Stroking the Details to Deepen the Story

Reprinted from Flash Fiction Chronicles article dated January, 2011

One of the comments that is difficult for many of us to come to grips with is when someone tells us our stories are not deep enough or that we haven’t given the reader enough to go on. I used to think: we’re talking flash here, micro flash, hint fiction, short shorts!  How am I supposed to “go deep?”

But for something to resonate, it must have context.  Readers want to feel empathy with the main character—or some kind of emotion for the main character—even if it’s distaste.  The question is, how does a writer do that with a limited word count?

Details not only set up time and place, but also suggest a back story, the circumstances, or even a trait or two of the main characters.  Specific details also anchor the story for the reader, giving them something to visualize while reading on to find out what happens next. Context and empathy come about through concrete, specific details that immerse the reader in the writer's world.

A lake and two small boats give
context to Munch's painting

I’m not suggesting there's any need to describe an entire room or tell the reader the exact time of day, but rather to stroke in a detail much as a painter might do.  If you examine a painting closely, you may discover that the person in the background is just a line squiggle with a touch of brown at the top to suggest hair and a swish of red to suggest a skirt or as in Munch’s The Scream: two small boats in lake.

The man screaming in the foreground of the Munch painting is alone while behind him there are two figures on the road and two boats on the lake.  I have no idea what the artist had in mind, but for me, this structure and detail suggests a strong fear of facing the world alone or facing death and because these details are behind him, he has no hope.

These details do not need to be written into a piece immediately in the rough draft--get the story down first--but can be added in the revision stage of the process once the writer understands what details will best serve the story in a thematic way. 

So detail, if carefully chosen, can suggest setting, foreshadow events (remember Chekov's gun), as well as deepen character, and underline theme.

Here’s an example:

Water drips from icicles outside the kitchen window. Clear skies glisten through dirty glass panes. I’m pouring my first cup of coffee when I hear snow sliding down the roof and know it’s time to call Carissa.

This image sets scene as well as mood

This is the opening to my story, “Spring Melt.” It’s a stroke like a painter’s stroke.  The whole house isn’t  given, not even a whole kitchen,  just the suggestion of a house because it has a kitchen, dirty window panes, and a sloping roof.  There is a sense that winter is passing into spring and that brings the narrator to a decision to call some woman. It’s a specific image to carry the reader into the next paragraph, but also to give the story context and later, a thematic pay-off.

Details should be as carefully chosen as anything else in a story.  Which will enhance the character and hint about what could happen next? Physical appearance often dictates personality.  A woman who has always been admired for her beauty may never feel compelled to grow artistically or intellectually, and therefore has little to talk about except hairstyles and Botox. This narrowed point-of-view could, in turn, bring conflict to a piece about marriage or best friends or wherever the writer wants to go.  

Showing tension between characters through dialogue becomes easier when there is a trait or detail in the story that sparks deep feelings.  Here's a brief exchange between Anna and Matt from “She Can’t Say No” to show how this can work.

…Alone at the table, Matt asks Anna how she knows his friend, Kerrick, a fast-track kind of guy, gel in his hair and Hugo Boss shoes.  

“I met him once,” she says and smiles. When she smiles, the scar on her upper lip whitens. Sometimes when he wakes up alone in the morning, thinking of her, the word “harelip” pops into his brain. He’s hinted to her about childhood operations, bringing up tonsillectomies, appendectomies, avoiding the words “quadrilateral mirault flap,” but she says nothing.  

Looking at her mouth now, he can almost feel its slight ridge on his tongue. He coughs. “And?”  

"And what, Matthew?”  

“You were flirting.”  

“I know.” She slips the side of her naked foot along Matt’s calf and tucks it behind his knee. “I’m sorry.”

People in stories don’t always have to agree and when they don’t, they argue, and when they argue, they bring up old grudges, other disagreements, and reveal who they are and what’s important to them.  In the example above, the relationship between the two characters is revealed by how Anna parries Matt’s jealousy.  It’s not a fight, but it’s still a moment of revelation.  Then Matt remembers how it feels to run his tongue along the scar on Anna’s mouth telling us that although he is jealous of her past with men, he’s also aware of her affect on him. The detail of her scar makes this scene more interesting and deepens the emotional risk for both characters.

Sometimes a story may work without specific detail, but going deeper can often be as easy as changing a word or two, adding a line, using a bit of dialogue, or throwing in a specific detail that gives the reader context for the unfolding events like Anna’s slipping her naked foot behind Matt’s knee. She has the power and he knows it.

