Complications Ensue: Writing Styles Pt.2

Long, flowing prose, made up of the perfect words placed in melodic paragraphs, can be a pleasure to write, and even (occasionally) a pleasure to read. But the danger is that you’ll become mired in a swamp of indulgent vocabulary and wet spaghetti sentences. Complex doesn’t mean convoluted.

William Faulkner’s Barn Burning:

The store in which the justice of the Peace's court was sitting smelled of cheese. The boy, crouched on his nail keg at the back of the crowded room, knew he smelled cheese, and more: from where he sat he could see the ranked shelves close-packed with the solid, squat, dynamic shapes of tin cans whose labels his stomach read, not from the lettering which meant nothing to his mind but from the scarlet devils and the silver curve of fish - this, the cheese which he knew he smelled and the hermetic meat which his intestines believed he smelled coming in intermittent gusts momentary and brief between the other constant one, the smell and sense just a little of fear because mostly of despair and grief, the old fierce pull of blood.

You might think, Golly gee (which is how I imagine you talk) this is a wonderful description of a room, a town store that is being used as a makeshift courtroom, you can almost feel you’re there, and what a masterful job of realisation of a setting. Scene setting at its most vivid. And you would be wrong.

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Simply Irresistible

I’ve decided to do a couple of posts on writing styles. The first will be on clean, simple prose as mostly identified with writers like Ernest Hemingway or Raymond Carver.

This kind of writing, where you don’t use long words or complicated sentence structures is easy to read and can build into a powerful way to tell a story. However, simple does not mean simplistic.

Simplicity in writing refers to the external structure, the language you use, the number of events you cover, how you structure the narrative. But that is not the most important aspect for the writer to establish. The writer needs to know about the internal structure, what the story is about.

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Chapter One: The Hunger Games

This is a continuation of my series of first chapter dissections where I take apart the opening  chapter of a successful novel to find out what makes it work, how the author hooked the reader, which rules were followed, and which were broken to good effect (previous entries can be found here: Ch.1 Analyses).

Suzanne Collins was an established writer before she wrote The Hunger Games, having written extensively for children’s television and a series of MG books. She moved onto Young Adult with this novel in 2008, the first in a trilogy. Set in a dystopian society in the future, every year two teenagers from each district are sent to the Capitol to compete in the games.

The premise isn’t original, but I’d say the main difference from its forebears is the audience. Stories of this dark nature haven’t been aimed at teens before (even when they’ve starred teens as in Battle Royale). How the author manages to balance this mixture of children and violence is, I think, part of the book’s success.

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A is for Angry Young Men

It’s easy enough to say a character should be active, driving the story forward, have a goal etc. but what if he isn’t that sort of character?

A lot of young male writers that I read and critique in the various writers’ workshops I belong to, write about young male characters who don’t know what they want, who haven’t decided what their goal is, who don't care about anything. These writers want to write a story of discovery. They want to write about how to figure out which are the important things. They want to rage against the ridiculousness of life, in no particular order.

They want to write about these things because life doesn't conveniently offer up a neat, pre-packaged plot to give existence meaning and direction. That’s what they’re interested in, because that’s what they feel about their own lives. Certainly people have written books about such characters, so why not them? If it reads slow or aimless, then it’s literary fiction. It’s character driven. It’s intentionally mundane to reflect life. But how do you stop it being boring for the reader?

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Book Autopsy 2: A Love Story

In my last post I analysed the first chapter of Ira Levin's A Kiss Before Dying, but to be honest this was something of a soft target. As a thriller it naturally follows most of the 'rules' of contemporary literature popular with creative writing teachers and how-to books. Starting off with a hook, keeping pace high, using action to move the plot, these are all fairly standard for the genre.

My dissection of the first chapter still revealed some interesting things, but I think it would be even more intriguing to take the same approach with a book from a completely different genre: Romance.

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Chapter One Analysis

I'm going to take the first chapter of a successful novel and break it down to see how the author hooks the reader, what information he feels is necessary at this point of the story, how he approaches things like POV, character and voice.

The book I've chosen is A Kiss Before Dying by Ira Levin (Rosemary's Baby, Stepford Wives). A 237 page, tightly written suspense thriller, it is a commercial novel but with many unconventional touches, extremely well plotted with some very clever twists and turns. It was his first novel, which is also one of the reasons I chose it. Chapter One is just over four pages long.

There will be the spoilers. 

