My thanks to Fee, for his good natured comment on a recent Hemingway post (see comment, left). Like many British readers, he feels Hemingway is over-rated by Americans, and pleads cultural differences. Specifically, Hemingway’s trademark style, the “relatively unvarying, staccato rhythm,” feela like somone is driving nails into his head. That’s serious. “I know you’re a Hemingway nut, but a lot of British readers and writers don’t really understand the .”

First, to set the record straight, I’m not a Hemingway nut. It was his life, as story material, that initially brought me to him. Along the way I came to respect and admire some of his fiction–mostly the early short stories. I like only one of his novels, “A Farewell to Arms,” and mostly, truth be known, I’d rather be reading other writers. Even British writers! For example, I’d rather settle down with Thackeray, Martin Amis, Hardy, Muriel Spark, even the Mitfords (I once actually met Jessica). Then why do I bring up Hemingway so much? Because, as Fee observes, he offers so many clear, “teachable” examples of the right way to approach doing fiction–examples that, I believe, are not bound by culture.

But culture is a legitimate issue here. Hemingway was certainly American to his marrow–worse, an American abroad whose interest in the natives rarely extended beyond that of an adventure tourist. He lived in Paris but had no interest in the French. He was downright hostile toward the English. Of course, that shouldn’t necessarily stop you. I love reading Evelyn Waugh, even though he was famously unlikeable and hated Americans.

No writer can please everyone. But it’s helpful to place EH in context. He came at the end of a long-simmering American reaction against the worst excesses of stuffy 19th Century Victorian fiction, English and American. The great Victorians–Hardy, Henry James–rose above the excesses of the era. But mediocre Victorian fiction, on both sides of the Atlantic, was probably the most horrendous mediocre fiction ever to exist on any planet. You’ve never heard of any of these authors because they rightly vanished into the sinkhole of literary history. Their writing was clotted with meaningless bromides, silly social mannerisms, predictable plots, cardboard characters, and melodramatic emotions.

This was the voice of fiction in the pre-WWI world Hemingway grew up in. He himself had started off writing juvenalia in that highly mannered, clicheed style. But the the unadorned style demanded by newspapers, the influence of Sherwood Anderson (in Chicago), and later the tutelage of Gertrude Stein (in Paris), caused him to seek the simplest possible way to write fiction, based on pure observation of the telling detail.

It’s impossible to overemphasize the powerful catalyzing effect Stein had on him. Everyone knows about her, but few read her today. (The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas barely counts: she wrote it intentionally for a commercial market.) But read only a few pages of The Making of Americans, or 3 Lives and you’ll hear the echoes of the voice Hemingway appropriated and made his iconic own: the simple, almost primitive phrasing, the strategic repetitions, etc. It’s all there in her supremely confident, if enigmatic, voice (although in a much less disciplined form than Hemingway employed): “Anna managed the whole little house for Miss Mathilda. It was a funny little house, one of a whole row of all the same kind that made a close pile like a row of dominoes that a child knocks over, for they were built along a street which at this point came down a steep hill. They were funny little houses, two stories high, with red brick fronts and long white steps…” [3 Lives, opening page].

Over the years, a lot of bad Hemingway has been written (a lot of it by Hemingway himself, unfortunately), and inspired the merciless parodies that have confused the style issue for many Hemingway readers. Whether you’re British or American, I think it would be hard to read, say, “A Change of Season” without being genuinely moved by it. At its best, Hemingway’s insistence on simple clarity and primacy of the image defined the future of literary fiction writing, at least for Americans, for several generations–just as Poe’s innovative “single effect” theory had done for the emerging short story form, a century earlier.

