One of playwright Anton Chekhov’s most quoted maxims is this: If in Act I you have a pistol hanging on the wall, then it must fire in the last act. If you establish an expectation in the reader, particularly a strong expectation, you must fulfill it.
The truth is that every story has things in it that must be fired, a multiplicity of tiny guns whose discharges help create the ending, guns that have been primed and loaded over the course of the story.
These are sometimes subplots: the heroine’s best friend is also looking for a love interest and at the end their expectation is either fulfilled or thwarted but it is never neglected, because the reader will exit the story wondering about that, and all the impact of the story will be thwarted.
But not always. They may be an object that is reprised throughout the work: the lily that signals Death’s approach, the clerk who sold a traveler their tickets.
Let’s look at some of this at work in a story that will be familiar to many, James Tiptree’s The Women Men Don’t See. If you are not familiar with the story, I advise reading it beforehand.
This is the ending. My comments appear in parentheses.
By noon we’re back in Cozumel. Captain Estéban accepts his fees and departs laconically for his insurance wars. (Tiptree accounts for this major character and moves him offstage.) I leave the parson’s bags with the Caribe agent who couldn’t care less.(Another character, who appeared toward the beginning, is checked off the list.) The cable foes to a Mrs. Priscilla Hayes Smith, also of Bethesda. I take myself to a medico (the narrator has been injured in the course of the story, an injury severe enough that it shapes the action and therefore must appear in the final moments) and by three P.M. I’m sitting on the Cabanas terrace with a fat leg and a double margarita, trying to believe the whole thing. (Notice that this creates space in which the reader, like the narrator, can think back over the story and draw conclusions.)
The cable said, Althea and I taking extraordinary opportunity for travel. Gone several years. Please take charge our affairs. Love, Ruth.
She’d written it that afternoon, you understand. (The reader has seen this moment, but not what she wrote. Now it’s delivered.)
I another another double, wishing to hell I’d gotten a good look at that gizmo. Did it have a label, Made by Betelgeusians? No matter how weird it was, how could a person be crazy enough to imagine–?
Not only that but to hope, to plan? If I could only go away… That’s what she was doing, all day. Waiting, hoping, figuring how to get Althea. To go sight unseen to an alien world…
With the third margarita I try a joke about alienated women, but my heart’s not in it. And I’m certain there won’t be any bother, any trouble at all. Two human women, one of them possibly pregnant (here a storyline with Captain Estéban is being resolved), have departed for, I guess, the stars; and the fabric of society will never show a ripple. I brood: do all Mrs. Parsons’s friends hold themselves in readiness for any eventuality, including leaving Earth? And will Mrs. Parsons somehow one day contrive to send for Mrs. Priscilla Hays Smith, that grand person?
I can only send for another cold one, musing on Althea. What suns will Estéban’s sloe-eyed offspring, if any, look upon? “Get in, Althea, we’re taking off for Orion.” “A-okay, Mother.” Is that some system of upbringing? We survive by ones and twos in the chinks of your world-machine…I’m used to aliens. (Here a conversation is being reprised, and its payload, set up earlier, is now being delivered.) She’d meant every word. Insane. How could a woman choose to live among unknown monsters, to say good-bye to her home, her world?
As the margaritas take hold, the whole mad scenario melts down to the image of those two small shapes sitting side by side in the receding alien glare.
Two of our opossums are missing.
The conversation has been loaded here, midway through the story:
“That’s fantasy.” Her voice is still quiet. “Women don’t work that way. We’re a –a toothless world.” She looks around as if she wanted to stop talking. “What women do is survive. We live by ones and twos in the chinks of your world-machine.”
“Sounds like a guerrilla operation.” I’m not really joking, here in the ‘gator den. In fact, I’m wondering if I spent too much thought on mahogany logs.
“Guerrillas have something to hope for.” Suddenly she switches on a jolly smile. “Think of us as oppssums, Don. Did you know there are opossums living all over. Even in New York City.”
How do we emulate that sort of thing as writers? I suspect this is something that most of us will be adding in the rewriting and revision stage, going back through the story to see what pistols our unconscious mind has scattered about throughout the narrative. Recently, for example, in the course of writing a space opera novel, a particular element emerged that shapes things — while I took account of it in writing everything after that moment of realization, I’ll need to go back and tweak the earlier parts to make sure I’ve loaded that object as fully as I can before it delivers its payload in the final scene.
Check what you’ve loaded the story with and make sure it’s all primed and ready to go off.
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Today's Wordcount and Other Notes (8/21/2014)
Three whales this morning - they came out of the water enough that we could see there was one large and two small and think they might have been humpback whales. Vida pura, indeed.Lots of skipping around, often what I do when I’ve got several projects in the works.
So here’s the breakdown and total:
650 words on Circus in the Bloodwarm Rain
673 words on “Carpe Glitter”
534 words on “Prairiedog Town” (working title)
200 words and editing finished on a story in a semi-accepted state, plus sent off to the magazine that requested the changes.
