Category: Uncategorized

Posted in book reviews, Uncategorized

5 Things I Learned from “A Swim in a Pond in the Rain” by George Saunders

Posted on by Valerie Lute

In George Saunders’s latest book, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, we don’t see the zany satire he’s known for. Instead we see a different side of Saunders, his teacher side.

The book is based on a course he teaches at the University of Syracuse about the Russian short story. He explores seven stories by nineteenth-century masters and looks for lessons that these stories still have for writers today. Here are five that I found valuable:

1. Wow Your Reader Once Sentence at a Time

Bill Buford, a former fiction editor of the New Yorker, once said that what he liked about a story was “I read a line. And I like it…enough to read the next.”

What keeps a reader reading? Tender vulnerability, a surprising turn of phrase, a description that changes the way we view an ordinary object, a bit of dialogue that makes us feel tethered to the characters.

Here was a line that wowed me from the first story in the book, “In the Cart” by Anton Chekhov: “‘And you can’t understand,’ she thought, ‘why God gives good looks, friendliness, charming, melancholy eyes to weak, unhappy, useless people––why are they so attractive.'”

Even though all the words in the sentence are simple, it expresses something complex about this character’s inner life and the life of the character she’s thinking about.

2. A Story Can’t Stay Static

One of the fundamental laws of fiction is “always be escalating.”

Early in his writing career Saunders once got a rejection that read, “It’s fast and funny and wild…but we aren’t sure it’s a story.”

Writing a satisfying story is a balancing act. We writers must set the reader’s expectations and honor them, but do it in a way that’s surprising. An ending that seems to come out of nowhere might cause the reader to throw the book out of the nearest window, but nobody likes a predictable plot either.

One way that several of these Russian writers manage this balance is by employing patterns and variations.

Chekhov’s short story “The Darling” tells of a woman named Olenka and the four men she’s loved in her life. With each new love, she becomes totally consumed by the object of her love, taking his opinions and views as her own. But each time the pattern repeats, something about the situation has changed. Each man is different, and Olenka is aging herself. By the end of the story, we feel like we know her so well because we’ve seen how the same personality trait manifests in different circumstances.

3. Revising is Listening

I often have my students read Anne Lamott’s “Shitty First Drafts” in the first class of a term. It’s a great way to free students from the pressure they feel to write perfectly from the start.

George Saunders says that in his years as a writing teacher, only two things separate his students who go on to publish from those who don’t. The first is structure, which I talked about in the previous section. The other is a willingness to revise.

We read our work the same way a reader might, line by line. And with each line, we have to ask ourselves, is this line working as well as it should? What can we do to improve it?

It can be a slow process.

Robert Frost once came to a college to do a reading. At that reading, a student stood up to ask a complex technical question about the sonnet form. Frost responded: “Young man, don’t worry: WORK!”

A lot of aspiring writers believe that there is a secret they can unlock to make writing fast and easy. If you have the secret, please let me know! So far in my writing career, the only thing I’ve found that works is parking my butt in the chair and telling myself I have to work.

A story is a conversation between a writer and a reader. As we go through our sentences line by line, we find opportunities where we can communicate better. This might be by speaking more directly, honestly or vividly.

The Russian short stories in this book did not manifest themselves exactly as how they were published. The writers crafted these stories by looking at what was already working well and enhancing it.

One small detail that got my attention in the Tolstoy story “Master and Man” was a shirt drying on a line that the main characters pass several times as they get lost in a deadly snow storm. Each time the shirt is being affected differently by the raging wind, until at last it has blown away entirely. I doubt Tolstoy sat down to write “Master and Man” with this drying shirt in mind, but when he realized how effective this detail could be at foreshadowing, he ran with it.

4. The Door To the Truth Might Be Through Strangeness

This is my favorite chapter title in the book, and not just because I teach a class called Writing the Strange.

What we call “realism” in fiction isn’t all that real. Events are heightened and condensed. There is no randomness. Everything is ordered and is understandable, for the reader if not for the characters. But how often does real life feel ordered and understandable?

