Cliffhangers--Cheap Thrill or Literary Technique?

I recently read Dan Brown's Inferno, my first Dan Brown book because I completely missed out on that whole DaVinci Code thing. Far too many people were talking about it and I was one of those really annoying people who wouldn't read a book if too many people hyped it, and then I saw the movie so what's the point anymore?

omg like, so many people are reading this book, and I'm just. like.
that's just so pedestrian.  

One of the things that really surprised me about Dan Brown's writing is that his chapters were really short, about 3-4 pages on average. That's about a third of the length of usual chapters, and in some books I read, chapters can go on so the the entire 350 page book only has 4 of them. 

It's a stylistic choice, I know, but what I am wondering is how effective this choice is. Inferno was, as I suspect most of Dan Brown's book are, an action/mystery novel. There are chase scenes, shootouts, fast cars driven badly. And a common technique in ramping up that tension is in keeping the ideas short. 

This can be seen not only in the chapter length, but in the sentence length as well. Shorter, faster, creates more tension. Thoughts are clipped, to turn the page faster. Eyes scan, searching for the truth. The words rush past. Fingers on the next page, ready to flip, ready to tear through chapters. Its ramping up, towards something. It's coming closer and sweat falls, heartbeat racing. And then there's a cliffhanger. 

You want to kill me, don't you, Tucker? Well, get a number and get in line.

And the next chapter starts. 

I think this is at it's least effective when the writer is obviously doing it to create a false tension. It's the "horror film" cliché. A character is wandering around their house, when suddenly a shadow moves to the left. A knife falls off the counter, striking the floor, flipping end over end. The character jumps and looks right into a deadly pair of hunter's eyes, focused for the kill.

"Your soul smells like tuna and mice parts."

That's right--it's a &%$#@ cat. It's always a &%$#@ cat. 

This is a cheap thrill, a bad reason to make us flip the page. But then, there we are, on the next page, and the author has probably already thrown us into another cliché, like having the main character muse on the premature death of his father, or cleaning a series of guns that are planning to be used in a plot that hasn't been fully explained yet.  

The author can always get us to flip the page, can always come up with some bit of tension that makes us want to know what will happen next. But when we're done, do we feel satisfied? Do we set that book down and say to our friends, "this was a good book. This made me think. This made me care about the characters. I'll remember this book."

On the other hand, longer, more rambling sentences and chapters allow the reader to indulge in deeper thought, a more closely inspected plot, the introspective character, the complex theme. These also run the risk of getting monotonous, laboring over ideas that have already been proven, already been vetted within the text of the book, or confusing the reader with innane details of subplot or setting, causing him or her to return to the top of the page to figure out just where the author was going with this idea.

It's like Debussy and a shot of morphine

The answer is in balance. Cliffhangers are an excellent technique when something is actually at stake. We have to stop trying to trick our reader and start trying to entertain, to delight, to teach. As E.B. White said, "No one can write decently who is distrustful of the reader's intelligence, or whose attitude is patronizing." We have to assume that our readers will see through cheap tricks. 

If you can't recognize what those are, then my next blog post will blow your mind!

Learn to Write for Yourself...And Everyone Else

In honor of paradox, I’d like to consider another bit of possibly contradictory writing advice:

1.       Know what’s going on in the market

2.       Write for yourself

Unlike this paradox, which is OMG

This is essentially saying that we should simultaneously write for ourselves, and for everyone else. Be completely selfish/be completely selfless. Write with your eyes closed/never close your eyes. Read every published work you can find/find your own voice. 

And people talking about absolutes. Anyone who deals
in absolutes is stupid. 

I can kind of make sense of this conundrum when I remember my first exposure to band. My brother was in middle school band, a trombone player. I was a fifth grader, coming with my mother to pick him up after school, and she brought me inside to see the band room and see an experience I might be able to share in, in a few years. After school, the band room was noisy. Students were practicing at random, in small clusters or solo, somehow able to concentrate on their own sheet of music while amongst the tumult bouncing between the sound-cushioned walls.

“How do they do that?” I asked my brother. “How do they hear themselves?”

