By Benjamin Percy
– Hell, to me, is a cruise ship. Hell is lying on a beach with no plan outside of soaking up a few rays, sucking down a few pina coladas. Hell is relaxing.
– Call it sexpository dialogue. Or sexposition. The power struggle between the two lovers usually reflects the subject matter. (in Game of Thrones. And it works because sex is exciting…so people are paying attention to the information)
– No matter how beautiful or ugly your characters are, no matter how charming or obnoxious, quiet or noisy, no matter what their purpose in a given scene, the reasoning behind triangulation dialogue is simple: always have more than one thing going on in your fiction. And if the triangle is strongest, most basic self-reinforcing structure, then consider this a lesson in the geometry of dialogue. Triangulation being having a couple who’s marriage is falling apart arguing about something like the dishes.
– Prolong the reveal… We know this from the bedroom. If a seduction goes on for weeks, months—if clothes peel off slowly—if nails and lips tease before taking hold—if patience gradually gives way to forcefulness—the more explosive the results, the more gratitude we feel.
– You’re disappointed, too. That’s because desire is the most thrilling and pleasurable and terrifying condition. Anticipation satisfies us in a way acquisition does not.
– It’s the way we’re wired. We need to have something to look forward to. Prizes are shiniest before they’re won, just as monsters are scariest before they’re seen. That is why Melville kept his white whale hidden for so long.
– Gauge the importance of what you’re hiding and relegate an appropriate number of pages before the reveal.
– But in the way every answer is unsatisfactory unless it opens up into another question.
– Batman rips open the cabin door and discovers. . . everyone on board is dead! And old. Withered, gray-haired. The plane has aged as well, the plastic is yellowed, the wiring faulty, the bolts weeping rust. Mystery #1 is solved. And Mystery #2 takes its place: what the hell happened on board this flight?
– I keep a giant corkboard next to my desk. Every day, when I sit down to write, my eyes skim across it. I’ve tacked to it pieces of paper, cocktail napkins, notecards. On them I have scribbled snippets of dialogue overheard at bars and diners and parties that I might later funnel into a character’s mouth. Bit of trivia, etc.
– I really like the verbs he uses- “weeping” rust.
– Set pieces are the moments I was referring to before, when the stakes are escalated, the staging carefully managed, the special effects sometimes expensive and flashy. Alfred Hitchcock refers to them as crescendos
– This moment is proceeded by relatively calm language and relatively calm circumstances (In written stuff these “special effects” and “crescendos” are achieved by amplification of language Percy’s talking about an example from Cormack McCarthy) – descriptions of the men riding through the heat and desert wastes. And then, as the attacking horde approaches, McCarthy goes off leash. The sentences grow wild and expansive, matching the material. It’s the equivalent of the quick series of camera cuts and heightened music that we encounter in Hitchcock’s famous shower scene, a stylistic intensification that casts a spotlight on the sequence.
– when everything is important, nothing is important. There is a direct ratio between the length and the function of a scene. Save the attention to detail for the scenes that matter most.
– The point of view belongs to Gold, but Wolff cheats the limitations of his perspective by getting us inside his daughter’s head (she can’t hear him since the wind is gusting and can’t se him since her hood is pulled up) and even the dog’s (the trampled-down snow indicates its territory). This is the equivalent of a swift succession of camera cuts. We have close-ups (the description of the dog’s muzzle and hindquarters) and we have medium shots angled from above (the description of his daughter never having appeared as small as she lies in the snow). De Palma and Wolff draw from the same bag of tricks.
– If it’s a short story, do you have at least one set piece? If it’s a novel, do you have at least four? And have you given them the necessary minutes of footage, the careful staging, the special-effects budget they deserve? This is what will launch your story from merely memorable to iconic.
– Because once the lights go out—once your vision is canceled—once one sense is shut off—the others heighten.
– ob skene (literally “offstage” in Greek), from which comes the present day word obscene
– “With the serious writer, violence is never an end in itself. It is the extreme situation that best reveals what we are essentially, and I believe these are times when writers are more interested in what we are essentially than in the tenor of our daily lives.” Flannery O’Connor
– The stories would not resonate as they do. Why? As the stories are written, they invite the audience backstage—into the dark—where imagination takes over and the reader becomes a kind of writer…
– I call this “gorenography” and it strikes me as hollow, excessive, masturbatory.