This is why strange stories like “The Nose” by Gogol can still capture something about what it means to be human. This story is about a proud Russian bureaucrat who discovers that his nose has escaped from his face and surpassed him by obtaining the rank of State Councillor. With such an absurd premise, the story is able to satirize social class in a unique way.

5. Good Stories Resist A Single Meaning

When I was younger, I wanted to save the world with my writing. I thought that I could use fiction to correct people’s wrong opinions about social issues.

But Chekhov once said, “Art doesn’t have to solve problems. It only has to formulate them correctly.”

In other words, to express a problem fully, with all its nuances, not denying a part of it because it is inconvenient or contradictory.

In the story “Alyosha the Pot,” Tolstoy intended the main character to embody radical Christian humility. The story is about a simple peasant named Alyosha, who goes to the city to become a servant for a harsh but wealthy family. When he falls in love with the cook of the household, he realizes for the first time that life might have other things to offer. But both the masters and his family disapprove of the match, and he cancels the engagement. As the story continues, the reader can’t help but question if Alyosha’s meekness is truly a virtue.

Even though Tolstoy had strong moral beliefs about Christian ethics, in his fiction, he left a lot up the reader to decide. The world and the general public’s ideas about right and wrong have changed a lot in the hundred years since the story was written. If this story were more pedantic, if it told us there was only one ethical way to life, it wouldn’t have stood the test of time.

Conclusion

Let me leave you with one final quote from George Saunders: [when reading a good story] “we begin living it; the words disappear and we find ourselves thinking not about word choice but about the decisions the characters are making and decisions we have made, or might have to make someday, in our actual lives. That’s the kind of story I want to write, the kind that stops being writing and starts being life.”

I think that is what every writer is striving for. If, like me, you are struggling to figure it out, follow this blog on Facebook or Twitter for more posts like this where we learn something together.

Posted in Uncategorized, writing habits, writing prompts

4 Ways To Find Story Ideas

Posted on by Valerie Lute

How do we get story ideas? We all want an idea so great that we can’t put down the pen. But all writers sometimes feel like the muse has left them. If you’re like a lot of my fiction students, you might love words and language and get pleasure from putting together sentences, but struggle to find a story to structure your writing. Sometimes you might feel like you have to wait around for the angel of inspiration to bless you, but it turns out, generating new story ideas is a skill like any other. It can be honed and practiced.

This blog post is not going to be a list of prompts. There are endless web pages containing lists of prompts. These don’t always solve the problem of inspiration. It’s not uncommon to get a prompt, and still have no idea what to do with it.

Instead, I’m going to be talking about ways you can mine your own experiences and interest for story ideas. Unlike prompts, which might feel random or unrelated to you, these methods will generate story ideas for you that are already connected to powerful memories and the things you feel most passionate about.

Have A Writing Practice

I’ve talked a lot about the importance of having a writing practice. However, I don’t think everybody has to write every day. We all have different lives and schedules and what’s important is finding something that works for you.

The reason why this helps generate story ideas is the practice of writing will change how you see the world. When I was a teenager, I used to write poetry, and because I was in the habit of writing poetry, I would see things that would give me ideas for poems. I don’t write poems anymore, and I never get ideas for poems.

If you don’t know what to write about, you can start keeping a regular journal. This could be your day-to-day activities, your observations or your dreams. Eventually, you’ll start to notice what you like to write about, what’s interesting, and what could be expanded.

Write One True Sentence

This is how Ernest Hemingway always broke his writer’s block. For him, “one true sentence” is a simple declarative sentence, not something overly flowery or philosophical. His first lines usually have concrete physical details and introduce both a setting and a character. Here are some examples:

  • It was late and everyone had left the café except an old man who sat in the shadow the leaves of the tree made against the electric light. — “A Clean, Well-lighted Place”
  • It was now lunch time and they were all sitting under the double green fly of the dining tent pretending that nothing had happened. — “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber”
  • He came into the room to shut the windows while we were still in bed and I saw he looked ill. — “A Day’s Wait”

What “true” sentences can you think of? You might want to imagine a person who caught your eyes somewhere, or an event from your real life. You can still feel free to use this as a jumping off point if you write fiction.

