Creativity and Constraint

Who likes rules? Who wants to be curtailed by limits? Or constraints. Most of us began rebelling against such things at about twenty-four months. And writers have spent years encountering commandments on everything from how often you “should” write to how often you “should” use a hook.

The smartest writers among us realize that there’s an exception to every rule. Because there definitely is. In certain instances, you absolutely need to “tell.”  Sometimes more detail is better, sometimes not. Reader expectations about point of view have changed radically and dramatically—even from what seemed acceptable a few decades back. Lots of exceptions.

Still, if you’d like to be an original and “good” writer, as opposed to being someone who writes, consider who benefits when you rebel. Yes, sometimes those exceptions are exactly what’s needed. More often, though, enormous opportunity lurks in addressing issues rather than disregarding them. When writers ignore this source of serendipity, readers pay.

Tip: The best brainstorming you’ll ever do comes from solving an apparently insoluble problem.

Consider this example.

Louella imagined popping the necklace that wasn’t pop-it beads while shrieking, “Don’t you dare comment on me or my kids ever again.”

“Easy there, girlfriend,” Hortense advised, as if reading Louella’s mind.

Is there a constraint here? You bet. The quotation marks in what Louella thinks precede identical quotation marks in what Hortense says aloud. Particularly back to back, two uses of one kind of punctuation are at best distracting, at worst, confusing.

A writer faced with this issue can choose from several options.

1. Assume that most readers will get it, even if it stops them just for a minute.
2. Cut the two sentences and make the point some other way.
3. Decide that the creative response is addressing the issue rather than ignoring or deleting it.

Want to choose # 3? Here’s one alternative: 

Louella wanted to shriek, “Don’t you dare comment on me or my kids ever again.” She wanted to pop the necklace that wasn’t pop-it beads. She wanted to wreck Hortense’s sleek hairdo. She wanted to…

As if reading Louella’s mind, Hortense advised, “Easy there, girlfriend.”

More often than not, there’s an innovative way to follow the rules. So. Why not limit any rationalizing to what your characters say or think. Because the best writers follow very few rules all the time. Those same writers follow all reasonable rules a lot of time. And every writer needs to know those rules—and be able to justify precisely when and why it’s okay to break them. 

After all, as Anne Enright observes with painful candor: “Only bad writers think that their work is really good.”

Respect for constraints is among the best ways to make any writing better.

**** Laurel's new book, Beyond the First Draft, is now available from Amazon or Wyatt-MacKenzie Publishing. ****

Reading the Rocks

Whether polishing novels or agates, what we call “art” reveals what’s deep inside, awaiting someone to make it visible. As Michelangelo put it, “I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.” In this way, rocks and stories share something in common.

Like lapidary, novel writing involves carving and polishing in order to reveal. The initial premise resembles a geode, like the ones in the picture below.

Not much to appreciate there, not until you expose the contents of its heart. To do that, you need to imagine the secret shapes, lines, and textures you want to bring to the surface.

I was lucky enough to discuss the art of polishing with the patient—and exceedingly talented—lapidarist Alan Vonderohe. A lot of that conversation applies equally well to novelists.

~ Choose raw material with potential.

Not every geode or scenario is worth the effort. Why invest time and energy in something dull or commonplace? But don’t dismiss before you’ve considered the possibilities, either.

~ Study your options.

Vonderohe may spend a few days examining a rock to discern its secrets. The truth is that, with stones and scenarios, once you discover the right approach, it’s difficult to imagine another alternative. In fiction, we call that causality. Outlining helps you bring the best to the surface, the way handling a rock opens you to its potential before you start to polish. Ultimately, thinking before cutting or composing saves time and energy; it’s a shortcut to emphasizing what matters.

~ Nourish flexibility.

A good lapidarist keeps changing the view to disclose the best angle, perhaps an almost invisible vein of blue. Why view your novel from only one direction, missing all those possibilities that never crossed your mind? The rut is the artist’s enemy.

~ Uncover the heart.

Lapidary begins with taking away, while writing fiction begins with building up. In the end, though, every art involves polishing. How else will it seem finished?