“They don’t,” he answered. “Well…they do. It’s complicated. While everyone is playing, you have to ignore everyone else and completely concentrate on what you’re doing, otherwise you’ll get distracted and lose your place. But you also have to listen in to be sure you’re matching what the others are playing around you—not too loud, not too fast."

I feel that it's a good illustration of listening--but not too much. If you concentrate too hard on what other people are doing, you'll only succeed in copying them. But if we write in a vacuum, we're sure to produce works that are only appealing to us, that lack an appeal to the other human beings that are sure to make up your audience. 

Unless you have successfully cornered the "reading puppy" market. 

I feel that the "write for yourself" bit of advice most often comes from well-meaning mentors trying to keep their manatees from freaking out too much. 

Reference

For a beginning writer, trying to figure out "what the industry is doing" can be terrifying. And it makes "the industry" sound like an Orwellian force set on blocking our every move towards a successful publishing career. Thus, "write for yourself" is really a way of saying, "Chill out. Stop spending all your time trying to chart the themes in the current best-sellers list, and just write." For we learn by doing, instead of thinking about learning by doing. 

Yes...I see...

Write What You Know...Even if You Know Nothing

There's a bit of seemingly contradictory advice I’ve received over the years:

                                                             Write what you know. 

This is seeminly contradictory because I've also been taught that writers have to know about everything. Fancy a character in a historical setting? Better brush-up on on your knowledge of the time period. What to write a girl with a Spanish heritage? Better remind yourself of the difference between Spanish and Mexican dialects and slang. Is the world endangered by the machinations of a deranged nuclear physicist? Better know that the techno-babel he's spouting off at your protagonist is at least theoretically scientifically correct. 

This kool-aid will be so freaking good. And I'm not even gonna let Jimmy have some. 

Depending on where the story and your own imagination lead you, there is little that you don't have to know. And then I hear the advice that I should "write know I know." 

This is confusing. After giving it some more thought, I think the “write what you know” phrase is taught in an effort to do away with the sheer unapproachability of the blank page.

"I hear cries of fear; there is terror and no peace."

If a student says she doesn’t know what to write, you could do more than tell her to write what she knows. Be specific. Tell her to write about the first birthday party she remembers, then once she has a firm grip on all the characters in that scene, have her take those characters and write another story about them. It’s a way of getting started. 

But one creative writing teacher I had emphasized that writers have to be more than just renaissance men. They have to be really, really good at lying. A writer must know the feeling of steel bars melting right in front of her, otherwise how could she write from a fireman’s point of view? A writer must be able to capture the elation of a nosedive through rains of fire, clinging to the wing-joints of his father’s black dragon, blocking out the whirring of the arrows flying past, even though no such awesomeness actually exists in this pale, worthless reality we call life.  

Ok, maybe it's not so bad. Thanks, Pooh. 

Some people are masters of writing exactly what they know. Some of the very best books were products of this process, and very successfully books. You see, some people write about one location they are familiar with, with a plot centering around one central scandal that they actually experienced, and characters based so strongly in reality they could be ripped directly from their memories.

Let's talk Mark Twain. His boyhood home in Missouri gave him the setting for Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer. His father died at 11, giving rise to the sorts of stories of unsuperivsed boys going about their adventures. He also worked on a riverboat on the Mississippi, as a printer, 
a soldier, a miner, and a journalist, and had a passing interest in parapsychology (even being an early member of the Society for Psychical Research).  I see Twain's works as the cumulative collection of his life's experiences combined with a fair amout of education, wit, and genius. 

He also never wore shoes. Ever. 

Then there are those who use something from their own lives. Just a little something, a memory, an experience, a hobby. I like to use Michael Crichton as an example. The guy was a trained doctor, and a very successful one. I think he was probably one of those really annoying people who was very successful at everything he did, but he left some great books behind. Congo, Sphere, Jurrasic Park, and the list goes on. 

Odds are, Crichton didn’t actually experience raising dinosaurs from the dead (though he did apparently experiment with astral projection, aura viewing, and clairvoyance. So he was probably a superhero). But he did know a lot about genetics, and he applied those ideas in every strange, creative way he could imagine. He became disenchanted with the medical industry, deciding to go full time into this writing thing. 