Listen to Music

Appreciating another form of art can help us reach creative breakthroughs. I often use paintings, photographs and music during writing exercises in my classes. Of course, you can get inspiration from dance, sculpture, film or any work of art that you’re passionate about.

When I use music prompts in class, or to inspire my own writing, I tend to favor songs that have cryptic lyrics. Some examples that I’ve used are “Birthday” by the Sugarcubes, “O Children” by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds and “Desolation Row” by Bob Dylan. I feel like this inspires nonlinear thinking as it is easy to free-associate from the images without pinning you to a single narrative. Or you could ignore the lyrics altogether and focus on the emotions that the music produces for you.

Of course, if you have a favorite narrative song, you can also try to expand the story. Maybe there is a minor character in the song that you’ve always wondered about, or you expect the lovers in the song are bound to break up.

Take Inspiration from Books

Part of being a writer is being part of the literary tradition. Writers have been taking inspiration from their fellow writers for thousands of years. Even Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet was based on an Italian poem, which in turn was inspired by the Roman writer Ovid’s book Metamorphoses.

One exercise that I like to do with my students is to use opening lines from famous novels to begin our own stories. A good opening sentence can evoke endless possibilities. This works best if you use a sentence that’s unfamiliar to you, which is why I didn’t provide the titles which might introduce bias. Here is the list I use in class:

  • “All children, except one, grow up.”
  • “It was a pleasure to burn.”
  • “The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.”
  • “We went to the moon to have fun, but the moon turned out to completely suck.”
  • “Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting.”
  • “It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.”
  • “A screaming comes across the sky.”
  • “The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.”
  • “In the town, there were two mutes and they were always together.”
  • “I write this sitting in the kitchen sink.”

There are many other ways to find inspiration from your favorite books and stories. There are published novels about the Pride and Prejudice characters fighting zombies and Sherlock Holmes during World War II. Being inspired by your favorite books isn’t just for online fan fiction, though you’re basing something directly on an existing work, make sure it’s in the public domain.

So you might want to give it a try. What happens when you put your favorite characters into a new situation or exotic setting? What would Romeo and Juliet’s marriage have been like if they didn’t die? What if Odysseus was an Iraq War veteran? All great books from the past can be updated a multitude of ways.

Are you looking for more writing inspiration? Follow this blog on Facebook or Twitter! I look forward to writing with you again.

Posted in setting, the novel, Uncategorized, writing prompts

How to Write A Setting With Personality

Posted on by Valerie Lute

“The setting was like another character.” Have you ever heard someone describe a story this way? What is it that makes some settings feel alive, as if they were a person and not just a landscape? It takes more than just writing vivid description. Today, I’m sharing three ways to give your settings personality.

Setting is Responsive

My favorite instruction on writing setting comes from The Writer’s Notebook: Craft Essays from Tin House. In her essay, “Place” Dorothy Allison, author of Bastard Out of Caroline, shares what makes setting come alive for her.

I cannot abide a story told to me by a numb, empty voice that never responds to anything that’s happening, that doesn’t express some feeling in response to what it sees. Place is not just what your feet are crossing to get to somewhere. Place is feeling, and feeling is something a character expresses. More, it is something the writer puts on the page–articulates with deliberate purpose. If you keep giving me these eyes that note all the details–if you keep telling me the lawn is manicured but you don’t tell me that it makes your character both deeply happy and slightly anxious–then I’m a bit frustrated with you. I want a story that’ll pull me in. I want a story that makes me drunk. I want a story that feeds me glory. And most of all, I want a story that I can trust. I want a story that is happening in a real place, which means a place that has meaning and that evokes emotions in the person who’s telling me the story. Place is emotion.

Dorothy Allison, “Place”

In other words, in order for a place to feel like a character, the other characters should display an interactive relationship with it.