Chapter 1 starts with these lines:

His plans had been running so beautifully, so goddamned beautifully, and now she was going to smash them all. Hate erupted and flooded through him, gripping his face with jaw-aching pressure. That was all right though; the lights were out.

On the surface this gives a very clear indication of his mood.  In fact it tells the reader directly that 'he' is angry and blames 'she'. The writing is visual and the last line gives a nice sense that he's hiding his feelings, but in many ways this would seem to be a overly 'telling' start. But as we'll see, it isn't. 

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The Weird Bunch

So, I was staring into space and I noticed that the middle shelf of my bookcase is a strange mix of genres (click twice on the photo for a better view). Over on the left it's mainly fantasy books that I've had since I was a kid. I used to have a lot more but I gave them to charity. I just kept the ones I really loved, although I don't read them any more. Fritz Leiber's Fafrhd and the Gray Mouser series. Michael Moorcock's Elric, the baddest hero ever (won't catch him saving any cats). Two Narnia books — A Horse and His Boy is certainly my favourite, not sure why I kept Prince Caspian. Some very well-thumbed Tolkien.

I also have quite a few odd books. The novelisation of Harold and Maude. Cruel Shoes by Steve Martin from when he was doing silly stuff not suitable for the New Yorker (a sample line: These were not the average "contented" cows. They were cows born for trouble.)

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Take my advice

I enjoy reading “how to write” type books. Whether they're on fiction, screenwriting or plays, by established writers explaining their method, or by somebody you’ve never heard of revealing their secret formula for instant success. I find the subject fascinating — but just because their system works for them doesn’t mean it’s going to work for me.

I tend to write all night, with plenty of coffee and hard boiled eggs for sustenance. At dawn I stop everything and go jump in my private lake, cutting through the water like a fart-powered  torpedo.

—Stephen King

The problem with most of these sorts of books is this:

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Go with the flow

Apart from what a story is about, there is also the matter of how it is written. Once the reader is caught up in the story they can find themselves being drawn irresistibly through the exciting parts but just as irresistibly through slower sections. To some degree this is to do with being engaged with the story overall and the characters, but it is also to do with the way it is written. The way the words are put together, the construction of the narrative, the syntax used to create a rhythm.

Some people are obviously just gifted in this regard. They naturally put words together in an attractive way. But that doesn't mean it can't be learnt. On the most basic level there is spelling and grammar and typos. Just being able to read the text will make the flow better. But assuming those things are at a competent level, there is  another level of sophistication beyond that, which will make the narrative flow.

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Build a story, leave the door open

A story is more than a series of events that happen. Scenes have to be interesting, they have to build and they have to play a role in communicating the overall narrative. But how do you know if the scene you have written is helping to tell the story or distracting from it? One way to decide is to look at the scene and ask yourself what is its significance? Not to the character, or even to the writer, but to the story.

Most things that happen in a story can be said to have some sort of influence on the greater scheme of things if you really push it. A girl walking down the street on the way to school who notices a red sports car, which is then never mentioned again, could be said to have some symbolic or metaphorical resonance with the themes of the story. That's fine, but once you know that, you are then able to decide whether that's the best way to achieve that effect (which it may well be). Problem is most people don't do that and leave it hanging as a thing that happened in the story just because. And that's what it will read like.

If a woman is getting ready to go for a job interview and the phone rings and it’s some guy trying to convince her to switch phone plans, and once she gets rid of him she goes off to her a job interview, what’s the significance to her story? If it makes her late and she misses the bus, then that could have a very strong impact. If the guy tells her that she'd be stupid to pass up this limited special offer and she gets very irate, calling him a cocksucker who should stick his head up his own ass so he has somewhere quiet to eat his bag of dicks, and then puts the phone down and goes back to being very normal and getting ready (pink shirt or white shirt?) that tells us something about her but it has a particular significance since she's going for a job interview where that aspect of her personality may prove to be a liability (although personally I'd hire her on the spot).

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Behold, my powers of description!

Of all the different aspects of writing a story (character, story, plotting, theme, pace, suspense, what-have-you) by far the easiest to get on the page is description.  You may not know who Jack is, what he’s going to do or how he’s going to do it, but you can still get 400 words down about the boots he wears and the view from his window.

Describing stuff is a necessary part of any story, but it can also go on for quite a while. Certain genres suit a more flowery style (romance, fantasy, historical fiction) and literary fiction in general can tend towards a more deliberative use of language. But it's not enough to describe something well, you also have to know why you're describing it.

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