Category: Writing

The Hook

Still catching up on my Writer Unboxed reading and came across Sarah Callender discussing a book that hadn’t hooked her at the start (but she kept reading because it was for her book club). In retrospect, she says,

These sentences did not pique my interest or ground me in the story. The narrative voice was dry, and I didn’t immediately see a desire or a conflict in Rask. And where on earth were the aliens?!? I simply could not get my bearings.

Of course, after listening to the whole story, the style, the narrative distance, and the rather “blah” collection of opening details made sense, but perhaps Diaz was giving readers too much credit? Perhaps he trusted that readers would stick with him, would trust his storytelling, no matter what? But what if they didn’t? What if he lost readers because they couldn’t get their bearings in the story?

Callender got me thinking again about openings. What makes a good opening? What will help hook readers to keep reading?

(Just have to get off my chest:  I do hate the impatience of our society. Not just with book openings. How the opening weekend so defines the success of a film. The first primaries/caucuses define the winning candidate (I remember when that wasn’t the case). Etc. Okay, enough griping about the state of the world. )

In my writing class, I had the students do an exercise of generating 20 opening lines (adapted from a writing course I took many, many years ago). The guidance was:

The only criteria are that they must be active, contain if not a name, then a suggestion of a character, and not be 20 of the same thing.

Like a Freewriting Exercise, don’t think about it too hard. The idea here is write ’em fast and not try to control them very much. Turn off the brain that wants to make sense of the images that pop into your head. However absurd, dark, bland…write them down.

If you get stumped…then you’re trying too much to use your analytical brain to do this. Stop analyzing and just write something ridiculous and see what it is.

It’s a great brainstorming exercise. I hadn’t really been looking  for great openings, just self-created prompts for story ideas. The students return to them after letting them rest for at least a day, see if they can expand 3-4 out to paragraph, and then choose one to write still further on.

But the first time I did this, wow were students challenged by the guidance to make them active and have a suggestion of character. Which made me think deeper on the exercise and how to better scaffold it for students – and teach more about hooks.

So second time, I started with the classic bad opening line:

It was a dark and stormy night…

I had to explain that Madeleine L’Engle had intentionally used the already notorious bad opening for her A Wrinkle In Time, rather than being the originator of it (which goes back to the 19th century). And then noted how it’s been also parodied by other writers, such as Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett‘s Good Omens:

IT WAS A NICE DAY. All the days had been nice. There had been rather more than seven of them so far, and rain hadn’t been invented yet.

Wikipedia has a whole article on it and its parodies.

Then we settled down to discussing why it is bad. Now, Wikipedia says it is

“the archetypal example of a florid, melodramatic style of fiction writing”,[1] also known as purple prose.

But for me, it boils down to “It was” rather than an action verb or any suggestion of a character. Are these essential to an opening? Well, no. Look at, again, A Wrinkle in Time, and Good Omens. But damn, they’re helpful if you want to hook readers.

To further guide them, I gave them some examples of openings with action and suggestion of a character. Here are the ones I selected.

  • “She felt their eyes, all those executioners.” Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Chain-Gang All-Stars (2023)
  • “Why be in such a hurry, old fool? What good is hurry going to do you?” Conrad Aiken  Great Circle (1933)
  • “I remember it all with a vividness that marks the moment as the watershed it would be.” Ayad Akhtar  American Dervish (2012)
  • “On the day the world received its first phone call from heaven, Tess Rafferty was unwrapping a box of tea bags.” Mitch Albom  The First Phone Call From Heaven (2013)

The first three provide the hint of the character merely in a personal pronoun (from 3rd, 2nd, and 1st person POVs) and the third actually gives a name.

Callender, in her Writer Unboxed post, offers up her own selection of opening lines she likes. She also goes beyond the hook to discuss opening paragraphs and orienting readers. For her,

Ideally, these first paragraphs do at least a few of the following:

  • Establish a compelling narrative voice
  • Allude to the protagonist’s desire or need
  • Center the reader in the world of the story
  • Pique the reader’s interest

Looking over opening lines of books you like is a great exercise (or looking at opening shots in movies and how they set up the themes. I think of the opening of The Searchers, so echoed in its close – or the opening of The Godfather). Find ones that hook you – and I bet they have action and suggestion of character.

Relationship diagrams

I was reading Writer Unboxed (a favorite pastime) and Kristan Hoffman was passing along tips from a writers’ conference (and about navigating such a conference). One thing in particular caught my eye:

  • Diagram the relationships between your characters. The more connections between them, the more interesting it will be. (“It’s supposed to be messy!”) — Julia Vee

Along with it was this accompanying examples:

That immediately got me diagramming how my characters in my novels relate. The image on the left, as I would read it, is not that all the supporting characters simply relate to the main character (not just boring, but unlikely), but that they only relate to each other via the main character and their relationship to that person. That would be boring. I thought it was an interesting – and valuable exercise – so thought I would pass it along. 