Allison goes on to say, “Place is where the ‘I’ goes. Place is what that ‘I’ looks at, what it doesn’t look at. Is it happy? Is it sad? Is it afraid? Is it curious?”

You have to know your main character’s personality well. This is especially important if you have a first-person narrator, since everything is being filtered through that character’s opinions.

Writing Prompt

In Allison’s essay, she makes a list of single lines of description that summarize her feelings toward various cities she’s visited. They are as follows:

  • Central Florida is despair.
  • New York City is sex.
  • California is smug.
  • Boston has never gotten over Henry James.
  • Seattle and Portland lie about their weather.
  • Iowa City is one hotel room and a chlorine stink away from the suburbs of hell.

Using Dorothy Allison’s sentences as a model, write single sentence descriptions that sum up the feelings you have about each of the cities and neighborhood where you have lived.

These lines make great opening sentences for stories or essays. Vladimir Nabokov began one of his short stories, “Spring in Fialta is cloudy and dull.”

Setting is Personified

So far we’ve talked about how characters react to settings, but sometimes settings have an agency of their own. In the following passage, Jeanette Winterson introduces the setting in the first chapter of her novel The Daylight Gate.

The Forest of Pendle used to be a hunting ground, but some say that the hill is the hunter—alive in its black-and-green coat cropped like an animal pelt. […]

There is still a tradition, or a superstition, that a girl-child born in Pendle Forest should be twice baptized; once in church and once in a black pool at the foot of the hill. The hill will know her then. She will be its trophy and its sacrifice. She must make her peace with her birthright, whatever that means.

Jeanette Winterson, The Daylight Gate

Notice how she describes the hill like a creature, wearing a coat cropped like an animal pelt. Then as we go on, the hill begins to act, not just look, like a living creature. It knows the girl, as much as she knows it.

When nonliving things are described as if they had the qualities of something alive, this is called personification.

In this particular novel, we might suspect that there is something supernatural or uncanny about this setting that is giving it its agency. But even if your setting’s personification is a mere metaphor, it can still be effective in making it more evocative to the reader.

Writing Prompt

Your setting is alive. Write a scene where the setting has a message that it wants to communicate to a human character. How does it get its message across? Also think about your human character’s emotional response to the situation.

Setting is Defamiliarized

There’s an old saying that it’s the job of a writer to make the ordinary feel strange and new. This is called defamiliarization. The passage below describes a place that many of you should be familiar with, but does it feel comfortable and ordinary?

If there is a river within a thousand miles of Riverside Drive, I saw no signs of it. It’s like every place else out there: endless scorched boulevards lined with one-story stores, shops, bowling alleys, skating rinks, taco drive-ins, all of them shaped not like rectangles but like trapezoids, from the way the roofs slant up from the back and the plateglass fronts slant out as if they’re going to pitch forwards on the sidewalk and throw up.

Tom Wolfe, The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby

Here we have the suburban sprawl typical of southern California, but the description makes it feel anything but typical. Everything is slanted and irregularly shaped. The buildings are ready to vomit.

It is described in a way that makes the readers feel like they’re dizzy themselves. This isn’t just because of the word choice; the long run-on sentence is used intentionally to make the reader feel overwhelmed.

Whether or not the reader feels comfortable with your setting has nothing to with whether they know the place in real life. It’s all up to your words and sentence structure.

Writing Prompt

Write a scene where an alien visits a setting that is familiar to people living in the West in the 21st Century. It might be a supermarket, a highway, or a school. How does this setting feel outlandish, strange or unfamiliar to your character? What words and sentence structures capture this feeling?

The character doesn’t literally have to be a space alien. They could be an escaped circus animal, time traveler or anyone else you can imagine.

Wrapping Up

Now that we’ve learned about ways to give our setting personality, it’s time to think about how you might want to apply this information to your work in progress. You might want to double-check descriptions you’ve already written in your novel or memoir. Is it doing at least one of the following?