One more thing: Virginia Woolf expressed a simple thought in one of the Common Readers. (If someone can chase down the quote for me, I’d be grateful.) I don’t have the wording, but her gist was that a sentence is an image of a thought. Hemingway chose to write from the point-of-view that’s usually called “limited omniscience,” although I prefer to call it “character narration.” It’s 3rd person, and as such, objective, but it also represents a particular character’s psyche, voice, mentality, and (yes) underlying culture. In this kind of fiction, style IS (or should be) the image of that character’s way of thinking. For Hemingway, that character was always a young American male, sometimes traumatized by war, always trying shut out the forbidden areas of his own psyche. A kindred style was employed by Camus in l’Etranger, to render the narrative of Meursault. So whatever you might say about the Hemingway style–at least in his earliest, best work–it wasn’t an affection: it was a true linguistic image of a character’s stark, affectless psychic landscape.

When Ernest Hemingway was a young reporter, he filed stories from Europe for the Toronto Star. Many of them chronicled the struggles of various European countries to recover their stability following the catastrophe of WWI. Here, he observes the movement of refugees from X to X. Later he turned it into fiction.

Take a look at the two versions:

Hemingway - 2 Versions

In the Star dispatches, the purely informational terms and phrases are there because he was writing journalism; his primary responsibility was to convey objective information clearly and directly. And though his reporting had an aesthetic edge to it, to create emotion was not his job.

By contrast, look what happened when he “repurposed” the passage in his first volume of fiction, In Our Time. What differences to you see? Which version do you find more moving? More purely informative?

If you are a fiction writer, seeing these passages displayed side by side should confirm what you’ve learned and are still learning: fiction is about feeling, sensation, and meaning, as well as finding ways to “inform” readers emotionally, through subtext, nuance, indirection, misdirection, and all the other “secrets” of the trade.

The dual display should also contain a powerful message for experienced nonfiction writers hoping to cross over into fiction. To you folks––reporters, academics, columnists––who are already confident, experienced writers, I can only say: don’t let your experience work against you. Fiction is truly another country. Take some time and care to learn its ways.

Want some more?

Here’s an interesting example of what Hemingway did with some news reports not his own. Oronte, blogging on Inside Higher Ed, zeros in on the reporting behind one of the most startling passages Hemingway wrote for in our time, the execution of the Greek ministers.

Michael Reynolds (the greatest of the Hemingway biographers), who was an intrepid researcher, produced two news reports of the event. The first is quaint, almost silly in its determination to flaunt the ministers’ elegant bravado in the face of death. Hemingway was an experienced enough war correspondent by then to know it could not happen that way. He fixed on the second report (from the New York Times), which is pretty grim reading.

I won’t put them side by side, but you can check it out by going here, where Oronte, the blogger, quotes liberally from all sources. He also quotes the finished Hemingway passage in its entirety, and I’ll include that here (it’s short). Notice how it wouldn’t work as journalism: there’s hardly any factual information, names, times, places, etc. The story seems to be all about sensations, obsessed with puddles of water, the rain, the shutters. This is not reporting. What it is is great fiction writing:

They shot the six cabinet ministers at half-past six in the morning against the wall of a hospital. There were pools of water in the courtyard. There were wet dead leaves on the paving of the courtyard. It rained hard. All the shutters of the hospital were nailed shut. One of the ministers was sick with typhoid. Two soldiers carried him downstairs and out into the rain. They tried to hold him up against the wall but he sat down in a puddle of water. The other five stood very quietly against the wall. Finally the officer told the soldiers it was no good trying to make him stand up. When they fired the first volley he was sitting down in the water with his head on his knees.

Character name and gender can easily be overlooked when you’re launching a novel or story. But reader attention is too fragile to risk even the slightest distraction, so take care of the little things. Like this…

www.youtube.com/watch?v=aUxQecxw29M

I screened Clint Eastwood’s Grand Torino the other day, and though I enjoyed it, I had to cringe when I heard a certain dialogue exchange between Walt (Eastwood), a Korean War Vet, and his young Vietnamese neighbor, Thao.

Thao: “How many?”
Walt: “How many what?”
Thao: “How many men did you kill?”

This could be perfectly decent dialogue if the line preceding “how many” were in need of quantifying, as in, “I killed a lot of men in the war.” (“How many?”) But there’s no such motivator. Thus “how many” is not an honest conversational response; rather, it’s an artificial dialogue extender. It’s a device, pure and simple, and a bad one.