One other tip that stood out to me was:

Even with a bad pitch, you might still get your sample pages read — but a good pitch can get an agent excited, and that’s a whole different mindset. — Mary C. Moore

I’ve ended up doing a lot of interviewing of candidates for jobs along the way and always recall reading that one subconsciously makes a decision in the first few minutes and (unless one is very alert to it) the rest is confirmation bias – subconsciously looking for things to confirm that positive or negative first impression (which can lead to bad decision making). But essentially that’s sort of what Moore is referring to: a good pitch can lead to a positive trending confirmation bias.  

Grit vs. Inspiration

I’ve written a few times before about Octavia Butler’s quote, “Screw inspiration” – a nod to the potential excuse of lack of inspiration to keep one from writing everyday. Now I have a corresponding Stephen King quote vs. Rachel Toalson’s post “How to Get Your Butt in the Chair and Build a Writing Practice” over at WriterUnboxed:

Amateurs sit and wait for inspiration, the rest of us just get up and go to work.

The whole piece is a nice reflection from that quote. Toalson says,

Writers often ask me how I get so much done. How I write so many books. Well, I do the work. I work really hard at the work. I schedule writing sessions, and I write. And sometimes that writing is terrible, and sometimes it’s almost great. Sometimes it’s a little of both. I just keep moving forward, regardless of how the session is going at that point in time.

And there’s a hint in my process: I schedule my writing sessions. I realize not everyone works well with a schedule—but it does help develop a habit. My kids now know what time I write, and they know not to disturb me during a writing session unless it’s an emergency (and we’ve had multiple conversations about what constitutes an emergency, trust me; no, it is not an emergency that someone lost his favorite Pokémon card).

Toalson goes on to offer 12 steps on how to do the work (yep, writing as a 12-step program).  I particularly appreciate her final step:

And remember there’s room for bad writing

Bad writing is part of the process, just as failure is part of experimentation and discovery. If you are focused on getting out polished, ready-to-go writing, you are likely not going to get anywhere with your project. Like with gemstones, you’ve got to mine your ideas first. Start with the draft. Get it down on paper. Then polish and cut to end up with that (hopefully publishable) gem.

Anne Carson on writing

My father sent me an old profile on Anne Caron.  I’ve employed her If Not, Winter in a Sappho class. For a class which sadly lost a member, I used Catullus 101 and Carson’s Nox (based in part on the Catullus poem) – both lamenting the loss of a brother – as the basis for a project to allow the students to express their grief. So it was a delight to read this profile and I would highly recommend it. Among the other tidbits of insight, her description of writing struck a cord:

On writing: “we’re talking about the struggle to drag a thought over from the mush of the unconscious into some kind of grammar, syntax, human sense; every attempt means starting over with language. starting over with accuracy. i mean, every thought starts over, so every expression of a thought has to do the same. every accuracy has to be invented. . . . i feel i am blundering in concepts too fine for me.”

Non-Fiction Books I Have Read Lately

The first that comes to mind is Matthew Salesses’ Craft in the Real World. From the opening of the blurb on his website:

A groundbreaking resource for fiction writers, teachers, and students, this manifesto and practical guide challenges current models of craft and the writing workshop by showing how they fail marginalized writers, and how cultural expectations inform storytelling.

While the book looks to diversifying voices by challenging the writing workshop model, another way to describe it is that Salesses highlights the “givens” of writing craft and calls upon writers to think about them as conscious craft choices.  I’d highly recommend it to anyone. I have also used some of the writing exercises in a class I was teaching and the students really liked them.

Other than that, I’ve been reading fiction, books for my the classes I teach, or just doing my own writing.

Authorial Intent vs. Reader Response Pt. 2

On Tuesday, I shared some quotes from authors rejecting symbolic interpretations of their works. Today, I want to come from the other side: authors who embrace reader response.

First from William Golding, author of Lord of the Flies, on interpretations of that book:

There have been so many interpretations of the story that I’m not going to choose between them. Make your own choice. They contradict each other, the various choices. The only choice that really matters, the only interpretation of the story, if you want one, is your own. Not your teacher’s, not your professor’s, not mine, not a critic’s, not some authority’s. The only thing that matters is, first, the experience of being in the story, moving through it. Then any interpretation you like. If it’s yours, then that’s the right one, because what’s in a book is not what an author thought he put into it, it’s what the reader gets out of it.