Which led to Chris Patt  making out with Ron Howard's daughter.
We all saw this coming. 

But this is not a skill limited to Michel Crichton. Face it, you know something about something. Hopefully. Maybe you think that something is stupid. Maybe you can’t think of any way to apply it to fiction. Try this—could that something you know ever be used to take over the world? Could that something ever be a really interesting hobby or quirk for a main character? Could that something be used by an enemy for leverage, be corrupted into a weapon, be adapted into a life-saving treatment? What would your something look like in 100 years? 1000 years? This is where fiction comes from.

Personal example. I’ve played trumpet for years. It is almost completely a useless skill expect for the rare occasion someone needs me to play for a wedding, a church needs me for a service, or a friend needs help waking his kids up in the morning. 

Children hate me. 

I was working on a storyline as a combination short story/tabletop rpg I was playing with some friends in college (we were cool). I created a vampire character who was a jazz musician in a large city. He only came out at night cause that’s when the gigs were. He was able to lead a relatively normal life as a musician, and a completely unrealistic life as a vampire. I’ve never been a vampire, but I knew how to write him as a musician. I knew what it feels like to play a gig that falls to pieces, when the audience only claps out of sympathy. I know the rush of a show well-played, honest cheers, catching the eyes of fellow musicians. So I wrote about that. All the vampire stuff in-between, that came as it would.

Write what you know doesn't mean giving up and retelling your trip to Europe over and over again. But it does mean you can use that as a starting point. 

Things Only Stephen King Can Get Away With

I have a terrible commute.

Even Google Maps is like "This might take you an hour. Or not.
Not really sure. Have fun."

Because of this, I have listened to an unsual amount of audio books. I highly suggest this as a way of life for anyone else out there with a terrible commute. Go to your public library and investigate all those books you always meant to read but never had the chance. With an hour commute, you can finish a book a month just in the time you usually lose to Radiohead and Ke$ha.

On these commutes, I've been "reading" through Stephen King's Dark Tower series. I cannot really express how incredible this has been, as it is one of those stories that transitions very well to an oral telling. I'm going to wait to gush about this series until I've finished it (NO-NO SPOILERS. I know it's been out for years and I could just Google it. That's not the point).

I must be careful. 

But in the course of this series, I have discovered that, believe it or not, Stephen King does not follow the same rules as you or I. Stephen King does what Stephen King wants. And it doesn't matter what creative writing courses might be forgotten, what rules undone. But today, I heard him break a big one.

Don't hide information from your readers. Hide information from your characters, yes, but never from your readers. 

I'm in Wolves of the Calla, Book 5 of the Dark Tower series.*

I'm not going to go into annoying detail here, but in essence, Eddie Dean learns something from another character, right at the end of a chapter. King does the classic "fade-away" technique, drawing away from the conversation just as Eddie learns the advice about their enemies that TOTALLY changes everything about the story. Instead of letting us overhear every word that the characters have been saying, like he has for the entire chapter, King decides to cut right here, and leave us hanging.

You know, ok. It's his story. Let's let him do his thing. I guess we're not supposed to know yet. But then...THEN- Eddie Dean tells this new, incredible information to Roland Deschain, the main charcter (Cowboy/Jedi/Superhero), and yet again, we aren't allowed to hear it. Instead, King concentrates his writing on Roland's face while Eddie tells him this vital information, and yet again we are forced to wait around for the story to get around to the truth.

Stephen King can do this incredibly annoying writing technique, because we trust him. Honestly, I'm in Book 5 of this series, and I know that I'm gong to stick it out till the end. He could introduce literally anything at this point, and I would still read it. (Also, because of the relative insanity of this series, he could happy Miss Piggy leading a communist revolt against the citizens of Fraggle Rock, and it would still somehow make sense).

Inevitable. 

