Christina Baker Kline

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Breath on the Glass

When I’m working on a novel, ideas rise up at random times from the murk of my subconscious like pronouncements in a Magic 8 ball.  If I don’t write them down right away, these ephemeral thoughts can fade and disappear. FoggyMirror

Driving my 14-year-old son, Hayden, to summer camp in Maine on Sunday, I put him to work as both a DJ and a scribe. (After all, I was the chauffeur.)  He selected a Green Day song from his new i-Pod touch (an 8th-grade graduation present from an indulgent grandmother), then I was allowed a song by The Fray; he picked Ben Folds, I chose Dar Williams.  Every now and then I asked him to open my writing journal – a wire-bound, college-ruled notebook with a green plastic cover – and scribble a line:

Sea air in Galway

Fiction chooses the writer

Breath on the glass

Sea air in Galway. The Maine coastline in similar, in many ways, to the west coast of Ireland, 2500 miles to the east. With this note I was reminding myself to pay particular attention to the sensory details; I thought I might be able to use these impressions in a scene in my novel.

Fiction chooses the writer. This idea for a blog post sprung from an ongoing conversation with several novelists about how and why people start writing fiction.

Breath on the glass. As we drove in the rain, I saw Hayden turn his head to look out the passenger window at two guys on a motorcycle, both without helmets, grimacing into the downpour. Hayden’s breath fogged the glass. When he turned back to me, saying, “Wow, Mom, what were they thinking?” – I glanced over again, and saw that his breath had already evaporated.  And the guys on the bike were gone.

That’s how it is with these fleeting observations, and why I asked Hayden to keep a pen handy and the notebook on his lap. And he was happy to do it – as long as he could listen to Metallica and I promised to get him to Bar Harbor on time.

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Guest Blog: Julie Metz – Some Thoughts on Memoir and Fiction

Metz, PERFECTIONThe memoirist Julie Metz, who is now working on a novel, writes:

When I wrote my memoir, Perfection, the story of my discovery of my husband’s secret life only after his sudden death, my focus was on careful recall aided by journals and letters.  And yet, since I love reading fiction, I wanted my memoir to “read” like a novel.  After many failed attempts, I found a structure for the factual narrative that allowed me to recapture my own state of mind at the moment of my husband’s death and the early months of widowhood.  The primary inspiration for my book was the fictional memoir Jane Eyre, in which an innocent narrator’s life is changed by a devastating revelation.

During this last year, while Perfection was in the final stages of publication, I began working on a new project, a novel.  I am finding it to be a very different process.  I began with a snippet of a story I’d been kicking around in my head for years, but as I got into the project in a deep way, the original story fell away as the characters became more vivid. Very little remains of the original idea except for locations and some back story.  The day I realized I had to quit forcing my original idea into the book was both sad and liberating. My attempts to direct the plot were those of a classroom bully who tries to force other kids to play by his or her rules. No one wants to play with a bully.

Now that I spend my days conjuring rather than exclusively researching my past, I frequently think of Anne Lamott’s advice in Bird by Bird: to focus not on plot but on character. I try to sit with my (mostly) made up characters and hope that if I am quiet and patient I will get to know them as well as the real people in my life, and that they will tell me what they need to do and say.

Julie Metz is a graphic designer (she co-designed the cover of her memoir), artist, and freelance writer whose work has appeared in publications including The New York Times, Glamour, and Publisher’s Weekly. Perfection: A Memoir of Betrayal and Renewal, is her first book.

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Making Conversation

Dialogue is hard to get right.  It has to sound like natural speech, when in fact it’s nothing like it.

I like to send my creative-writing students out to cafes and parks with notebooks to transcribe bits of overheard conversations.  Then I ask them to type up these transcripts and turn them into dialogue between characters.hopper 1

Inevitably their written dialogue little resembles the overheard conversations.  When you write dialogue, you have to eliminate niceties and unnecessary patter and cut to the core of the exchange — unless the patter is crucial to the story, conveying a dissembling, depressed, incoherent, or boring personality.  (The writer George Garrett called this “dovetailing.”)  At the same time, it has to sound natural, like something someone would really say.

Richard Price, in his recent novel Lush Life, allows his characters to talk and talk and talk. Price maintains a delicate balancing act; his characters’ words matter.  What they say changes the direction of the story.  But he never burdens his dialogue with exposition or forces it to convey plot points that don’t come up naturally.  In Writing Fiction, Janet Burroway says, “In order to engage us emotionally in a disagreement, the characters must have an emotional stake in the outcome.”  Price’s characters are nothing if not emotionally invested.

Price’s dialogue is vital to the story because it moves the action forward.  He constantly puts his characters in conflict with each other.  Their conversations are full of surprises – self-revelation, inadvertent admissions, hearsay, evidence.  But it sounds real: his characters’ speech has kinetic energy; it crackles with life. Real life.

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Writing Tip #5: Advice from George Orwell

george-orwellIn his essay “Politics and the English Language,” George Orwell made a list of six rules for writers. “These rules sound elementary,” Orwell wrote, “and so they are, but they demand a deep change of attitude in anyone who has grown used to writing in the style now fashionable.” Though he compiled this list in 1946, it’s as relevant and useful today as it was then:

  1. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
  2. Never use a long word where a short one will do.
  3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
  4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
  5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
  6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

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Short Chapters

Anna Karenina is more than 800 pages long. So why does it feel shorter than many 300-page books?

Anna KareninaAs I read this novel recently I noticed that Tolstoy cuts his long scenes into short chapters, usually no more than two or three pages. He often ends a chapter in a moment of suspense – a door opens, a provocative question is asked, a contentious group sits down to dinner, characters who’ve been circling each other finally begin to talk – which propels the reader forward into the next chapter.

The psychological effect of these short chapters is that this huge book is fairly easy to get through. Reading in bed late at night (as I tend to do), I’d be tempted to put it down, but then I’d riffle ahead to find that the next chapter was only three pages long.

Three pages – I can do that. And I really want to find out who’s behind that door …

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