– You must earn violence. Build up the kindling and pipe in the oxygen before you strike the match. Because it serves as important function in a story, as a transformative device a catalyst for change.
– Violence is not the answer, but a variable in a long, complicated equation.
– Hitchcock described this (invites the audience to participate) as “transferring the menace from the screen into the mind of the audience.” And isn’t that your goal? To make an audience feel? So that they are not bystanders but accomplices? Hitchcock makes this possible by supplying minute particulars, never showing us everything, only glimpses that anchor the moment and allow us to fill in the rest of the nightmare.
– In most stories, there is a narrative arc and an emotional arc…The emotional arc is how the character transforms as a result of the narrative.
– Silence, I came to understand, was knowing when to shut up.
– Matters of the heart make your world worth occupying. Especially when it comes to high-concept storytelling.
– We need the everyday to balance out the astonishing. Make the extraordinary ordinary.
– Fantasy allows us truths that might otherwise be unavailable.
– I feel like there is almost a mathematical relationship between the weirdness of certain material and how precise you must be with everything else, which is maybe why so many sci-fi and fantasy novels run long, as the writers know they must fatten the story with exposition that will make the dragons or robots more plausible.
– When you create a logic system, a contract with your reader, I suppose you could say, you need to stick with it. When Gaiman waffles, the spell breaks.
– This is our world except for _____. Maybe gravity is increasing incrementally. Maybe it won’t stop raining…You might find this constraint limiting, but this one thing will change a thousand things. Think of it as a stone thrown into a pond, rippling outward. If you do this, if you limit the change, and if you closely monitor the effects of it, then through this limitation and its accompanying logic system, you increase the likelihood that your audience will willingly suspend its disbelief.
– Consider this: Picasso trained in realism before he shattered our way of seeing.
– Or are you exclusively “artful” because it’s easier to excuse your sloppiness as purposeful.
– Here is another, less common juncture to consider: the worst-case scenario. In Raiders of the Lost Arc it’s the SNAKE PIT. The way to the arc is literally covered in Indi’s greatest fear.
– The moment almost always comes, in long-form narratives, at the juncture of the second and third acts. Call it the rock-bottom moment, the dark night of the soul, whatever…If you know the worst-case scenario, then you know its placement, so you know one of the brighter stars in the narrative constellation.
– Samurai are said to have spend hours every day imagining all the things that might go wrong in battle. A feint, a duck, a broken sword, a severed limb, someone tripping, someone screaming, someone attacking from behind. Then they would try to imagine a way out of the situation. This helped them stay cool when they fought…Know your worst-case scenario and you know the way of the samurai—a clear-eyed method of negotiating the gauntlet of storytelling trouble.
– I began to color-code the major problems the characters faced—in blue, black, red, green, yellow, pink, purple—and to track page numbers. Larsson would introduce a blue problem on page 25, return to it on 78, 169, 240, 381, and so on, each time ratcheting up the tension and complicating things further…I have come to call these flaming chain saws. Your success as a storyteller has to do with your ability to juggle them.
– I wrote four failed novels before I finally figured out the long form…I treated chapters like short stories, introducing and resolving trouble in fifteen pages.
– Here I am—talking analytically about worst-case scenarios and juggling trouble, mapping out the embattled terrain of novels and comics and screenplays—but when you get right down to it, I’m suggesting that the best way to mess with the head of your reader is to strategize the delivery of bad news.
– First, because the impulse to explain will insult the reader. That’s their job—part of the pleasure of reading a story is inference, filling in the blanks and becoming a participant in the narrative, a coauthor. As a beginner, you’ve had more training in reading than you’ve had in writing—and so, succumbing to insecurity, you announce, you explicate, making as a writer those inferences you’re used to making as a reader.
– Second, stories are about forward movement, and if you turn to backstory, you have effectively yanked the gearshift into reverse. The story is no longer rushing forward—it’s sliding back.
– The first-person narrators should be more free-associative, more apt to digress. That’s how our minds are wired. That’s how we speak. Easily distracted, we loop away from the story we started.