Writing as Matrix

Reprinted from a Flash Fiction Chronicles article published November 29, 2010 

Guess what?  Writing fiction isn’t that easy. We become proficient enough in school to use written communication when needed.  However, writing well, long or short, requires additional expertise.    To write a short story, novel, play, or screenplay calls for a three-dimensional, high-definition, multi-layered endeavor on the part of the writer. This endeavor lands us in a matrix as illusive as anything Keanu Reeves found himself in. Words shift and dissolve, meanings change, the whole becomes lost from its parts.  Diving into the complex world of a story often leaves us confused and frustrated.

Writers know there are rules and guidelines, a craft that must be learned, but many don’t understand how all the different parts will eventually need to mesh together.  I’m not referring to plot-points, sub-plots, or authenticity here, though they are, of course,  parts of the whole.  I’m more concerned with the basics of process, how to “see” a writing project and decipher its mysteries one step at a time.

Visualize a published book, any book, the rectangular shape of it when closed, with a spine, the hard back and front covers,  and paper, the whole thing about an inch or so thick.  Now think of yourself opening that book to page one, laying it flat on a table in front of you.  Stand up and look down at it.

Begin on the blank page

You see words lined up on a page. Sentences and paragraphs. You think the author spun out those words: subject+verb+prepositional phrase for one sentence, something else for the next. It doesn’t seem that complicated.  It’s two-dimensional, but the creation of those words, sentences, and paragraphs is anything but two-dimensional. In your mind, erase all the words from that first page of the book, erase all that follow. Where do YOU start?

Content: What is the story about?

With an idea: content. What the story is about: the who, what, where, why, when, and how.  Now place a clear, book-sized piece of glass on top of that empty book, maybe leave just a little air between the glass and the actual book.  Breathing space.  Can you see it?  The clean white pages of the book through the clear glass sheet?  Now imagine filling that glass with all the words you’d use to say what you want to say.  It won’t all fit.  Suspend your disbelief, and pretend.  That’s layer one of the matrix.

Now put second sheet of glass down–some breathing space again–and notice you can still see the paper and all the content.  The content goes all over the place.  Who’d want to read this?  So maybe on this second pane, you can begin to organize what’s on the first pane.  Spend time thinking about all the different ways you can structure it. Which sentence should go first, second, which paragraph is irrelevant?  What content will move your reader?  What won’t?  That’s layer two.

Structure: How does the content unfold? 

You’re still standing over the book but what you see is a jumble of content on glass 1 and a bunch of arrows and carets and notes on glass 2.  An even bigger mess than before.  You want to quit!

So you take the two layers and fuse them together to come up with what seems to work best. The two pieces of glass come together through “the writing process,” the writer as “glass alchemist.” Now you are back to one pane–1 and 2 have become one.

Place another glass down.  You see the structured content below and you begin to understand that it contains subtle ideas and perhaps one or two big ideas.  These ideas are the reason you are writing this piece in the first place. You probably didn’t know what those ideas were exactly, but something led you to them through your writing,  and now you can see it all, right there, on the pane of glass 3, what this story means.

Meaning: What does the story say?

These thematic purposes, big and small, need to be “joined” to glass 1. You look for key words. If your content and structure is about love, you look for places to set up images of love, symbols of love, expressions of love. Maybe instead of a piece of dialogue, you decide to put in a gesture, a finger running down a cheek. All this goes into the pane of glass 3: anything that clarifies, intensifies, distills the language. Through this process, pane 3 fuses to the first two and again, you have a single piece of glass.

Now you notice the single piece of glass is clearing up. The words are beginning to look like real sentences, clear sentences, leading somewhere important. The page is beginning to look like a page with elements of content, structure, and purpose.

A fourth piece of glass will bring tightening to the story: deletions of unnecessary words, unnecessary phrases, those “darlings” that people say we must kill.

Several more panes can be added too. Subplot on one, back story on another, each piece of glass building one on top of the other until it all reads smoothly, giving the reader the information she needs to become one with the story.

Elements: Everything comes together.

After the final pane is honed and completed, all the glass will fuse together and imprint the page. The story is finished, but let’s go back to the beginning and put the four or five or six panes of glass where they were before they were melted together.

If you look at the “book” from the side view, open it with covers and spine flat on the table and the glass panes stacked on top of each other with just a little air between them, you’ll get the idea of the complexity of the process. One step at a time, looking at different aspects, but managing to remember all the aspects too, adjusting to get them to work together. There could be 20 or 30 layers in a novel, maybe only 4 or 5 in a flash.