~ Respect nature.

At mineral and gem shows you’ll find rocks dyed garish colors or carved into triangles, skulls, hearts, and butterflies. Yet doesn’t art originate in the tension between naked raw material—whether anecdote or uncut stone—and the artist’s interpretation of that? A story or stone can become so contrived that its integrity disappears. If it no longer seems true, if interpretation descends into commercialization, is that still art?

Tip: Polishing lets others see what one imagination detected hidden beneath the surface.

The Princess inside the Dragon???

Rainer Maria Rilke had this to say about expectations, judgments, and truths:

Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us, is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.

Maybe you find this concept troubling even outside fiction writing, not to mention within it. But don’t visualize Walt Disnified princesses and dragons. These are metaphors, symbols to tweak however you wish. Often, though, metaphors are the best way to express the unsayable.

So which ideas does this metaphor suggest?

~ Identify the dragons in the lives of your characters.

What if the sources of terror and repugnance craved love instead of blood?  How many of those only reside within? What new insights might this generate?

~ Look beneath the surface.

Though dragon imagery shifts from culture to culture, the basic idea’s always the same. Or is it? Perhaps humans and dragons share traits in common. Why do dragons represent so many things? What does it really mean to be a dragon? A princess?

~ Refurbish.

We associate dragons not with beauty, vulnerability or tenderness, but such hideous violence that slaying one makes you a hero. When we change both image and message, readers experience both original and new versions.  How efficient is that?

~ Reveal similarities, whether in heart or history, in drama or dream.

How does the antagonist resemble the protagonist? How do both antagonist and protagonist manifest the strengths and weaknesses everyone shares?

~ Play God.

The role of Supreme Being capable of infinite wisdom and understanding suits fiction writers well. We write fiction, of course, from yearning to expose what we consider evil and good. But that yearning must remain so secret that every dragon harbors a bit of princess. Wouldn’t your readers appreciate that kind of wisdom and understanding ?  

~ Astonish.

Great plots reveal the possibility of the improbable, the morality that becomes possible because the hero makes it so. You won’t need a single dragon or princess. Just larger-than-life characters and a causal plot.

Tip: Use the metaphorical dragons and princesses surrounding us to gentle your novel’s dragons and

        fortify its princesses. 

Do It with a Prop

This is a true story, and a prop started it all:

A Canadian couple who’ve been living together for several years decides to vacation in Venice. On the iconic Rialto Bridge, they pause before a jewelry shop. Its gold pieces tempt them inside. One of them admires a beautifully crafted plain gold band. She wants it. He agrees that it’s gorgeous and, what-the-heck—buys the other for himself.

Outside, with the gondoliers crooning corny songs as the red-velvet-lined gondolas sway on the mint-green waves, he turns to her. “So I guess this means we’re getting married?”

She nods. “Yes.”

They’re still married, and—I got to see their rings when this drama professor explained how he urges his students to use props. “What better way to both motivate and make motivation concrete?” Yes, indeed.

Tip: Props drive characters, promote causality, and transform abstract into concrete.

What makes props work?

~ Clarity.

Have to explain the prop? You haven’t found the right one yet.

~ Originality.

Instead of giving a gardener a trowel or a plumber a snake, choose something credible but unpredictable. Does the gardener make pottery for all those plants? Does the plumber play second base or collect old jazz albums?

~ Characterization.

Random props seem—random! For example, whether a guy wears his wedding band says something about him, just as what kind of engagement ring she likes says something about her. When props reveal and deepen character, you accomplish two things with one detail. Exquisite efficiency.

~ Symbolism.

The wedding ring works because it unexpectedly happened in a foreign country, albeit an exceedingly romantic one.  If Lucy spies a ring in Modern Bride and invites Herman to admire it, the effect is clichéd, heavy-handed, and not in the least romantic. Surprise us.

~ Causality.