– In “A Temporary Matter,” Jhumpa Lahiri writes, “She wore a navy blue poplin raincoat over gray sweatpants and white sneakers, looking, at thirty-three, like the type of woman she’d once claimed she would never resemble.” Here is a brief flash of backstory—again contained in the adverbial slot—that illustrates a larger truth about the story: things have not turned out as the couple planned.
– The truth, of course, is that if you’re good enough, you can do anything.
– I feel about novels as I feel about tattoos: you need to think about them for a good long time before you commit to the ink. Otherwise, in your drunken rush, you might end up with the equivalent of Yosemite Sam on your ass. I typically brainstorm for an entire year before I touch the keyboard.
– I’ll begin to construct a kind of Wikipedia entry, figuring out their histories. Things get really interesting when I figure out what my characters want. Because when I know what they want, I can set obstacles in the way of that desire…
– Percy suggests mapping out the high and low intensity/action points in the narrative to make sure it looks balanced. Not too many slow scenes or too many fast ones back to back to back. Think Jamband/Orgasm
– A cardiograph, a seismograph, a suspense-o-meter, a soundboard. However you want to think about balance, modulation, expansion and contraction, the variation of style and content so that you might best manipulate your reader into feeling.
– We’re vulnerable to terror because we don’t see it coming. Steven Spielberg understands the art of the reversal. He gives his audience a tickle and then slugs them in the stomach.
– That’s why every sex scene in a horror film gives way to a pitchfork to the abdomen, a head lopped off by a machete—because our arousal makes us more vulnerable, the scare more unexpected.
– We believe in light because of shadow; we believe in good because of evil, the balance that is the balance of life. Your stories and scenes require something similar: constant reversals, a modulation of tone and content, sometimes gently and sometimes jarringly negotiated, so that we will believe and so that we will feel moved to laugh or gasp or sob.
– “He and his boys up there were keeping it new, at the risk of ruin, destruction, madness, and death, in order to find new ways to make us listen. For, while the tale of how we suffer, and how we are delighted, and how we may triumph is never new, it must always be heard. There isn’t any other tale to tell, it’s the only light we’ve got in all this darkness.” James Baldwin
– Now, if we took this same passage but put the character on a train instead of a plane, the delivery might be remarkably different—the sentences might be short and hard-hitting, made to match the chu-chunk, chu-chunk rhythm of a barreling train. Out a plane’s window, everything slides along gradually, whereas when riding on Amtrak, you might catch only a glimpse of a farmhouse, an old oak tree, a truck waiting at a crossing. So maybe the sentences would work better as fragments, a series of frozen images flashing past.
– You’re ultimate goal, as a storyteller, should be to sweep the reader away. Pretty sentences exist only in the service of this goal. They are the incantation that enables the reader to dream with their eyes open, to believe in other worlds, to care about ink and paper as if they were flesh and blood.
– Instead of letting language invisibly enchant us, Chabon announces himself as a sorcerer. The sentences put a spotlight on him and not the material.
– With this in mind, if you’re writing about sex, maybe your aim is to arouse, in which case you probably want to use slippery, sensual language so that your sentences sound the way Marvin Gaye sings, smooth like “the silk that silk wears,” to borrow a line from Adrain Matejka’s poem “Understanding Al Green.” But sex can be comical and awkward, too, and maybe that’s what you’re going for, if your character is a spectacled, acne-pocked, needle-necked teenage virgin more familiar with microscopes and textbooks than a woman’s body, in which case the sentences might be halting and dotted with words like unit and fornicate.
– “well if you can’t plan it out ahead of time, you’ll just have to work it out as you go along.” Donna Tratt – The Goldfinch
– Wherever they are, however they are, should tone the sentences, replicate the experience in complementary correspondence that will make your reader feel as they do.
– Someone once told me, “I want my work to feel like it could happen anywhere.” To which I responded, “Huh.” That’s like saying you want your character to seem like she could be anyone, Margaret Thatcher or Pippi Longstocking, or you want your story to seem like it could happen anytime, a thousand years ago or a thousand years in the future. Abstraction sucks. Good writing relies on particulars.
– Write about your own backyard. Claim your own forty acres. Create a stage on which your characters will perform.
– When a reader first picks up a story, they are like a coma patient—fluttering open their eyes in an unfamiliar world, wondering where am I, when am I, who am I? The writer has an obligation to quickly and efficiently place the reader in the story.