Imagine saying to someone, without specific prompting, “when?”

In real life, there wouldn’t be a clue to what you were talking about, and you’d look pretty silly. My wife would probably fire back, “Is this some kind of joke?”

What’s even worse is how often this lame dialogue trick is trotted out––and by professionals. Whenever I run across it, a giant banner unfurls in my mind, shouting, “PAY NO ATTENTION TO THAT AUTHOR BEHIND THE CURTAIN,” because for the moment (and here’s what’s critical) the spell of the fiction is broken.

A few more slips of the the curtain like that and you’ve lost your reader.

Fiction writers often do too much. In most cases, if you showed it…
it’s done. Resist the temptation to “explain the punchline” with a needless “village explainer” summary of what the reader just saw.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=dOnQbE4DmEI

Some time ago, I asked the question, How do you create your characters? I’m really happy about the way the results stacked up. What the numbers tell me is, readers of my blog have their heads screwed on right. The final tally is just about exactly what I hoped it would be. Behold:

• I free write until I understand them 45.8%
• I base them on people I know 30.6%
• I “cast” them with actors I like 5.6%
• I take them from history or the news 2.8%

By the way, I might have “closed” this poll once before, but this time it’s really, really gone. Another one will take it’s place as soon as I come up with a good polling topic. Any suggestions?

It was a hit last fall, so we’re doing it again. The Powerful Narrative is returning to beautiful Wildacres Retreat Center in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina, October 4-8, 2010.

The Powerful Narrative is is a workshop my wife Carol––a nonfiction writer and coach––and I developed focusing on the role of that powerful engine and how it runs both fiction and nonfiction.

We’ll look at how story elements shape and power both fiction and creative nonfiction. We’ll examine story structures and methods of narrative storytelling. Narrative is the driving wheel of both, so we’ll zero in on how it works in each––emphasizing similarities and differences.

It’s a hands-on workshop, meaning you’ll do lots of of writing, and leave with a notebook full of fresh ideas–for both your current projects and the new ones you’ll discover in our intensive, deep-diving workshop freewrites.

Trust me, the food’s great –– and of course, you can’t do any better than Wildacres in October for combining creative work with simple pleasure. Take a look:

Both Carol and I will be available for private conferences. There will be special afternoon events and readings in the evening–by you. We’ll also spend a little time on the practical side of today’s writing life: your “platform” as a writer, and how to use low-cost or free web tools to build it.

Registration is open, but spaces are limited, so sign up soon. Carol has more information on her site, Writer, Teacher, Coach. To register now, click here.

I am a desperado. I go to war every day. Self-motivation is my battleground, and many days I limp off it, bloody and ready to die.

Oh, I have my excuses: start with personal management skills so bizarre they could probably not be charted. Hands down, I am the world’s worst boss–of myself or or anybody else–and certainly worse than any I have ever worked for (with a couple of exceptions). Then there’s attention deficit disorder and migraines and some other neurological oddities and on and on. But ultimately, who cares about the excuses? If you are serious about writing fiction, especially long fiction, it’s all about getting to the table. That’s Job #1 for a novelist. In the end nothing else matters.

For most of us, at best, self-motivation is hit-or-miss. Mine is split so many ways that the total result spans a scale from intense to “disaster,” so I need help. That’s why I’ve always been big on self-motivation methods.

One of my favorites is something I call “Desperado Self-Motivation.” I first tried it years ago, when I decided for the nth time to stop smoking. From the start, it didn’t look promising–as a musician, I was working in the worst possible types of environments––clubs, frat houses, and concert venues so smoke-filled that the whole enterprise seemed dead on arrival. But here’s where the Desperado machinery kicked in.

The bass player in the band I worked with also wanted to quit, so we made an agreement: the first to smoke would pay the other $50. The penalty would double in the second month, double again in the third, and so on, exponentially. At the end of six months, the penalty would have ballooned to $1,600, an unimaginable sum for me in those days.

A key supportive factor was that, since the band worked steadily, we would be able to monitor each other. This removed cheating as a factor, and––cut to the chase––it worked.