  • Showing something about your main character’s personality and how they relate to the world around them.
  • Creating a sense that the landscape is alive through its interactions with the human characters.
  • Disorienting readers with surprising word choices and sentence structures, giving them a sense of newness.

If it’s a “no” to all of the above, it may be that your setting is, pardon the pun, fading into the background. Revising with what you know now will make your setting an active character in its own right.

Need more advice on making your writing come alive? Follow this blog on Facebook or Twitter! I look forward to writing with you again.

Posted in the novel, Uncategorized

How to Write A Gripping Opening Line

Posted on by Valerie Lute

First impressions are everything. If you don’t hook your readers from the start, they might turn on Netflix or start doom-scrolling on Facebook. There are plenty of other things for people to do besides read your novel.

But don’t worry! Today we’ll learn how to find a hook for your novel so your readers won’t be able to put it down.

Examining Opening Lines

Let’s look at some opening sentences and see how they are working. I selected these by pulling famous novels off my husband’s bookshelf. In other words, I could have picked any number of well-regarded books and found opening lines that work similar ways.

Catch-22

It was love at first sight. The first time Yossarian saw the chaplain, he fell madly in love with him.

Catch-22 by Joseph Heller

The hook: This line begs the question: Why did Yossarian fall in love with the priest? Making the reader ask a question is always a good strategy for an opening line. It hooks the reader and makes them want to keep reading to see if they get an answer.

The tone: In addition, the idea of a man falling in love with a priest at first sight is humorous. This sets the silly tone of the rest of the novel. It is important that your opening line help establish the reader’s expectations about what kind of book they have chosen to read, even if the book later subverts some of the reader’s expectations, which Catch-22 certainly does.

The character: We are also being introduced to the character of Yossarian here. Generally the first person you see in a novel will be the main character. That may sound basic, but it’s important. There are exceptions to this, of course, but if you chose to begin with someone other than the main character, you need to write carefully so the reader can follow the transition.

The Golden Compass

Lyra and her daemon moved through the darkening halls, taking care to keep to one side, out of sight of the kitchen.

The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman

The hook: Here we see the main character sneaking through the hallway. This begs the question: why does she need to sneak? Right away we sense that there is a mystery afoot. The story begins in medias res, or in the middle of things. This means there is no exposition or introduction at the beginning of the story: we are thrown into the action right away.

The world: The fourth word in this sentence is “daemon.” This tells us right away that we are in a fantasy novel and sets the readers expectations accordingly.

The movement: It is significant that Lyra is not in a static position. She’s moving through the hallway. This movement makes the reader feel like they are getting pulled into the story. If Philip Pullman had started the novel a little later, we would see Lyra hiding and overhearing a conversation she’s not supposed to hear. Even though this would technically still be in medias res, it’s less gripping than seeing her in motion.

Gravity’s Rainbow

A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now.

Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon

The hook: There’s a big mystery here. What is this thing in the sky and why is it screaming? Why did it happen before and why is it happening now? Having this much mystery up front can be risky because it may alienate some readers. Make sure you introduce a character quickly to help ground them.

The movement: Once again we begin a story with movement, but this time it is the movement of an object across the entire skyline, rather than the movement of a single character that we saw earlier. This alone says a lot about the novel: it’s a big book about big ideas and takes a broad view of history. The movement of the large object across the large space is mimicking this.

The Devil Wears Prada

The light hadn’t even officially turned green at the intersection of 17th and Broadway before an army of yellow cabs roared past the tiny death trap I was attempting to navigate around the city streets. Clutch, gas, shift (neutral to first? or second?) release, clutch, I repeated over and over in my head…

The Devil Wears Prada by Lauren Weisberger

The Character: We learn a lot about the main character from these opening sentences. We learn she’s a frantic, anxiety-prone loser. Her struggle against traffic immediately establishes her as an underdog. Readers tend to love underdogs and want to root for them, especially if they find her anxieties and problems relatable.

