No, that is not a Frank Sinatra song used as the theme for a popular sitcom.
I have been thinking about this for quite a while now. There are words whose definitions we exaggerate to the point of hyperbole in an effort to convey strong feelings. E.g.:
“I love this new book.”
“Watching that movie was torture.”
I’m calling time-out to consider whether these are appropriate uses.
Chris Sims has given more thought to Scooby-Doo than ever I and fifty of my closest friends combined have done. And he has discovered some things about the cartoon that have been sitting in plain sight but haven’t previously been noticed much.
I started with Scooby-Doo when Scooby-Doo started in 1969; the show was part of my regular Saturday morning cartoonfest (back when I voluntarily woke up before noon). It didn’t take me long to understand that Daphne would get the gang deeper into trouble, that Shaggy and Scooby would alternate between making a comic stand in the face of danger and running full-tilt from that danger, and that Fred and Velma would put their heads together and think their way to solving the mystery. There was always a con-man behind the curtain who would have gotten away with his nefarious schemes had it not been for those meddling kids. Sims tells us why this works and explores its larger implications.
There’s plenty for writers to think about here. Enjoy.
Welcome back to another year of Catsignal.
This is shaping up to be a busy year for me as I add teaching duties to my usual freelance work. Consequently, the Pen to Paper feature may become more of a weekly link or linkfest rather than deep, well-considered insight from me. But there are lots of writers with valuable things to say to us, and I’ll be pleased to help spread their words. (What the new schedule might mean for fiction on Thursdays remains to be seen. I haven’t written anything for this week yet…)
As proof, we’re going to start things off with a funny, yet perceptive, look at projects we have effectively abandoned: Twelve Ways to tell if Your Novel is Dead. I’ve got a couple of these that I might just as well admit are as finished as they’re going to get … but I don’t think I will.
I have read a few things – a very few things – by Vaclav Havel. I don’t remember what they were, though. I read them because he wrote them, and I knew who he was, and when you respect someone you are inclined to read at least a little of what he has written.
Havel was one of those rare, shining creatures – a writer whose words made an enormous difference in his own lifetime – that the rest of us scribes admire and, in our weaker moments, envy. He was a playwright who became a dissident and helped to lead his people from life under the Soviet yoke to one of self-determination, and who led then as president of his country. That’s a heck of a story arc, but few of us would care to emulate his years in prisons and a labor camp, no matter how many books we might sell afterward.
He is gone now, but his words and his example remain for us always.
A confession (and, simultaneously, an undignified boast): I was always that kid in school who did a perfect or near-perfect first and only draft of a writing assignment. After years of voracious reading, I knew how sentences should be constructed because I had seen so many of them, and I was a good speller. From handwritten work through my typewriter years, I did one neat, well-crafted version and handed it in.
I despised the occasional assignment which required a messy, marked-up first draft and then the revised, neat, finished paper. I would always write what I needed to and then reverse engineer a rough draft to satisfy my teacher’s pedanticism. Such, then, was the state of my abilities (and my ego).
After getting a word processor, though, and discovering the endless joys of painlessly changing a word to improve a sentence, and of moving entire paragraphs around, I have become an inveterate revisionist reviser editor of my own work.
And that is how the best work is produced. The writer must go back through his story and make certain that every word, every concept is as it should be. Sometimes this will be a simple process; other times, it will mean rewriting the story essentially from scratch.
Setting can be a crucial part of your story. It doesn’t have to be; some stories get by on a bare minimum of “this is where and when we are.” For example, Accept Our Condolences does not tell the reader when or even where it takes place; other than the mention of an end table, leading one to understand the story takes place in a home, there is no setting. In Popgun, though, the setting is paramount to telling the tale. And in The Library Patron, I put more effort into describing the personnel and places than I generally do, simply because I felt it was valuable information. As with most things, give the reader whatever he needs to make sense of and enjoy the story, and withhold that which is merely window dressing.
So what goes into setting? You’ve got time, place, and the standard five senses, of course, plus the reactions of your characters to what they sense. The more you can deliver through the eyes of your characters, generally the better off you are. For example, you can baldly tell your readers, “It was a dark and stormy night.” Or you can have an exchange of dialogue between two characters:
“Oh! the lightning is so bright!” Gladys shrieked.
“Yes,” Rupert agreed, “and the thunder is about to shake that vase right off the mantelpiece.”
Okay, that doesn’t necessarily improve on Bulwer-Lytton’s original, but you get the idea.
In working with your setting, accuracy has to be a target, and you want to hit one of the inner rings. Except under carefully controlled conditions, a story about the Civil War will not include a scene in which President Lincoln radios instructions to General Lee. Or let’s say you set a story in the Greater Kansas City Metropolitan Area in which you describe the scenic view of the Missouri River from Shawnee Mission Parkway. You would perhaps achieve a perfectly acceptable verisimilitude for most of your readers, but the locals would howl either in outrage or derision or both. It pays to look up little details like that, and it has never been easier to do so than it is today.
We all know what an apostrophe is, but I see them misused daily. Although I don’t imagine that most of my readers need it, here is a basic primer on how to use apostrophes. Send the link to someone you care about who needs it. (Or maybe to someone you despise who needs it.)
Titles: either they come to you in a flash or you struggle with them for perhaps longer than it took to write the story.
The title is the first point of contact with a potential reader, which makes it pretty important. It’s got to catch your attention sufficiently that you read the first paragraph. After that, the story has to sell itself.
B.W. Clough and David Steffen offer some helpful hints on giving your story just the right title with examples of things that work and things that don’t.
Even the best writers have title trouble. Some of Shakespeare’s titles wouldn’t leap off the shelf at me: Two Gentlemen of Verona, As You Like It, All’s Well that Ends Well (why bother, then?), Much Ado About Nothing (ditto). He did much better with The Tempest and The Taming of the Shrew.
Other top writers have also had difficulty creating titles to match their works. Here’s a list, compiled by Emily Temple, of famous books that began life with different names than we know them by. One she missed for Gone With the Wind was Mules in Horses’ Harnesses.
There is a tradition that haiku is divided into two parts: real haiku, which are about nature, and senryu, which are about people. These basic divisions get redivided by whoever is doing the analysis. Elizabeth St. Jacques has three categories of haiku (the third one is an overlap of the first two), and in her article she has plenty of examples of how to tell one from another.
Michael Dylan Welch sees four categories, which he describes. He notes that the division between haiku and senryu is sharp and serious in Japan, but believes English-language poets and lovers of poetry can afford to do without the distinction.
Jane Reichhold gives us the sordid history of senryu and why the gulf between the two forms is so wide in Japan. She also tells us how one of the great early importers of haiku-form poetry was very selective in the ones he gave the English-speaking world. She goes further than Welch and makes a cogent argument for English poets to drop the very idea of senryu in favor of, simply, haiku. Her reasoning makes good sense to me, and I intend to follow it.
* * *
In other haiku news, I learned yesterday that one of my haiku will be used at tinywords, the haiku site run by poet D. F. Tweney. So if you aren’t already, start reading tinywords daily for all the wonderful haiku found there and to, eventually, see this Catsignal classic.
The briefest of introductions will suffice today. I’m sending you to read plenty of someone else’s words. Writer David Farland reminds us of the power of storytelling and that what we do is most emphatically not a trivial waste of time. This is one to help recharge your battery.