What made it work? In the crunch it was money, and it’s conceivable that money could be used in a like manner to goose your writing production–imagine a kind of NaNoWriMo with a financial gun to your head. But I’ve never come up with motivational factor that rivals the fear of losing cash.

The closest I’ve come is shame. The fear of failing PUBLICALLY. This is the basis of one NaNoWriMo Tip I posted last year: schedule a “Victory Party,” and send out the invitations.

Now, Michael Todd Cohen, a client of mine, has taken that idea to the absolute max. Not only has he planned a party plus reading, he’s started a blog and a Facebook page to promo it. On top of that, he’s rented a New York theater for the event, and reserved a nightclub for the party.

Michael’s goal? To produce a new draft of a novel I had critiqued for him, revising it drastically at a pace of 1,000 pages a day. When I last checked in with him, he was close to on schedule––and definitely ready to party––this Monday, July 19.

Not everyone can marshal Michael’s resources (he’s a TV producer) but with a little honest self-reflection, anyone can locate their own equivalent–the emotional pressure point that makes them squirm–and figure out their own ways to turn it toward positive action. How about you? Do you have a favorite self-motivational system? If so, please share.

Writing those big dramatic moments is perhaps the greatest challenge any fiction writer will face. Example:

A man returns home after work to discover his house ringed by police and fire vehicles, and a crowd of onlookers.

He tries to break through the police line but is stopped. He struggles desperately, then stops cold at the sight of two stretchers, rolled out of the house, bearing two covered bodies. Behind him, he hears a hushed voice: “The wife and kid. Both dead.”

A terrible moment. How would you write it?

Here’s one way:

“No. No…couldn’t be. The wife and kid? HIS wife and kid. Dave’s mind reeled at the thought. Disbelief flooded him like poisoned sap. He struggled to regain his composure, but denial gave way to desperation, then hysteria, causing him to renew his struggle to break through. “Yeah, it’s both of em,” said a voice behind him. “Poor guy.”

What do you think? Did that attempt render the horror vividly enough? Well, I don’t know about you, but it certainly wouldn’t do it for me. Why not?

Notice the kind of terms the action is described with:

His mind reeled. A cliche. What specific mental or emotional experience does this convey you? None. It conveys a type of experience that applies to anyone in a state of profound disorientation.

Disbelief flooded his mind. “Disbelief” is a category word, and “flooded his mind” is another cliche. Together they are an informational, but say nothing about this particular man’s mental experience in this particular moment. Nor do they convey a sense of how it feels to be going through it all.

“Desperation…hysteria.” Generic words. Again, they tell me what general type of experience he’s going through, but fail to address his specific experience, the thoughts and feelings particular this this man in this moment.

Struggles… Another generic word, another general class of action, but it doesn’t convey an image. Yes, he struggles, but does that mean he claws at the officers? Do his arms push and shove to rip his way through? Who knows? Generic words don’t deliver particularities because, they’re designed to be broadly informational,. it’s not their job. [Yes, I'm aware I used it myself in the set-up, but my job there is to quickly inform you. I'm not writing fiction.]

Renewed his struggle… Does that describe an action? Would you say, “Look at that man renewing his struggle.” Not likely, and it’s because those words are normally intended only to inform a reader that certain thing is happening, but not what that certain thing is, looks like, feels like, and means.

So let’s do it again, this time right. But how? Here are a couple of helpful principles that, if you can hang onto them as you write a moment like this, will transform the result:

• Simpler is better. The more you reach for a suite of modifying words and phrases to encompass the experience, the less impact you’re likely to have. Why is this? Because more words mean more linguistic mediation, more refinement. When the experience is one like this–the most devastating emotional punch this man will ever receive–the refined and complex takes a back seat to the blunt and bone simple.

• Explanation pales before the power of the raw image. I can explain what Dave is going through until I’m blue in the face, and you’ll understand it, but you won’t feel it. Have you ever watched a TV news report in which suddenly there are 30 seconds of gut wrenching visuals? What was the announcer saying while you watched, transfixed? You can’t remember, can you? That’s because the power of that visual dwarfed the expository drone of the announcer’s voice, blanked it out.