The Movement: Once again, we are in motion. This time, we’re careening through the chaotic streets of New York City. We know this even though the city isn’t named because of the concrete pieces of description: the familiar street names combined with the yellow cabs and traffic. But importantly, this setting is done inside the act of driving. This allows the reader to feel like they are driving through New York City with the character.

Pumping Up Your Novel’s Opening Line

Now let’s apply what we’ve learned to our own opening lines. The following are general principles you can apply to begin your novel with a bang.

Add Movement

As we saw in our examples, keeping the readers in motion will draw them into the story. This is a great way for the writer to prove that they created a dynamic world, assuring the reader that the characters will experience change by the end of the story.

Act First, Explain Later

Don’t bog down the beginning with paragraphs of backstory. Begin with an intriguing scene and incorporate the necessary background in small doses throughout the first chapter.

Build an Iceberg

Remember Hemingway’s iceberg? A good writer doesn’t need to spell everything out for the readers. Instead, they give just enough information for the readers to use their own imagination. This is especially true in opening sentences, where some mystery or ambiguity can hook the reader.

Establish the Voice

The reader should get a hint at the general tone of the novel from the very beginning. Will it be a tender love story or a side-splitting satire? If you have a first-person narrator, you also have to give a hint at the character’s personality. Are they a hapless schmuck, like the narrator of The Devil Wears Prada, or are they are sardonic and bitter, like Holden Caulfield in Catcher in the Rye? In a first-person novel, the reader’s interest is often dependent on the strength of the narrator’s personality.

Wrapping Up

I suggest you take some of your favorite books off the shelves and examine their opening sentences. How many of them follow these rules? How many break them? Do you notice a difference between classic and contemporary novels?

If you’d like more advice on improving your novel, follow this blog on Facebook or Twitter! I look forward to writing with you again.

Posted in Uncategorized, writing prompts

3 Writing Prompts Inspired by Hemingway

Posted on by Valerie Lute

We learn by doing, not from just hearing advice. Ernest Hemingway, that heavyweight of American literature, would agree with that more than anyone. Blog posts detailing writing tips from Ernest Hemingway are practically their own gene at this point. And they are so popular for a reason: Hemingway was full of writing tips that benefit beginner writers and established novelists alike.

But advice without practice will only get you so far. Today I’m sharing three Hemingway-inspired prompts that I often use with my students. Let’s start putting ideas into action!

One True Sentence

Sometimes when I was starting a new story and I could not get it going, I would sit in front of the fire and squeeze the peel of the little oranges into the edge of the flame and watch the sputter of blue that they made. I would stand and look out over the roofs of Paris and think, “Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.” So finally I would write one true sentence, and then go on from there. It was easy then because there was always one true sentence that I knew or had seen or had heard someone say. If I started to write elaborately, or like someone introducing or presenting something, I found that I could cut that scrollwork or ornament out and throw it away and start with the first true simple declarative sentence I had written.

― Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast

It’s certainly comforting to know that even Nobel Prize-winning writers like Ernest Hemingway experienced writer’s block and insecurity during their careers. And here he’s giving us his trick for getting the pen flowing again: writing just one true sentence. But what does he mean by “one true sentence?”

Let’s look at the first lines from some of his stories and see what similarities we can see in them.

  • It was late and everyone had left the café except an old man who sat in the shadow the leaves of the tree made against the electric light. — “A Clean, Well-lighted Place”
  • It was now lunch time and they were all sitting under the double green fly of the dining tent pretending that nothing had happened. — “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber”
  • He came into the room to shut the windows while we were still in bed and I saw he looked ill. — “A Day’s Wait”

What commonalities did you notice in these sentences? They all introduce both the setting and the character. The sentences are all simply written, but also full of concrete details that you can see: the shadow of a tree, the green fly of the dining tent, the open windows.

We also get a picture of where the character or characters are in this space and what they are doing, even if we don’t learn anything else about them yet. This makes the reader feel like they are entering a scene that is already in progress. As Hemingway said, he never started a story as if he was presenting or introducing something. He threw the reader right into the action.

