principle works in all kinds of writing and business situations. For example, Chip Scanlon, writing for the Poynter Institute, discusses how reporters must interview many sources and do lots of research, before writing that article, which might contain only a small part of what the writer knows.

When I was writing business reports, I also gathered a great deal of information and had to distill it down to its essence, but I also had to be able to answer esoteric questions. Without a broad understanding of the issue, I wouldn’t have much credibility.

Finally, the Iceberg Principle Applied to Your Writing

How well you prepare to write your novel can make it sellable – or not. Using the Iceberg Principle when you are preparing to write and then writing, can make a difference. Some ways you can use the Iceberg Principle:

  • Build complex characters with lots of back story, not just the protagonist and antagonist.
  • Take time to create your setting completely, whether it’s a fictional world or a piece of the real world. Draw diagrams, maps, blueprints, whatever it takes to give you a sense of the setting. Write detailed descriptions of key places in the story.
  • If you want to create a fictional world, ask yourself all the questions that need to be answered about that world. The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers have an article with a detailed list of questions you can work through to build your world.
  • Writing historical fiction? Be sure you know the details about the world in which your characters lived. Yes, this takes lots of time, but it will pay huge dividends in improving your writing.
  • Think about what is happening in the outside world while your story is going on. What events – local to global – might affect the characters and the story?
  • Create a specific timeline for your story – what happens when and what events happen in what order?

Following the iceberg principle in your fiction writing helps enrich your writing. It makes you an “expert” in the story you are writing, and helps your readers feel more involved with your story.

While your readers may not acknowledge your efforts in spending the time to gather the whole iceberg, they will be able to more quickly become immersed in your story and your characters.

As Hemingway said,

If a writer of prose knows enough of what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an ice-berg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water.

 

 

 

 

 

Filed Under: Story and Storytelling, The Writing Life Tagged With: fiction writing, Hemingway, iceberg principle, novel writing, writing fiction, writing style, writing tips

How Much Daily Writing Time is Enough?

by Jean Murray Leave a Comment

How many hours a day should a writer work? What’s too much (or is there such a thing?) What’s too little?

On the one hand…Deep Work and Flow

I’m a big fan of the concept of Flow, a concept that features in the work of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (yes, I know that’s quite a name).  Flow is “optimal experience,” the time when you are most creative. It’s that time when you are so immersed in your work that time passes and you don’t realize it; it’s a time of deep involvement and enjoyment. For a quick overview of the concept of Flow, see the author’s TED talk.

A recent FastCompany article includes the concept of flow to show that an optimum number of hours of creative work should be about 5 hours a day. It’s about what Cal Newport calls deep work. Newport defines deep work as  “cognitively demanding activities that leverage our training to generate rare and valuable results, and that push our abilities to continually improve.”  Newport says we waste our creative time doing shallow work (like emails, blogging, etc.) when we should be doing deep work, to improve the value of our work, increase the volume, and create more satisfaction. He says skill trumps passion and the only way to get skilled is through deep work.

So, 5 hours a day?  Does that mean I’m not doing good work if I stop at 1000 words a day?

On the other hand…Write a Little a Day

Write a little every day, without hope, without despair.” (Karen Blixen/Isak Dinesen)

Stephen King (On Writing) tells fiction writers to aim for a target of 1,000 words a day, six days a week. Sounds good to me.

Leo Babauta at Zenhabits says that writing daily is life-changing. It clarifies your thinking, makes you a better writer, helps you break through writer’s block and come up with new ideas regularly.  encourages you to start small. Maybe that’s less than 1000 words. It doesn’t have to be 5 hours!

And Colin Nissan at McSweeney’s has an even better reason to write a little every day: It strengthens your writing muscles.

In conclusion – a balance

A little a day is what I can handle. 1000 words on one novel, some work on another. I have a life, even if I’m retired. But on some days, when I have time, I can set aside 5 hours or so and see what happens. Maybe a little a day PLUS some “deep work” days is the secret.