Now stand above this book with its layers and look down. Let them fuse again.  It’s back to words in sentences across the page, paragraphs, pages to turn.

When I taught Freshman Comp, many of the students were intimated because they thought of writing in its final published form, a thick rectangular book with three or hundred pages of clean text written by accomplished writers.  They’d shake their heads and groan and mumble, “I don’t even know where to start” or “Nothing I ever write is like this in the book” leading to “I’m going to fail.”

They wanted to give up because they didn’t understand that writing is a process, and understanding the matrix of what really goes into a piece of writing: the who, what, where, when, why, and how of content, the organization of structure,  the writer’s own feelings (theme) that emerge from the text, and the time and effort of revision and proof-reading.  Seeing each of these as a separate step (or a pane of glass) in a process, makes it easy to understand that good results require time, attention, and practice and none of it is easy.

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More EDF good news and a lesson learned from whittling

MY heart still hip-hops into my throat when I open my Yahoo account and see on the
"From" line of an email, the words "everyone@everydayfiction.com."

It's the line that appears when they are sending a rejection, an acceptance...or actually maybe a rewrite. Any which way, I always take a moment before I open it. If I prayed, I guess you'd say that's what I'm doing. Luckily for me, they like my "Stranger on the Porch" bit and are going to publish it sometime in the future. Hooray!

This is actually a piece I've adapted from my novel. As I've said before, I've been struggling to keep the seat of my pants in the chair. When I'm doing one thing, I'm often distracted by another. In this case, the idea of writing a 1000 words has so much more appeal than rewriting 80,000 words. But I have resisted the lure of flash so far this month even though titles and ideas on how to make those titles work assault me at the sink, in the shower, on my walks. Then one day--mid-anguish/temptation--I had a revelation.

Since I use a dramatic arc in each chapter by opening with conflict, torturing my character, and finally having her take some action--the same dramatic arc that I use for a story as a whole--I wondered if I could cadge something from the novel to satisfy my need to send off a submission to EDF and thereby not get totally out of the world of my novel characters. Write flash but have it benefit the novel too. Maybe chapter 1?

I took a look. Yep the arc was there, but I'd have to whittle it down to fit the 1000 word criterion. Wow. An amazing thing happened during this process.

Because I wanted to flash the chapter, I brought to it a much more critical eye, and suddenly realized how much better it was turning out. The whole experience reinforced my belief that parameters create in a writer the ability to dig deep and come up with something better than if there are no parameters.

What happens in this first chapter of my novel is not straight forward, and I've often changed it, edited it, played with it. But this time I knew I had to achieve more clarity for it to stand on its own as flash. The images became sharper, the character more interesting. Whittling worked again. What an incredible lesson I keep learning over and over.

Now my hope is that people like it. That it stands on its own. I hope it's as good for you guys as it was for me.

A.D.D.

I don't think I officially have A.D.D, but I often feel as if I do. I'm constantly wanting to start something new, to pull something surprising out of my brain, and see what it will develop into. And this is actually a good thing, especially when I'm beginning a new project, but unfortunately all those flashes of inspiration seem to strike me when I'm trying to settle down and do the drudge work of editing.

Did I say "drudge work." I can't believe I typed that. I love to edit and have professed for years that if I can only get past that initial draft, I know I can craft something that works. There is something magical about reading one's own words aloud and realizing, hmmm, that doesn't work quite right. What about this? What about that? A cliche? Let me see if I can just spin that a little to the left. So what is going on here?

It's the novel. That multi-drafted cyper-folder with its "fits and starts" (there you go: cliche. I'll catch it later. Hmm maybe not), calling and repelling me all at the same time.

I made a vow this year that this was going to be it. I would get that dang book into the kind of shape that would allow me to start my agent search. But with me, as soon as I vow, I procrastinate. It titillates me to make a commitment and then renege. I actually feel that titillation in my body. Ooh, make a promise and break it? Why? I think there's a tiny part of me that is ready for the looney bin. Or maybe its latent teen rebellion, the one I never had.

I do get things done. I did vow when I quit my job that I would build my writing portfolio and I've done that. And my skills have become sharper, my ability to see what works and doesn't work more accurate. So yes. I am making progress with the portfolio goal. But I did vow when I quit my job that I would also finish the novel and market it and that is still the flamingo around my neck.

I don't know what it is about writing a book that is so darn hard, but part of it for me is that it activates my interest in everything else. Since I committed to finishing the book, I have helped remodel the back of my house, taken up jewelry making, dabbled in polymer clay, and PMC, and painting, as well as supersized my exercise program. These "hobbies" have been so much fun and I'm eating up all the new awarenesses that these interests bring to me. But. I sit down at the keyboard and think...hmmm, just an hour with all that color behind me on the work table might give me just the bump I need.