I tried this technique once, in a creative writing class with Judy Troy at Auburn University. I wrote this perfectly mediocre story about a boy and his divorced mothing dealing with his going off to college and leaving her all alone. I was really trying to tap into real emtional human stuff, really the kind of thing I try to avoid nowadays. But here's the weird thing. I had this whole story wrapped up in the main character's brother, a few years younger than him, who also didn't want to see him go. And we saw this little brother misbehave, act out, and through the whole story we just think he's young and growing up in a hard situation. But then at the end, I revealed that the brother was actually a 17 year old mentally handicapped person this whole time! 

And doesn't that just change everything? Wasn't it clever of me to fool you all into thinking this was just a little boy, that all the emotions I was trying to express here were really just a ploy, a distraction from the overall reveal of a side character's...true age?

Yeah. It was terrible. 

I was scolded incessantly by Judy until I realized that I am not allowed to play this game. If my characters know something, I need to let the readers know it too, instead of creating false tension by holding information behind. This seems like a very natural and easy trap to fall in to, but I know, at the end of the day, my story will be better for it. After all, if my story is good enough, there should be enough tension to keep readers interested without cheating.




*Let me here acknowledge that this is a little weird because I've been listening to this on audiobook, so I can't actually cite any lines here. I could go buy the book, or get it from the library, or find that one particular disk and listen to it enough times so I can write the word exactly, but that sounds terrible.

Try A New Perspective

I've never been comfortable writing in the 1st person. Whenever I have a story idea, I see it in my head as happening to someone else. The film in my head plays out like...a film, with discernable 3rd person characters, because Hollywood hasn't come up with a good equivalent of a "Write Your Own Adventure" novel.

This and "Blair Witch" are the closest we've come.
Plus, Jason Bourne's shaky cam. 

I'm not sure why I envision my storylines this way. I think part of it is because I was trained as a Medievalist, always envisioning a glorious past. People have been writing about the Trojan War since long after Troy even had the possibility of existing. And it is hard to write about something that happened so long ago as if I was a part of it. Other people were. I'm trying to tell their story.

Perhaps it's because I think less of where I am, and more of where other people are.* That I've always imagined that characters are doing something more exciting than I've ever done.

When really, I should accept that few ever will. 

This flips me into an interesting conundrum. I've never felt hampered by the 3rd person before. In fact, I believe that most of my favorite stories were written in the 3rd person. 

        Here are the first three stories to come to my mind:

1. Harry Potter- J.K. Rowling's epic explanation of why people can be terrible while they're young, and can still turn into great people. Give them a chance. (Seriously though, every adult in his life was a terrible kid. But the important ones got over it).
2. The Once and Future King- a guys finds a sword, another finds a cup. There's a lot of excitement in-between, though. You should really give it a look. 
3. Back in Action- a children's book by Elvira Woodruff which was a favorite of mine, concerning the adventures of 10 year old Noah and a magic powder which shrunk him and his friend to the size of his action figures, who also happened to come to life. This was an important tale to young me, who, with no shortage of real friends, always imagined having more.   

But let there not be equal representation here. After all, if there were not a conundrum, I would not be writing a blog post about this. 

Star Wars is the answer. I miss when Video Games allowed you to choose between the two pov's.

It makes a difference. 

Because sometimes you need to feel the stormtroopers burn as you swing. And sometimes you don't. 

Here's the flipside, that "outsider's pov."

      Books which are fantastic in the 1st person:

1. Gulliver's Travels- the story of a man learning what it is like to have ultimate power, ultimate weakness, and terrible ignorance. There are also horses, if you like that kind of thing.
2. The Historian- a book that will make you think vampires are really, historically real, and will also anger you because of the unbelievable, unmimicable effort that Elizabeth Kostova put into her world building. 
3. The Hunger Games- about the kids from children's television shows like Clarissa Explains it All and Clifford, all pitted against each other in a ring of death. [Seriously though- Suzanne Collins is a super genius, fantastic writer, and someone I'd be uneasy asking to babysit).  

So, here's my own experience. I've been writing on this book off-and-on for a few years (yes, my projects always run in the years because I have trouble commiting and I have always had to have 'real person jobs.' Annoying). I had it in 3rd person until just recently, when I decided to try shifting, and I've really enjoyed the result. 