– You don’t want your reader working that hard at the start of a story. Moving from this world, with its myriad distractions, to the world of page is hard enough. Place solidifies the otherworld we’re entering and anchors your characters in it.
– Never give us a generic description. When we enter a new space, show it to us—but through a particular lens: your character’s point of view, modified by mood.
– There’s a note on pg 122 to re-read a section. I’m not sure if it means the one just ended or just beginning…
– Not always in that telescoping order, but moving between the faraway and the nearby gives a sense of life, of three-dimensionality, the constant negotiation between place and space.
– The stage anchors us and the staging engages us.
– Re-read pgs 121-129. Its about setting, emotion, dialogue, details, etc.
– He (instructor Barry Hannah) asked the student to read aloud the stick-up passage. Then he reached into his satchel, pulled out a handgun, and shoved it in the student’s face. “What are you thinking about right now?” He did this to point out a lesson about…calls out so perfectly the momentum-killing proclivity of so many writers to mash together action sequences with emotional fuss.
– Literary writers tend to overdo thoughtfulness, to glut their fiction with interiority that interferes with the reader getting swept away, just as many genre writers tend to neglect interiority in favor of action.
– Envision your narrative topographically. The peaks—when a car crashes, a couple argues, a storm knocks out the power—should be balanced out by valleys, so that your story resembles Colorado instead of Iowa.
– These opening spike our adrenaline, urge us on with page-turning hunger, but they also typically set up an antagonistic force, the central trouble of the narrative. Only afterward do we come to understand the implications of the attack or wreck or kidnapping. Follow the visceral with the cerebral.
– In screenplays, around page 25, the first plot point occurs. Also known as a “doorway moment,” this is when the main character makes s decision, in response to the inciting incident of the story, that is the beginning of their transformative arc…These are called doorway moments because once the decision is made, a door closes behind the character: there is no going back. Also, in Campbell, it’s answering the call to adventure…
– Consider how much real estate they take up in your story, how many pages they account for, and then frame them with proportional moments of repose. If you’re stretching out the physical beats, then you need to stretch out the emotional beats as well. Going into the scene, what are the stakes of the situation? Following the scene, what are the implications of the action that just took place?
– “Tell a story, have some thoughts about it. Tell a story, have some thoughts about it.” William Kittredge.
– Whatever is won or lost—a trophy, a marriage, a job, a pile of gold, a reputation, a soul, a life—will matter to us only if you make it clear why it matters so much to your characters.
– The denouement is the answer, the emotional consequences of the physical warfare you have been building toward since the first line.
– Make a graph of your story or novel or essay or memoir. Step back and judge it as a whole. Pay attention to how you might balance the physical beats and the emotional beats rather than entangle them. Tell a story; have some thoughts about it. Tell a story; have some thoughts about it.
– I admit to feeling puzzled when I first met him, when he asked me whether anyone in my family farmed, when every conversation somehow cycled back to chores or machinery or crop yield. It took me a few years to get used to his way of seeing the world.
– And this is what so many beginning writers fail to realize—the same thing I failed to realize when I first met my in-laws: that your way of seeing the world bends around your work. We spend the majority of our adult lives hunched over a desk in a hive of cubicles, or fitting together auto parts in a factory assembly line, or scraping charred burger off a grill as a line cook, or stuck in traffic limbo somewhere between the boardroom table and the La-Z-Boy recliner. And yet in most of the student stories I read, work is mentioned only in passing or is absent together.
– Whether we like it or not, work defines us. Work dominates our lives. And we have an obligation, in our prose and poetry, in the interest of realism, and in the service of point of view, voice, setting, metaphor, and story, to try to incorporate credibly and richly the working lives of our characters.
– I will make a series of complicated hand gestures, screech my whistle, and say, “Point of view violation!” This is because the writer, after establishing a first-person or close-third point of view, has violated the constrictions of that perspective. In the first few sentences of a story, you establish a contract with your reader. You have violated that contract if you, say, leap from the gaze of a beachside sunbather to that of a pilot in a plane streaking by overhead.
– Point of view corrals description and metaphor—and the character’s job determines the point of view.