According to the Canadian couple, without that window, they might never have married at all, and certainly not right then. The storefront caused action—the kind that drives fiction because one event (stopping before the window) causes the next (wedding bells). Serving coffee won’t necessarily enhance a scene. But staining the white carpet that he never wanted her to buy? That’s something else entirely.

Prop it up.

Post-Holiday Gifts for Readers and Writers

No wrapping required, and most novel readers or writers want these goodies:

For the reader who wants to have everything:

Give readers tension and momentum.

Page-turners are fun. No matter how elevated the subject, readers read novels for fun. Slogging through backstory, wordiness, or redundant scenes better summarized rarely produces much fun.

Give readers originality.

Stock characters, situations, language, or outcome can, but shouldn’t be, comical.

Give readers a full-blown escape from reality.

Most of us read novels to avoid paying bills, sorting the laundry, or turning out the light and wondering if sleep will come easily tonight. Protect your readers from their own reality, which intrudes with even a second of implausibility, familiarity, boredom, silliness, grossness. Instead? Supply what readers came for: a trip into a world you created just for them.

For the writer who has everything:

Which writer is this? Every novelist I know wants to be better at handling plot or metaphors, suffers from blockage or excess, and frets over adoring or loathing revision. The one thing writers agree on is never having enough time.

Give yourself time.

That doesn’t mean texting, gaming, or alphabetizing cd’s to avoid starting the next chapter. Nor does it mean interminably rewriting the opening chapters to avoid what’s next. But agonizing about time drains energy, stifles soul, and—wastes time.

Give yourself honesty.

Why completely depend on your writing partner or critique group to point out what isn’t working? You won’t always know; that’s what critique is for. But often you do know. When you do? Listen. Put your energy into revising--not rationalizing.

Give yourself stimulation.

Daydream. Relish sensory experiences. Plunge into the world of your fiction, even if that means researching, watching related movies, exploring dead ends.

Give yourself tenderness.

As Robert Browning put it, high standards help us reach for heaven. But do your standards set you up for failure? Discipline is great, but unrealistic goals demolish creativity. If writing just makes you unhappy, why bother?

Tip: Be good to your readers. Be good to yourself.

Only a Click Away

Tip: The better you see, then the better your readers will.

Sit in a public place and observe the people with their phones. Don’t whip out your own and start photographing or texting. Don’t call or email anyone about what you see. Resist that temptation. Obsession, maybe? Just watch. Remember that?

A smart phone lets you see with a camera instead of only with your eyes. The views differ radically. Once you frame the world to fit a rectangle or panorama, you’ve changed it, however slightly.  And that affects your readers more than slightly.

Good novels create a reality that’s sharper, acuter, and more “real” than reality itself. Can video, slo-mo, burst, or series of clicks capture the fullness and intensity of the entire world? What camera can compete with the five senses plus the human imagination?

Well over a century back, Ralph Waldo Emerson understood this. “Each and All” mourns the fact that snippets and souvenirs can’t reproduce the forest or seashore:

I fetched my sea-born treasures home;

But the poor, unsightly, noisome things

Had left their beauty on the shore,

With the sun, and the sand, and the wild uproar.

Is photography depriving you of what Emerson calls “the perfect whole”? If so, that deprives your readers, as well. Perhaps a bit of sensory immersion would help.

Put down your phone. Disconnect yourself from everything except the physical world around you. Take a moment to touch, hear, see, smell, maybe taste. In this scene…

What’s most beautiful?

What’s ugliest?

What’s most intriguing?

What contains potential danger?

What contains potential pleasure?

How would you make someone care about the least interesting detail here?

How would you make someone care about the least empathetic person here?

What astonishes you?

What’s a metaphor to describe “the perfect whole”?

Don’t give up until you have a good answer for each question.

What Ezra Pound called making it “new” is less about seeing something different than finding what’s different in the presumably ordinary. It’s more comfortable to reach for the exotic. But if you’re a writer, originality is your job. Take it all in so your readers can. According to Kurt Heinzelman in “Make it new: The Rise of an Idea,” the writer’s task is renewing via a “return to origins.” Where do you find that? Many things originate in the external world—and at least sometimes you need to view them without the frame a camera imposes.