More on daily writing:  Daily Writing Tips

 

 

Filed Under: The Writing Life Tagged With: fiction writing, flow, Stephen King, Writing, writing advice, writing tips

How Poetry Adds to Fiction Writing

by Jean Murray Leave a Comment

Chillihead – Flickr Creative Commons

I love discovering new poets. The poetry I enjoy tends to be reflective, not love poems but about life and nature and the nature of life. I want poetry to (a) heighten my emotions, and (b) make me think. Sounds contradictory, doesn’t it?

Two simple ways poetry can help your fiction writing: (1) Use of poems or lines from poems in the introduction or chapter headings of your novels, and (2) Use of poems to find a title for your novels. Shakespeare’s poems – and plays are especially good for this, as is the Bible.

But the best way poetry helps fiction writers is in improving writing.

Even the simplest poems, like this one, can bring strong images to writing:

 In a Station of the Metro by Ezra Pound

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.

What a beautiful, haunting image this is.

I began looking at poetry as a way to write better when I realized I was writing fiction like non-fiction. For over 30 years, I’ve been writing manuals and how-to books to help people start and run small businesses.For example, from my current work-in-progress, The Thriving Writer:
Brand recognition is important and writers need that recognition as much as companies selling commercial products or services. James Patterson might be able to get away with not having a recognizable logo, but many writers have “branded” themselves in some way. As difficult as it is to come up with the perfect name, it’s even more difficult for many people to choose a logo that perfectly exemplifies their business.  I’ve seen business people muddle over pages of logos with subtle differences, attempting to find THE ONE.  Of course, like the name, the choice of a logo is one that stays with you for a very long time.  Many of the same considerations apply to logos as to business names.
Pretty dry stuff. So I started gathering up poetry books, discovering new poets, and learning how to write with more imagery and subtlety of language, to make my novels less like how-to manuals and more poetic.
Jolene Paternoster says, “Fiction writers can look to poetry for original and beautiful descriptions of everyday happenings and objects.” That’s true. That’s what I’m trying to do.
And Bob Stallworthy says, “Good fiction, just like good poetry, has a lot to do with using precisely the right word in the right place in the line. And, …when we get this right we get the image we want that makes the reader say, “Wow! I never thought of it like that before.” Isn’t that what we, as writers, want?
While I agree with Bob, I think what we fiction writers want is for the language to be unnoticed but effective, so it doesn’t overpower the story. Like a little hot sauce – but not too much – in a fantastic Ultimate Grilled Cheese sandwich.
An example of beautiful poetic fiction writing, in one of my all-time favorite books: The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, by David Wroblewski. The author started out in computer science (talk about dry!) and got an MFA and went on to write this extraordinary novel. (I gave this book 5 stars on Goodreads, something I almost never do.)

Here’s a sample:

This will be his earliest memory.
Red light, morning light. High ceiling canted overhead. Lazy click of toenails on wood. Between the honey-colored slats of the crib a whiskery muzzle slides forward until its cheeks pull back and a row of dainty front teeth bare themselves in a ridiculous grin.
The nose quivers. The velvet snout dimples.
All the house is quiet. Be still. Stay still.
A perfect example of “show, don’t tell” in lovely language.
So, I’m reading Seamus Heaney, Philip Larkin, Stanley Kunitz, Yeats, (notice the Irish poets, please), Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, and more, as I get the chance.
Some more recent additions to my list of favorite poets:
Robinson Jeffers. Example: The Place for No Story.
Loren Eisley. All the Night Wings (book)
Theodore Roethke Night Journey
Onward and upward.
Related: How to Enjoy Poetry
A recent article in the New York Times about “Poetry – Who Needs It?”

In a Station of the Metro

by Ezra Pound

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.

– See more at: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15421#sthash.q8yefZgi.dpuf

Filed Under: For Readers, The Writing Life Tagged With: fiction writing, Ireland, national poetry month, novel writing, poems, poety, writing tips

Two Ways to Jump-Start Your Novel – Or Procrastinate Creatively

by Jean Murray Leave a Comment

It depends on how you look at it. I’ve found two ways to get started writing again on my novel. Unfortunately, neither actually involves writing the novel. They both involve getting deeper into the novel and working out structure. Both have helped me work out issues and settle questions I had in my mind, and both have given me a mental boost to start writing again.