So then, let’s visualize: what does Dave do, physically, when he sees the bodies rolled out and hears, “the wife and kid. Both dead.” What do we see him do?

First, look to the most obviously expressive part of his anatomy–his face. How would you objectively describe the facial changes of a man in sudden and intense shock?

Then don’t forget his body–does it contort, slump, go into spasm, go rigid? The unusual postures people assume at moments like this are richly expressive.

Screenwriters face the challenge of the visual all the time, because every piece of narrative they write must be a potential screen image. What would you write, for example, if the director said, “I don’t want any dialogue for this moment. Do it all visually.”

So let’s try: “Dave’s mouth fell half open. No. No…couldn’t be. His eyes drifted, then snapped back into focus at the sound of the stretchers rumbling by. The wife and kid? HIS wife and kid? He couldn’t believe what he was seeing. He clawed at his lips with both hands, then with a wail, propelled himself forward into the restraining arms of the cops. ‘Yeah, it’s both of ‘em,’ said a voice behind him. ‘Poor guy.’”

Not too awful––except that after some powerful visuals comes the purely explanatory phrase, “he couldn’t believe what he was hearing,” an informational buzz killer. What do do? This one’s easy: get rid of it. Drop it out, and you then have the full power of Dave’s desperation in a single mini-sequence of images, and there’s no narrative interpretation to get in the way.

“Dave’s mouth fell half open. No. No…couldn’t be. His eyes drifted, then snapped back into focus at the sound of the stretchers rumbling by. The wife and kid? HIS wife and kid? He clawed at his lips, then with a wail, propelled himself forward into the restraining arms of the cops. ‘Yeah, it’s both of ‘em,’ said a voice behind him. ‘Poor guy.’”

You don’t need more–raw images will do all the explaining by engaging the immediate emotional comprehension of the reader. When that happens you’ve got involvement, and in fiction writing, that’s gold.

Fiction writers often take forever to write and revise a scene. Weeks, months, years later, they can still rewrite. Improvisors, by contrast, must build a scene instantly, by interacting in real time with other players. When it’s over it’s over. There’s no rewrite.

Could there possibly be two such different ways of reaching similar ends?

In a sense, no. The fiction writer’s particular skill is to merge inspiration with slow, steady synthesis––building toward completion of a narrative that purposefully drills deeper and deeper into the dark core of character and conflict. The skill of the improvisor is to find “the game of the scene”–that is, commit quickly to a character, define a situation and a relationship with your scene partner, and–always in the moment–to build an audience-pleasing dramatic unit.

I can report from experience that not only do the skills of the writer NOT help much in building an improv scene–they can even get in the way. In my case, a characteristic irony (which serves me well in fiction) caused me to make poor choices. I would turn a promising moment on its head by tossing out a skeptical aside totally uncharacteristic of the character I had chosen to be, or inappropriate to the moment. I had changed the game. Other players had to make instant adjustments to this new version of my character, and more often than not, the scene took a dive and never recovered.

One of my teachers made it his mission to cure this. “STOP!” he would shout from the darkness of the house. “You were a fireman trying to save a baby. Now you’re fretting over forgetting the lox for the bagels. Do you realize you just let all the air out of the scene?” Game over.

Here’s what I took away:

A novelist has plenty of time to develop a character, complete with needs and desires, as well as secrets, foibles, neuroses, etc. An improvisor doesn’t have the luxury. You must build a character lightning-quick, from one or two pertinent traits. You commit to that character and GO. You can’t hesitate, waver, or play metafictional games. As my teacher put it, “hang onto your sh_t!”–and play out the game of the scene with ferocious dedication.

It was a powerful lesson to learn. New awareness seeped into my writing and reading. My instinct for the right action at the right moment sharpened up, as well as my nose for the marginal choice–the inappropriate character move that could undercut the power of the scene. “No, this man would not turn on the TV at this point in this scene. Think. Remember who he is. Remember what’s of vital concern right now.”

Remember the game of the scene. Play by its rules and play to win.