Second from John Green (author of The Fault in Our Stars):

Things belong to the people that use them, not to the people who create them.

I’ll admit, I fall more on this side of things. I’m not saying there is no wrong interpretation of a story (now I’m thinking of a student in one of my film classes who thought having the Nazis show up in The Sound of Music was ridiculously over the top and unnecessary, leaving me to explain that it was actually based on a true story and the Nazis were really part of that story). But once you write and share your writings, you have set it free and are no longer in control. Whatever symbolism you intended or didn’t intend, it will be what the readers see that ultimately defines your work. 





Authorial Intent vs. Reader Response (Pt. I)

Yesterday, I talked about authorial voice. I recognized, however, it can be a questionable endeavor to assert what an author really meant. Intra-textual clues can guide one or external communications with the author might assert elements.  It can be more difficult when the author lived a couple of millennia ago in a different cultural context than the reader’s, like in the case of Sophocles. Or if one is asserting implicit symbolism or meaning encoded in the text when the intra-textual clues are ambiguous.

Thus, as I thought about the authorial voice, I also thought about authorial intent vs. reader response. Just to toss out a few definitions:

First, authorial intent:

Authorial intentionalism is the view that an author’s intentions should constrain the ways in which a text is properly interpreted.

Authorial intentionalism has been tackled but another of different schools of literary criticism, but here I’m going to limit myself to reader response theory. It is nicely summarized over at the Poetry Foundation:

[Read Response Theory] gained prominence in the late 1960s, that focuses on the reader or audience reaction to a particular text, perhaps more than the text itself. Reader-response criticism can be connected to poststructuralism’s emphasis on the role of the reader in actively constructing texts rather than passively consuming them. Unlike text-based approaches such as New Criticism, which are grounded upon some objective meaning already present in the work being examined, reader-response criticism argues that a text has no meaning before a reader experiences—reads—it. The reader-response critic’s job is to examine the scope and variety of reader reactions and analyze the ways in which different readers, sometimes called “interpretive communities,” make meaning out of both purely personal reactions and inherited or culturally conditioned ways of reading.

Today, I thought I’d share a couple of quotes from authors whom I like who are rejecting how readers interpret symbolism in their works in ways they hadn’t intended. I’ll come back later this week with a quote or two from author(s) who fall more in the reader response category.

First from Flannery O’Connor from a letter:

Week before last I went to Wesleyan and read “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.” After it I went to one of the classes where I was asked questions. There were a couple of young teachers there and one of them, an earnest type, started asking the questions. “Miss O’Connor,” he said, “why was the Misfit’s hat black?” I said most countrymen in Georgia wore black hats. He looked pretty disappointed. Then he said, “Miss O’Connor, the Misfit represents Christ, does he not?” “He does not,” I said. He looked crushed. “Well, Miss O’Connor,” he said, “what is the significance of the Misfit’s hat?” I said it was to cover his head; and after that he left me alone. Anyway, that’s what’s happening to the teaching of literature.

The second from Ursula K. Le Guin and her The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction:

In many college English courses the words “myth” and “symbol” are given a tremendous charge of significance. You just ain’t no good unless you can see a symbol hiding, like a scared gerbil, under every page. And in many creative writing courses the little beasts multiply, the place swarms with them. What does this Mean? What does that Symbolize? What is the Underlying Mythos? Kids come lurching out of such courses with a brain full of gerbils. And they sit down and write a lot of empty pomposity, under the impression that that’s how Melville did it.

The third from Ernest Hemingway and his Selected Letters 1917-1961:

Then there is the other secret. There isn’t any symbolysm [sic]. The sea is the sea. The old man is an old man. The boy is a boy and the fish is a fish. The shark are all sharks no better and no worse. All the symbolism that people say is shit. What goes beyond is what you see beyond when you know.

While Le Guin is right to warn against pomposity and perhaps over- or clumsy use of symbolism, both appear to reject the meaning a reader might read into their stories (though that last line of Hemingway’s always leaves me wondering).

Authorial Voice

Some things on my mind have me thinking about authorial voice. So I’m going to do a few posts on various related topics. Authorial intent vs. reader response will come up later this week, but today I want to talk about authorial voice vs. a character’s voice.

Often times when I am teaching, this distinction is one that students struggle with. I think of the character Tecmessa in Sophocles’ Ajax. I actually used to have a pair of cats named Tecmessa and Ajax.