Original 3rd person perspective:

Highway 280 was a lonely road from Sylacauga. It was only an hour and a half drive, past Alex City, past Dadeville…and then nothing but trees, which can make an hour pass in minutes with the right company, and minutes pass in hours with the wrong. Although they drove at a steady pace, there was the illusion of being motionless. Not even the leaves waved as they passed, the wind giving way to an August heat. They called it Fall Semester, but true fall, seasonal fall, wouldn’t come till late October, and two months of rising heat and scarce rain had scorched the Alabama landscape. The endless asphalt grey road radiated heat waves, only disturbed by the occasional pothole and the more than occasional patch of roadkill brown. 

New, first-person perspective, which I believe is an improvement:

"My name is Ryan Aleman. This all started in August, when we drove down to Auburn for the beginning of the semester. Highway 280 is a lonely road from Sylacauga. In the hour and a half drive, past Alex City, past Dadeville…there’s nothing but trees, which can make an hour pass in minutes with the right company, and minutes pass in hours with the wrong. We drove at a steady pace, but there was the illusion of being motionless. Not even the leaves waved as we passed, the wind giving way to an August heat. Yeah, they called it Fall Semester, but true fall, seasonal fall, wouldn’t come till late October, and two months of rising heat and scarce rain had scorched the Alabama landscape. The endless asphalt grey radiated heat waves, only disturbed by the occasional pothole and the more than occasional patch of roadkill brown."

It's a subtle change, but one I'm growing more and more confident with. I think it provides more imediacy, more insight into the character. I don't feel so bad dwelling on Ryan's thoughts, or describing what he sees. I guess, for some reason, this is just a story that I needed to tell from behind a set of eyes, instead of from the sky.

I just had to open myself up to the possibility. 

*(Although, I do believe that this often happens when authors try writing in the opposite gender, when it feels most natural to say, "she's doing this," or "he's throwing this," or "that person over there who feels different from me is having experiences." All I'm saying, in the relative safety of these parentheses, is that authors who are afraid of showing gender bias are probably more likely to write in 3rd person.)

Draw from Other Genres

My heart lies in the fantastic—fantasy and science fiction. There is often, as well, a certain ridiculous element that shows itself. 

Just imagine--in a few more years those horns will curl around enough to reach his mouth,
so he can blow great trumpet blasts right into his own head. 

I do enjoy, every now and then, writing a memoir, or a short-story with reasonably adult characters with jobs and mortgages, where the tensions lie in secrets or sexual tension, etc. And that’s all well and fine, but I always feel this pull towards something else. I never seem to last long in a “normal” world, perhaps because I use reading and writing as such an escape from my “normal world.”

After all, I too have a normal 8-5 job, bills to pay, a future to fret about. If I’m going to write a hero, that hero’s going to have a big flaming sword and a pet dragon and the issue he's dealing with has a lot less to do with the ennui of a life in suburbia and a lot more to do with the mystical viking martians who have crashlanded in the ancient mountains of his forefathers. 

AND TRUMPET GOAT WILL BE HIS STEED

As such, I tend to read works somewhere within the range of fantasy fiction (which is a wide range. A traditional definition would have Twilight and The Historian in the same category—a criminal offense). This does make sense: read what you write, know the genre, the trends. Know what storylines and tropes have been used and overused so you can avoid them. But there is another way to be original, I think.

My fiancé recently introduced me to the works of L.M. Montgomery, and such delightful characters as Anne of Green Gables and Emily of New Moon. I am thankful for this, because these are not books that I would ever think to pick up on my own, and as a boy without sisters, they were not on my childhood reading list.

Montgomery is, first and foremost, a fantastic writer. I approached her books as a skeptic. The covers didn’t appeal to me, and neither did the titles, the settings, or the blurbs on the backs.

Everything about this is designed to repel me. In book stores,
 I would literally see blank space on a shelf in place of this

It was literally a labor of love for me to even crack one open. But I have changed my tune, now. It is most amazing that Montgomery can make the daily dramas in the life of a nine year old girl seem to be the most important things in the world for those three pages. Her characterization is absolute, her world building on-par with the most successful fantasy or sci-fi authors.  