But I know that I must do the book first. Before the bump. Because if I can just remember that the writing offers its own bump, I could make progress.

I need to stay focused. I need to stop farting around, but I don't know how many times I need to say this to actually DO it. Today. I will work on the book before I touch a pair of pliers or open a tube of paint. TWO HOURS MINIMUM. I need to borrow Marley's chains.

Another Lesson From Reality TV: Emulate those who succeed

Project Runway is my absolute favorite reality show. Although my other favorites feature real talent and creativity, PR features the kind of creativity that I relate to. Not saying I could do what they do anymore than I can sing or dance. I can't sew anything but a curtain panel, but I'm talking about deeper stuff, that digging into the hidden corners of the right brain when doing art and finding originality. That's what two designers were able to do on last night's premier of Project Runway, Season 5.

What is originality? Talent and imagination, certainly, but also a third component, knowing what to do with it. One could say a person either is talented or not, has imagination or doesn't, but I don't believe that. Like everything else in our genes, the amount of talent and imagination varies, but of more consequence is what we do with what we have. Last night's first episode of PR is a good example of what I mean. There is talent and imagination in each contestant, but two of them also showed that third component: savvy, the wisdom and shrewdness to pay attention to those who succeeded rather than to those who failed.

I can't remember their names, Blond Tattoo Girl and Wistful Guy is what I'll call them here. BTG and WG are obviously students of the show and so were familiar with last night's challenge: Season 1's grocery store outfit, and they were successful because they looked to the winner of that challenge while everyone else focused on what previous contestants had done wrong. That shift of perspective last night made all the difference.

Here's the set-up. The contestants were taken to a grocery store and given $75.00 to purchase materials to fashion an outfit. Tim Gunn told them to think about the WOW factor, to come up with something that would "blow the judges' socks off." Austin Scarlett, the competitor who WON this challenge four years ago, pointed out that he succeeded by delivering the unexpected. The name of that episode was "Innovation" and his design, a bustier sundress made of corn husks, transformed an ordinary agricultural product into a snazzy little summer number. Yet despite these admonishments, many of the contestants headed straight for the easy-way-out aisle.

The most obvious and forgiving "materials" to purchase are, of course, trashbags, shower curtains, and table cloths. My immediate thought as they scurried into the aisles to buy these exact items was "These guys have thought about this challenge." Of course they have. Me too. Everytime I take onions and avocados out of their plastic netted bags I think 'evening gown yoke.' But unfortunately, this year's designers focused on the contestants who floundered with seemingly unsewable products, and they were determined not to fall into the same trap.

All except Blond Tattoo Girl and Wistful Guy. They paid attention to the winner of that challenge. They recognized Austin's inventiveness and had considered about how they too could innovate. WG made probably one of the most impossible choices. He bought plastic drinking cups. As one of the judges said, "Exactly what ANYONE would hurry to grab for this challenge." But it worked. He molded--literally with an iron--a corset top and bell skirt that looked wearable and was definitely sexy. He remembered the word "innovation" and by the silhouette he chose, he also remembered the corn-husk design. He kept it simple and pretty, AND used the unusable.

This worked for BTG, too, who won the challenge. SHE was crazy-creative with her vaccuum cleaner bags, her coffee filters, her tacks, and her binder spirals. Again I'm positive she's thought about it before the show, asked herself, "What would I do if..." Her dye and bleach treatment to the bags created a fresh and artistic skirt. The burn-out filters worked humorously with the tacks for the bodice. It was charming. I was pleased she won.

So why am I--a writer--spending all this time on this topic? Because this first episode of the season carries with it a potent message: emulate those who succeed, not those who lose.

How many times has a writer, a friend, or even me, said, "I read the worst book. I know what's wrong with it, so I know what not to do!"

Is this what any creative person should think about? An artist? A designer? A writer? Or should he or she instead, study what's hanging on the walls of the Norton Simon and MOOLA? Watch what's coming down the runway at Olypus Fashion Week? Or read closely for the content, the structure, the language of To Kill a Mockingbird or The Yiddish Policeman's Union or Tess of the D'Urbevilles and shout out loud, "Now this is the kind of art I want to do!"

The two best pieces last night were created by savvy designers who listened, who studied the winners, who dug to the center of their imaginations, and who executed with confidence and verve. That's the kind of writer I want to be. An original.