Tecmessa (Grey and White Tabby) and Ajax (Black Cat)

When I read it with students, they often think the play is sexist because of how Ajax treats Tecmessa (a sort of “shut up, woman” attitude). But I encourage them to note that there is a difference between a character’s voice and an author’s voice. To look beyond that one voice to see how she fits in the play as a whole. Ajax himself is dead halfway through the play, due to his rigid attitudes towards relationships and inability to adapt. Meanwhile, the definition of nobility Tecmessa asserted to Ajax (recognizing common humanity and the responsibilities we have to one another in community) is where Odysseus and Teucer (the two main positive characters) end up at the end of the play. Just because Ajax is sexist doesn’t make the play necessarily sexist. The authorial attitude towards Tecmessa is different than a single character.

This came to mind as I was reading reviews of the new Avatar: The Last Airbender series. Confession: I haven’t seen it yet. School is so crazy, I’m probably going to wait until spring break to resubscribe to Netflix and binge the dickens out of it. And the reviews don’t leave me in a hurry to watch it. I’ve already noted the discussions of Aang’s character being flattened out. The treatment of Sokka also seems flatter. Specifically, his character arc with his growth in his attitude towards women and traditional gender roles has been eliminated. As The Mary Sue notes in comparison to the Netflix One Piece live action treatment,

Taz Skylar’s Sanji was able to embrace the less-savory aspects of his character, so why was the choice to make Ian Ousley’s Sokka less sexist so prominent?Why introduce a character to develop if there is no character to develop? Much like Sanji, Sokka’s attitude toward women is a key trait that is necessary to include, in order to show growth. If the One Piece writers could navigate how to adjust Sanji to fit their series while reflecting his in-anime character, surely those writing Avatar: The Last Airbender could have done the same with Sokka.

In another post centered on this issue, the actor playing Sokka is quoted as saying:

“I feel like we also took out the element of how sexist [Sokka] was. I feel like there were a lot of moments in the original show that were iffy.”

🤦🏻‍♀️ Having a sexist character isn’t iffy -it’s how the world around the character reacts that makes it iffy or not. And Sokka’s sexism was (as I recall) shown to be in error and occasions for learning. The Mary Sue provides good specific examples and how they are handled. And note how it relates the larger issues of the social norms of the Water Tribe (that were challenged and changed in later books) as well as the war trauma Sokka had suffered as a young boy. And if you want to fight sexism, eliminating it from your narrative doesn’t accomplish anything. Including it in a character who grows from it might lead readers to see themselves and grow along with the character.

I’ll highlight how it is handled in the opening episode, as Rambler Kai notes and provides the video for on Twitter:

(This and many other Twitter examples at the Mary Sue).

I’m sad to think about the character as made less interesting and just more flat, but also see that mistake I’ve often seen in my students – mistaking a character’s voice for the authorial voice. I’ll repeat what I said about: watch how the world around the character reacts when weighing how the author might be leading you to respond to that character’s point of view. 

Kishōtenketsu

On Tuesday, I mentioned the Avatar: The Last Airbender movie (as one that should suffer damnatio memoriae). M. Night Shyamalan is to blame (no doubt along with a lot of studio-based decisions) for that monstrosity). And thus the post got me thinking about Shyamalan. I only recently learned about the Kishōtenketsu narrative structure and suddenly Shyamalan’s consistent plot twists made more sense to me.

The term Kishōtenketsu comes from the stages of the narrative:

  • Ki: introduction
  • Shō: development
  • Ten: the (plot) twist
  • Ketsu: Conclusion

This four-part structure differs from traditional Western plot structures, which tends to be conflict-oriented. Kishōtenketsu, on the other hand, centers around the twist (Ten), which not confrontation but rather a surprise which reorients audience understanding of meaning of story. Much like Shyamalan does in his movies.

When I first saw The Sixth Sense, I loved it. Then after awhile, I was put off a bit about how all his films (at that point) seemed to have a twist. While I have no idea if Shyamalan is trying to work in the Kishōtenketsu tradition, knowing about it makes me (ironically) look at his works in a different light.

Fudgesicle!

Do your characters code switch? While often in life, we have different voices (so to speak) in different circumstances (at work/school, with old friends where we have a lot of in-jokes, with trusted family and loved ones, with family with whom we can’t quite be ourselves, etc.). But in fiction, characters often have a single voice. While the author(s) have successfully differentiated voices among the separate characters, they might stick with a single voice for each. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that (for some reason, Deadpool comes to mind: same voice/language, no matter if he’s talking to a small child or a deranged psychopath and it works for his character). But, as Matthew Salesses would say, voice is a craft choice. Thus to code switch or to have a consistent voice should be a consideration – a conscious choice – when writing.

So why the title fudgesicle? I teach middle and high school. In my personal life, I can cuss like a sailor. But at school, I have to code switch and fudgesicle has become one of my favorite euphemistic swearing substitutes. I find it is even taking over my language outside of school.