And there is freshness there, new subjects and phrases that I have never seen in a modern books of fantasy fiction. Something I drew away, for instance, was how she describes the Canadian scenery:

“It was November--the month of crimson sunsets, parting birds, deep, sad hymns of the sea, passionate wind-songs in the pines. Anne roamed through the pineland alleys in the park and, as she said, let that great sweeping wind blow the fogs out of her soul.”

                -Anne of Green Gables

I especially recall the way she wrote about the flowers, because I’ve never cared a bit for flowers and would never think I could enjoy a book so much that spent so much time on them. That’s the joy of a good book. You enjoy it even when you can’t believe that you’re enjoying it.

And those kinds of words can make it into any genre, any setting. There’s no reason words like these have to stay in late 19^th century Prince Edward Island. They can stretch to any world or time I could possibly invent. This is a real lesson I learned from reading L.M. Montgomery. Good writing is not limited to any particular genre. And so, learning to write should include reading all the best works, learning from the best authors of every age, style, and subject. 

Learn How to Create

For anyone who hasn’t read my last two blog entries ("Goodbye my Darlings" and "Learn How to Copy"), it may seem obvious to encourage a writer to create, rather than copy. But in a world so saturated by stories, and a culture so obsessed by the best and worst of them, it is often difficult to separate ourselves both consciously and subconsciously from what we’ve already known. 

A friend of mine wrote a poem in 8th grade that he was incredibly proud of. It had everything a poem should - beautiful imagery, clever wording, a passionate outpouring of emotion. Then his teacher pointed out to him that he had inadvertantly copied much of the content, and sometimes almost the exact wording, from a poem by Wordsworth. 

Feeling discouraged with the fickleness of poetry, my friend grew up and became a doctor. 

But can't you see the poetry still yearning to crawl forth from his hollow smile?

I know I've fallen victim to this myself. I've cursed Orsen Scott Card several times for "stealing" several of my ideas--by writing them decades before I thought of them. 

To create something original, something both in-tune with the stories that a culture is currently consuming, while pressing forward towards something new, is difficult. It means getting uncomfortable. It means taking chances. And that may also mean turning your work into something completely different.

This is hard.

Or at least it's hard for me. You might be brilliant at it. I don't know your life.

The reason it is hard to really create, in my opinion, is because we learn through mimicry. As humans, we learn to speak by listening to others speak. We learn speech patterns and mannerisms by watching our parents communicate. 

Be open to eating warthogs and meerkats, unless they offer a greater supply of food and songs

For this reason, it is hard for us to do things we have never seen, i.e. difficult for men to act as fathers if they had no father figure in their own lives. We live, we learn, by copying.

And then, so that we do not repeat their mistakes or becomes clones of our parents, we adapt what we’ve seen. In a way, we learn history for the same reason. We learn what other people have done, both good and bad, so we can apply those lessons to our own lives. Teaching Monet in art class and Mozart in music class is the exact same as teaching Marx in economics and Stalin in government. We take those lessons and use them.  

Yes, I'm talking about painters again

I had an English teacher tell me that Shakespeare knew all of the rules, so he could break them. There is an extra step, forward movement past successful mimicry and into creation. I think few of us would be satisfied with being able to make “really, really good copies.” We want something original.  

I thought I had done it, with my decade-long novel project. I thought I had created something in a grand tradition, another piece in the puzzle that is the fantasy novel. I had mimicked and drawn something that seems so familiar and yet so very much my own.

But, no—I had very carefully and wonderfully crafted something that the world does not need—a copy.

I see now that though the world didn’t need it, I did. I needed it. To learn. I was just one step behind where I thought I was.   

Degas said—“You have to copy and recopy the masters, and it’s only after having proved oneself as a good copyist that you can reasonably try to do a still life of a radish.”

(Seriously, these painters have all the quotes)

Of course, the HOW is much more difficult. How do we press forward? How do I move past the tropes, the stereotypes?

I start by asking myself this—“Have I seen it before? Is it a character, or a theme, or a setting, or an entire universe ripped from another’s story? Am I rewriting known stories with such minor changes the differences are only superficial?

If I have seen it, if it feels too familiar…then it probably is. Try again.