Candles and Creativity

It’s almost Chanukah, the holiday celebrating light lasting not while the fuel holds out but while light’s needed. How apt to revere that when nights are long, days short, and creativity can feel diminished, if not spent. During these short days, keep lighting candles—religiously or otherwise. Because creativity isn’t an external thing dependent on season or sunlight. The source of your creativity is inside you.

All of us start out so well; we’re curious, unafraid of new things, unembarrassed by failure, open to ideas, ecstatic over inventing how to talk and see and touch. Risk thrills us. But then life can interfere. Envy, shame, and fear exert their ugly power. We learn there are wrong answers. We stop seeing the world as exotic. Haven’t we read about it, heard about it, seen it all before? No! We haven’t.

Creativity meshes all the plausible possibilities out there, bringing the depths to the surface so insightfully and originally that only you could capture what you found. Innovation gave us Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, Orwell’s Animal Farm, Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, Joyce’s Ulysses. And so on.

Maybe the pilot light for your creativity always flickers, never does, or is sensitive to cold, wind, darkness. Maybe you’re already asking the right questions. If not, try these.

~ Does your creativity work best if you push yourself, or relax?

“Thinking is the enemy of creativity. It’s self-conscious, and anything self-conscious is lousy. You can’t try to do things. You simply must do things.” ―Ray Bradbury

~ How do you generate new plots, images, scenes?

“Creativity is merely a plus name for regular activity. Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right, or better.” ― John Updike

~ Ever try to mesh two seemingly incompatible ideas?

“Artistic temperament sometimes seems a battleground, a dark angel of destruction and a bright angel of creativity wrestling.” ― Madeleine L’Engle

How many artistic risks are you willing to take?

“An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all.” ― Oscar Wilde

Are you still discovering?

“The thing is to become a master and in your old age to acquire the courage to do what children did when they knew nothing. ” ― Ernest Hemingway

Are you waiting or hoarding?

“You can’t use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have.” ― Maya Angelou

Tip: Are your literal or  metaphorical candles lit? You already have all the matches you need.

Taming and Training Your Voice

That’s already a contradiction. If your voice sounds caged or restrained or even as if you worked on it, it’s not working. So how can you train your voice?

You can’t proceed the way you’d attack plot or metaphor or an unfortunate addiction to adjectives. Still, you can get out of your own way, giving your voice every opportunity to come out and flash something appealing. Because voice is a bit wild—and should stay that way. But wild can also mean running amuck, and you don’t want that, either.

Here’s a start on taming and training.

1. Think about your audience—and only your audience. Nothing else.

Contrary as it may seem, the more you think about anything related to ego or how good or bad you sound or the effect you want to achieve or how many books you will (or won’t!) sell, then the more you damage your voice. Be yourself. Let yourself sound like yourself. That’s how your readers get the real thing. You can always polish. But you can’t polish what isn’t worth polishing because it isn’t real.

2. Ignore the superficial, obvious, or clichéd. What do only you see? Know? Value?

This necessitates risk. But gems are rarely scattered on the surface. They’re down deep. That’s what you—only you—can say, so you’ll have just the right words for it. The poet Muriel Rukeyser calls it “Going diving.” She’s talking about poetry, of course, but for any writer, “If you dive deep enough and have favorable winds or whatever is under the water, you come to a place where experience can be shared, and somehow there is somewhere in oneself that shares.”

3. Embrace tradition, then transcend it. Revere, but without losing individuality.

Use everything you’ve read and discovered to identify your place among your literary predecessors. Not so you can imitate them, of course, but so you can perfect the voice you developed because the authors before you made you who you are—a blend of yourself and those who made you yourself.

Where would Claire Messud be without Ralph Ellison and Charlotte Bronte, or Chad Harbach without Merman Melville, or Alice Hoffman without Emily Bronte? And that’s just the short list.