– A fan reminds him of the rotor wash of a Blackhawk, a cash register drawer has the rattle of chain gun, a dropped pallet booms like a mortar, paint pools in the aisles like blood. He cannot separate himself from his work. It is there, at every turn, imprisoning him.
– It is a job that frames and sets into motion every element of your story or essay or poem—and it is your job to do the required research that will bring the language and tasks and schedule and perspective of your character’s work to life.
– Writing is an act empathy. You are occupying and understanding a point of view that might be alien to your own—and work is often the keyhole through which your peer.
– associative repetition is key to narrative cohesion and can be used as a tool for thematic and character development. Percy gives the example of oranges in The Godfather and how every time something baad happens it’s preceded by an orange.
– I’m no stranger to starting over. I wrote four failed novels before selling The Wilding. They were not a waste of time, not at all. I learned from them the humility that comes from watching something you’ve spent years working on turn to dust in your hands. And I discovered—by dissecting their cold carcasses—the many ways I might rob their organs and bones, their images and characters and settings and metaphors, and rearrange them, reimagine them, as short stories.
– So much revision, I’ve discovered, is about coming to terms with that word: gone. Letting things go. When revising, the beginning writer spends hours consulting the thesaurus, replacing a period with a semicolon, cutting adjectives, adding a few descriptive sentences—whereas the professional writer mercilessly lops off limbs, rips out innards like party streamers, drains away gallons of blood, and then calls down the lightning to bring the body back to life.
– One more draft made ten drafts. And the tenth draft sold. I wrote over one hundred pages for the thirteen that were published.
– I have thrown away thousands of pages—and sometimes you need to do that; sometimes you have to start over. But sometimes you don’t. Sometimes your story needs some serious renovation—the walls are full of mold, the roof is leaking—and sometimes it simply needs some cosmetic work, a little paint splashed on the walls.
– I’ve discovered that revision is far less intense and traumatic when I begin a story with its end in mind. I used to be an organic writer who had no game plan, who followed my tooth-and-claw-instinct, who considered writing an act of discovery.
– Sometimes he (Dan Chaon) lays the pages down on the floor and wanders among them, rearranging them, isolating some scenes, crumpling up others and tossing them aside, until finally he decides what the story is about and returns to his desk to realize the piece in a shorter form.
– I used to consider editing something you did once a story was completed. I now begin each day by reading what I have already written.
– Faulkner said, Kill your darlings, and in that tradition I created a Cemetery folder. (No doubt you are less morbid than I am, so feel free to call yours The Compost Heap—the idea is the same.) In it I have files—tombstones, I call them—with titles like “Images” or “Metaphors” or “Characters” or “Dialogue.” Into these I dump and bury anything excised from a story. For some reason, having a cemetery makes it easier to cut, to kill. Because I know the writing isn’t lost—it has a place—and I can always return to the freshly shoveled grave and perform a voodoo ceremony.
– The original Rocky, the scrappy southpaw who lives in a filthy apartment and reams of a better life, who rises early and falls asleep late, who wants only respect and who everybody thinks is a bum, has something to teach every writer trying to break into the business.
– I wasn’t offended. I was inspired. I would tape his—and so many other editorial remarks—to the wall near my desk. The wall of shame, I called it. Everybody thought I was a bum, like Rocky, or so I thought. And every morning, when I woke up to hammer, I would stand there, coffee mug hot in my hand. My thoughts, starting at their comments, were somewhere between I’m going to get you, and I’d better do better.
– You know how many rejections “In the Rough” racked up? Thirty-nine.
– Remember – thirty-ninth rejection.
– After you spend those countless hours pushing sentences around, after you polish a story until it glows, nobody is going to approach you on the street and seize your hand and say, “Congratulations! You did it!” There’s more work to be done. The same stubborn mind-set that informs your craft must inform the often frustrating, sometimes humiliating work of submission (such a apt word, no?). And you need to know that breaking into magazines is about talent, yes, but also doggedness.
– When submitting your work, know the odds. Look at a magazine like Glimmer Train. Every year it receives some forty thousand submissions—of which it publishes about forty. Yeah. That means no matter how badass your story is, it’s probably going to get rejected. Take the hit. Smile through your mouth guard. Retreat to your corner. Spit into a bucket. Say a few Hail Marys. Then get back in the fight.