Writing Prompt

Spend a few minutes coming up with your own “true sentences.” Remember that each should have a character and a setting. Try to include one concrete visual detail in each sentence.

Write How You Really Feel

I was trying to write then and I found the greatest difficulty, aside from knowing truly what you really felt, rather than what you were supposed to feel, and had been taught to feel, was to put down what really happened in action; what the actual things were which produced the emotion that you experienced. In writing for a newspaper you told what happened and, with one trick and another, you communicated the emotion aided by the element of timeliness which gives a certain emotion to any account of something that has happened on that day; but the real thing, the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion and which would be as valid in a year or in ten years or, with luck and if you stated it purely enough, always, was beyond me and I was working very hard to get it.

― Ernest Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon

Here Hemingway makes a distinction between what you feel and what society expects you to feel. We’ve all experienced this at some point or another. Maybe you got your dream job, but instead of feeling happy you felt sad because it meant moving across the country away from friends and family. Or a loved one died after a long illness and rather than feeling sad, you felt relieved that they were finally out of pain.

Complicated emotions make good fiction. And Hemingway advises that we don’t simplify our emotions just because it makes the story easier to write.

He also discusses how writers make readers experience emotions. He says that we do that by following the sequence of actions that led to the emotion as closely as possible.

Let’s look at an example:

“As I ate the oysters with their strong taste of the sea and their faint metallic taste that the cold white wine washed away, leaving only the sea taste and the succulent texture, and as I drank their cold liquid from each shell and washed it down with the crisp taste of the wine, I lost the empty feeling and began to be happy and to make plans.”― A Moveable Feast

In this passage from Hemingway’s memoir, he describes the vivid, sensual tastes of oysters and wine. Hemingway was feeling depressed and empty earlier in the chapter, but because the reader followed him through this experience, we can understand the change in his mood.

Writing Prompt

Write about a time in your life when your emotions felt different from what you were “supposed” to feel. Follow the sequence of actions that led up to that feeling so that the reader experiences the emotion with you.

Be Brief

“If a writer of prose knows enough about 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 iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water.”

― Ernest Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon

Hemingway is famous for his strong but simple prose. Let’s look at another example:

“She was crying. I comforted her and she stopped crying. But outside it kept on raining.”― A Farewell to Arms

We know, without Hemingway telling us directly, that the woman is still sad, even though she stopped crying. This is what he means when he refers to the iceberg. Give the reader enough information that they can imagine the rest.

A poorly written setting can feel like a New Yorker cartoon. It’s a simple line drawing outlining a room, but it’s not a real place. It’s a caricature.

When you write a scene, you should know every detail. If your scene is in a restaurant kitchen, you should know what kind of food they serve, whether they are at peak hours or between meals, what languages the staff uses to speak to each other, how many cooks are old veterans and how many are students trying to make it through college. How many flies are buzzing around the garbage? What brand of rat poison is under the sink?

Inevitably, not all these details will fit into your scene. But if you provide just enough details, the reader will feel like this scene takes place in a real kitchen, not a caricature.

The same is true for your characters. You should know every detail about their lives, but most of it won’t end up in the final draft. Let’s see one final example:

“Going to another country doesn’t make any difference. I’ve tried all that. You can’t get away from yourself by moving from one place to another. There’s nothing to that.”― The Sun Also Rises

In this tidbit of dialogue from Jake Barnes, the narrator of The Sun Also Rises, we learn a lot about his personality and his attitude toward life. We can envision a lot about his past from this brief passage, and there’s a hint of tragedy that made him this way.

Writing Prompt

Choose your favorite “true sentence” that you wrote in the first exercise. Write the story that follows. Follow Hemingway’s advice about brevity and follow the sequence of actions that produce powerful emotions.

Wrapping Up

The only kind of writing is rewriting.

― Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast

One last piece of advice: your first draft is just one step. No matter how “truly” you write (to paraphrase Hemingway), you still have to revise your work. If you want more writing advice, follow this blog on Facebook or Twitter! I look forward to writing with you again.