Obviously, these folks can generate their own scenarios or voices. Yet neither ideas nor the words for them spring out fully formed, like Aphrodite on the sea. Even Aphrodite came from somewhere, as do our thoughts and expression of them, which reflects both idiosyncrasy and tradition. As Cormac McCarthy put it, “The ugly fact is, books are made out of books. The novel depends for its life on the novels that have been written.”

Tip: A great voice reflects the canon preceding it while striking a chord that resonates with both past and future, with both who we are and the forces—and voices—that created who we are. 

New, New, New, New, New

We’re starting a new year, which arrives with a flurry of resolutions, hopes, and dreams about a new start. Nu? What have you done to make your novel “new” lately? If you haven’t, perhaps you’d like to. Because our word for the long narrative comes from the Latin “novellus,” meaning, of course, “new.”

A novel that does nothing new is last year’s news. While it’s truer than ever that “there is nothing new under the sun,” it’s your job to make your novel feel new. These strategies might get you started.

~ Opening.

Link the setting and atmosphere to the dilemma, and any location or conflict becomes original.

~ Plot

Dig deep. As Don Maass frequently reminds, the first nine twists you generate will most likely lack the punch of the ones you brainstorm following that.

~ Character

Whore with a heart of gold? Quarterback who wants to make it big so he can save his family? Whores and quarterbacks—why not. Stereotypical ones? Uh, uh. Make one major change, be it status, dreams, occupation, even gender. Shake things up.

~ Syntax

Sentence structure is important and it’s not necessarily instinctive and English teachers aren’t the only ones who loathe run-ons and so you should get out of the rut. Vary. Change patterns. Transcend habits, even if that requires conscious, concerted effort.

~ Imagery

Roses are red. Skies are blue. Tears equal sad. Spring equals happy. Roses come in a rainbow of colors, as do skies. And character tears can make readers quite sad—for the wrong reason. Can’t find anything new for your scene? Turn it upside down. Probe its core. That’s where the imagery you need is hiding.

~ Climax.

If readers have expected a set scene for a couple hundred pages, don’t rob them of that pleasure. Still, satisfaction blends the predictable with the startling. One perfect detail will get the job done. Again, the secret is discarding the first dozen or so possibilities. The great ones come from thinking long and hard enough.

Tip: Resolve to find ways to make your novel “new” in this new year.

Have a happy one.

To “Maass” Is a Verb

People who extol verbs, who worship them, revel in them, revere and sanctify them, get mocked. And I don’t care. For writers, and especially writers with even minimal respect for reading or writing poetry, verbs are as good as it gets. No higher honor exists.

Verbs take complex operations and succinctly snare them in a single word: Photosynthesize, reminisce, calculate, mortify, and enunciate. Instead of an entire paragraph—plus a diagram—a handful of letters crystallizes an entire process.

Now of the many wonderful writing theorists and theories out there, very few encapsulate advice in a single word. Yet in book after book, and most especially Writing the Breakout Novel Workbook and the recent Writing 21st Century Fiction: High Impact Techniques for Exceptional Storytelling, this is precisely what Don Maass accomplishes. Shouldn’t that be a verb?

To Maass: To originate so profoundly and complexly that characterization, plot, outcome, and theme become more credible, convincing, and compelling than the humdrum nature of daily life.

Tip: Teach yourself to Maass from the Maasster himself.

Are you motivated to Maass your manuscript? Here’s how to start.

·         Abandon your first plot choice. While you’re at it, discard many of the next seven or eight plot possibilities. The ninth or tenth one flirts with greatness. Follow that.

·         Unearth hidden similarity. We know painfully well why your protagonist differs from your antagonist. So forget that. How are your protagonist and antagonist practically alike in some invisible yet believable way?

·         Burst boundaries. If you’re literary, don’t just ponder what genre writing can teach you. Admit that your “opposite” can enrich your novel. Let it. Are you a genre writer? Quit dissing that highbrow stuff. Find the way it can texture your novel.

·         Surprise yourself. If you find your own writing predictable, how will your readers perceive it? Replace every obvious emotion, situation, stereotype, and problem. Dig for buried diamonds. If it’s on the surface, everyone else has already seen it.

Tip: The more difficult path is the more original one.