Last month, Will Gray called my writing "lovely." It was a horrible thing to say, as I knew the inevitable big "BUT" was sure to follow. My writing was lovely, BUT it was hard to understand in a place or two. The month before that, Will and his wife Alison had both said a piece of mine was "poetic." BUT it was, they had to concede, difficult to understand . . . in places. They even debated whether my last sentence was too beautiful to cut--even though it made absolutely no sense in the story. Thanks to their delightful encouragement, I have stopped writing altogether.
My husband is no longer finding plot ideas in the piles of half-folded laundry. He's not picking up baby toys and uncovering a wad of character names. These days he's finding books--books about how to write. And rather than listening to excerpts of my work, he's being treated to précis of Dr. Horton's Critical Writing lectures.
What have I learned in all my study? Tim Tomlinson (The Portable MFA in Creative Writing) says it best. He accuses writing students and teachers of "advancing the scintillating sentence over the ambitious story. One shudders to think what this emphasis would have done to Tolstoy."
I have "lovely" writing, "poetic" writing, AND I have always found Tolstoy difficult to read. His sentences are drab.
Here is more from Tomlinson:
This type of lyrical writing produce[s] stories recognizable for their shimmering surfaces, their elegant lines, and their completely unmemorable characters set in completely unconvincing narratives, since they are really only about shimmering surfaces and elegant lines, and not at all about anything that matters to people other than other students of shimmering surfaces and elegant lines. When the virtuoso voice or the quirky vision (both by definition rare) are elevated so above the well-told story, you wind up with perfectly made nothings.
So what do I, a chronic scintillator, do? How do I grow ambitious in my storytelling? (I am not asking about how to find ambitious stories. I have those. I want to know how to tell those stories with the ambition they deserve.)
I need to arrest my unwarranted scintillations. Now, even here, see how I snicker at the double meaning in "unwarranted." See how I change "address" to "arrest," another word with double meaninng. I should have opened this paragraph with Dr. Horton's advice: "Be bold to say it simply." But I did not. I started to dabble in scintillation. I say "started to dabble" because normally I would have spent another 15 minutes reading and rereading this paragraph to be sure it "sounded" just right. But my focus on sound over story (or, as Tomlinson would have it, sentence over story) takes away the force of the very story I'm trying to tell. To illustrate, Dr. Horton would probably hold up my sentence:
"Our mother lifted up her voice in a furious howl, twining her song with Jael's and the coyote's--a strangling braid of supplication."
and compare it with the simple force of
"Jesus wept."
Now you must admit that "strangling braid of supplication" has a nice sound. But what does it mean? Only one of the three voices is actually asking for anything, so there is no supplication. To make matters worse, there is no strangling either. Not even a little-bitty figurative strangling. That leaves me with braid. It's a nice image. Maybe I could have reworked it. Maybe. Maybe not. Dr. Horton would most likely tell me that to keep such an empty phrase is wasteful at best, and arrogant at the worst.
To be honest, part of me rebels at the thought of "neglecting" my sound. Part of me thinks that writing simply won't help me tell ambitious stories, but I am reminded of what happened at the last writer's meeting I attended.
I received the usual "poetic" remarks, but then, toward the end of my piece, people got excited. They got interested. There in the last section, just when everyone was about to be strangled by too much scintillation, my character got off his duff did something. In fact, he did something quite shocking. I recognize it now as brief moment of ambitious story, and I notice that when I finally got around to telling it, my language was sparse, my syntax was plain, and my story was interesting . . . in places.
Posted by stephanie at March 16, 2007 01:00 PM | TrackBack