I finished my first – really awful – draft, went to a writer’s workshop, read some books on writing, and I’m now taking a course on storytelling. In the process, I have re-started my novel, working on a second draft. But some suggestions in the writing course and the workshop got me working on my novel again. Although they took some time – several days on each – I have been able to use them to begin working more confidently on my novel, knowing where the story is going and where it will end up.

I made up both of these, but they might be out there somewhere, in a similar form and I know other people have different ways of doing this (note cards, posters, etc.). There’s nothing new under the sun, after all.

1. The Story table. I created a simple table in Word. My purpose was to see things in parallel – the outer journey (plot) of the book and the inner journey of the main character. After I started, I added the inner journey of what was going on with the antagonist and the descriptions and events for the other main characters, including character arcs for some of them. Then I added sub-plots, and “breadcrumbs” (those hints that will be needed at the end).

The headings for the columns in the table are:

Structure: The basic story diagram (from The Writer’s Compass: From Story Map to Finished Draft in 7 Stages) of rising action, plot points, to climax and falling action.

* Storyline: Next to the structure, what’s happening when, by days and times. The plot points on the first column are next to the events at those points.

* Timeline/history. What’s happening in the outside world each day of the story. The timeline/history has been created (see below).

* Protagonist – internal – character arc. What’s happening with the protagonist; what she is feeling, thinking, how her character is developing.

* Sub-plots. What’s going on with other characters who are important to the story.

* Antagonist. What’s going on at each point with the antagonist, relative to each point in the story.

* Breadcrumbs. Points at which I need to insert specific facts which will be needed later.

2. History/timeline. This document was developed from a suggestion at the writing workshop that I needed to set up the “rules” for the world I was creating. I want to write historical fiction, so it made sense to do this. It would work well for all types of fiction, though, as the author is creating a world that may differ in small or large dimensions from the world we actually live in. To think of it another way, the world appears differently to each of us, so the author can create the world in his or her own image.

This document is a detailed description of the world of the story, before the story starts and during the timeline of the story. No individuals are mentioned, but events are described in detail, along with situations and facts about the various areas of the city. For each day, the weather and other natural phenomena (eclipses, for example) are described.

For example,

Timeline/History

 Falls River, Iowa ,is a small city of about 100,000 people, with a county of about 150,000 people. People outside of the town, in the county, live in various small communities. The smaller communities are largely farming – corn and soybeans and some cattle and pigs. The city is on the Dover River.

 Day 1: September 19, 2018.
     The day was clear and sunny, an early fall day. The temperature was about 64 at 10 a.m. The high for the day was 71, falling to 55 at 10 p.m.

The electro-magnetic pulse (EMP) was detonated at 10,000 feet in the atmosphere at 10:20 a.m. on Wednesday, September 19, 2018, over Kansas. The blast immediately wiped out all electronic devices and the electrical grid of most of the U.S. (except California, Oregon, Washington, Alaska, and Hawaii, and the western parts of Nevada.)  

No cars made after the 1970s were able to run because of their computer circuitry. Older cars would run, but it would be difficult to find gas for them because gas station pumps were not working and no gasoline trucks could deliver more gas.

Phones and cell phones, portable devices, tablets, and computers would not operate once they ran out of batteries. No satellite service was available and no Wi-Fi networks would work because routers running on electricity were inoperable…..

How my “writing tools” have helped me with my draft:

1. The story table helped me figure out where the plot points should occur, the character arcs of the protagonist and other major characters, how tension needs to build through the novel, how the sub-plots fit in, and how/when breadcrumbs might fit in. It sounds like a lot of work – and it was – but I’m moving ahead more confidently now, and having the outline in my head and on paper is immensely helpful in letting me be free to write instead of worrying about where I’m going.

2. The history/timeline made me spot inconsistencies in what was going on in the story and in the greater world. It also gave me some ways to bring in information to my characters, who were shut off from the world. It was fun to write the history, and I was finding some creative ways to add to the story. I might not use much of this, but it is important to know more than you put into a story.

With all this work, it’s taken me about a week, but I think it’s been helpful. Or have I just been procrastinating? What do you think?

Filed Under: The Writing Life Tagged With: character arc, historical fiction, novel writing, plot structure, writers outline, writing fiction, writing tips

  • 1
  • 2
  • Next Page »

© 2021 · Jean Wilson Murray ·