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!

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.

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.  

Goodbye My Darlings

This blog is my journey through my own literary mangling. Let me explain. 

"Kill your darlings" is a phrase I have heard again and again. According to this Slate article, the etymology is far more complex than I knew going into this, as I was only familiar with a passing nod to Faulkner and this Stephen King quote:

"kill your darlings, kill your darlings,

 even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler’s heart, 

kill your darlings.”

I have a book. It has a long history.

At the time I am writing this, I have recently turned 27. The first idea for this book, so different from what it currently is, came when I was a freshman in high school, a dozen years ago. I was age 15, at most. It’s safe to say, I saw the world differently.

I had an idea, with a friend of mine, that moved from a genuinly original idea, to a pseudo-Pokémon rip-off, to a completely different kind of rip-off.

There was a break. Years. I guess, four of them. I was a freshman in college and I read Eragon. Anyone familiar with the fantasy genre, or YA literature, or even anyone who walked into a Books-a-Million in the last decade has heard of his Inheritance Cycle at one point or another. 

Seriously--this cover was everywhere

From those I have spoken to, Christopher Paolini seems to be the kind of writer that people either love or hate (or they loved for years and then learned to hate by talking to other people who already hated him, which, I think, is just terrible. If you’re going to hate a thing, at least be original about it).

My own feelings varied. I loved Eragon, at first read. I ate it up. I showed all my friends, my brother, and then we all read the next books together. I loved the world, the characters, the story. But what I loved most of all was that it seemed doable.

For those trying to be writers, there are authors to be admired, worshiped, and copied. Some authors sit on a pedestal—we don’t know how they did what they did. And there are those we read that, at the end, we say—“that was good. But not so very good. I could do that.”

I wrote a scene, trying to reach into the epic mystery I had felt when I read Eragon, the kind of writing built on Beowulf and Tolkien (but more importantly Tolkien building on Beowulf). It was a nonsense action scene, but I built a mythology on it. Hidden powers, statues becoming people, weaklings becoming warriors.

Like this, except with far less offensive language

I suppose I learned some things in college. But mostly I wrote. I can see it in all my notebooks. The notes were on the pages, but my attention was in the margins. Everything got applied to my story—anthropology, art, western civ, mythology, composition. Four years led to two more, and little changed. Now the stories were stranger, and my comments were too.

By this time I already had full printed copies. I finished the first draft on July 27, 2009. Then there was a second. By the third, I’d realized Office Depot could print double-sided, costing me half the price of paper. Instead of wasting $45 on these ring-bound, black plastic covered manuscripts, I was only wasting $23.

I had friends reading them. Rave reviews, of course. There was a good mix of friendly unawareness and actual helpfulness. My brother read the most. If I died today, he might be able to piece my story together just because of how many times we’ve sat and talking about it. I started querying agents in 2012.

I had some partials, but no dedicated interest. Nothing stuck. I rewrote and rewrote. Every year I created a new, dramatic file folder in my “writing” file. 2012. 2013. 2014. Each time, my book was revisited, redone. This was it, the version that would change it all. But it was still the same. Paolini, and Eragon, were amazing to me, and yet they were still criticized because they were “unoriginal,” a recreation of fantasy tropes. What can I make if I struggle to recreate the recreation?

It’s about perception. What story do I want to tell, and, most importantly, how do I want to tell it? What is my goal? To tell a story that my friends and family will read, over and over again, because they love me, or to create something real, something new?

I have to murder it. This twelve year old, fermenting piece of work. For now, I will set it down, work on other ideas that aren’t so mired in a decade of past words. Someday, I’ll pick it back up, and see what I can make of it. If it’s unrecognizable, that’s because it wasn’t going anywhere as it was.

This hurts, but not as much as failing would.