Total word count: 2058
Not too bad, particularly when I’m working on getting back into productivity’s swing.
Today’s new words in Spanish: aire acondicianado (air conditioner), apogon (power outage), ballena jorabada (humpback whale), cafetera (coffeemaker), calambur (pun), picadura de mosquito (mosquito bite), la puerta de teja metallica (screen door), reinicializar (to reset, usually a machine).
And Wayne woke me this morning to watch three whales (we think a large humpback and two smaller ones) in the surf.
The following comes from an email exchange between myself and John Barnes, whose story I critiqued and who has given permission to reprint the exchange 🙂 I know that this question often comes up for newer writers. They see writers who write long, elaborate sentences and wonder why they then get criticized for overly long and complicated sentences.
John: When you said to work on writing on a sentence /paragraph level, were you referring to sentence structure or cutting needless words? Was it well-written? Would a good play on muscle memory to intersperse the story with flashes of memory, along the lines of what Aliette De Bodarde did with immersion?
The answer to the question in the first sentence is yes to both. I think that you are at a point in your writing where you should both be looking at constructing interesting, graceful sentences as well as making sure that you remove excess words. Extraneous language often gets in the way of a story’s speaking to a reader, muffling its impact.
I thought the language was competent, but still needs the final polish that removes any awkwardness or places where the prose calls attention to itself. One of the ways a writer convinces the reader to relax and give into the experience of the story is by convincing them they are in expert hands that will keep reminders that they are reading to a minimum. Awkward sentences or passages that are overly wordy can remind a reader that they are reading and generally are experienced as a negative rather than a positive.
Absolutely a good play on muscle memory that intersperses the story with flashes of memory would be great. To make it superlative, the language needs to be constructed as clearly as possible. If you go over “Immersion,” you will see that in every sentence, words are pulling their weight and there are no extras.
John: Thanks, so keep it simple then? What about writers like Cat Valente or Laird Barron who usually have flowery prose in their writing? On Neil Clarke’s sub page for Clarkesworld he says “language is important, there’s no distinction between “style” and “substance” or “story” and “writing”. What exactly did he mean by that? I only ask because you have many stories published in their issues and that ezine is like the uncatchable unicorn for writers like me. lol Thanks again.
If you look at Cat Valente or Laird Barron’s prose you’ll see that although it is flowery, every word in it is still doing something.
To see what I mean, let’s look at a passage from both of them. Here is one of Valente’s, from Silently and Very Fast in Clakesworld:
Ravan told me these stories. He set up a great hexagonal library in his Interior, as dusty and dun-colored and labyrinthine as any ancient scriptorium. He made himself a young novice with a fresh-shaven tonsure, and me a country friar with a red, brandy-drinking nose. He showed me the illuminator’s table, and a great book whose pages had golden edges and illuminations in cobalt and oxblood and Tyrian purple, and the images showed great machine armies trampling men underfoot. They showed cruel metal faces and distant, god-like clouds of intellect: incomprehensible and vast and uncaring. They showed the Good Robot desperately asking what love was. They showed fatal malfunctions and mushroom clouds. They showed vicious weapons and hopeless battles, noble men and women with steady gazes facing down their cruel and unjust artificial children, who gave no mercy.
These are complex sentences at times. They employ poetic techniques, such as the repetition of “They showed” as well as the deliberately repeated conjunction “and” of “cobalt and oxblood and Tyrian purple”. Notice how the “They showed” becomes like pages flipping.
But there are no extraneous words, no words that are not accomplishing at least several of the following duties: constructing a world for the reader, conveying information about the world, creating a specific tone, amplifying the engaging nature of the prose with sensory detail, providing aural delight when mentally read, providing beautiful or entertaining language, etc.
Here’s a passage from Laird Barron’s Blood & Stardust, which features a protagonist that has some similarities with yours.
My nerves weren’t always so frayed; once, I was too dull to fear anything but the Master’s voice and his lash. I was incurious until my fifth or sixth birthday and thick as a brick physically and intellectually. Anymore, I read anything that doesn’t have the covers glued shut. I devour talk radio and Oprah. Consequently, my neuroses have spread like weeds. Am I getting fat? Yes, I’ve got the squat frame of a Bulgarian power lifter, but at least my moles and wens usually distract the eye from my bulging trapeziuses and hairy arms.
I also dislike the dark, and wind, and being trussed hand and foot and left hanging in a closet. Dr. Kob used to give me the last as punishment; still does it now and again, needed or not, as a reminder. Perspective is extremely important in the Kob house. The whole situation is rather pathetic, because chief among his eccentric proclivities, he’s an amateur storm chaser. Tornadoes and cyclones don’t interest him so much as lightning and its capacity for destruction and death. Up until his recent deteriorating health, we’d bundle into the van and cruise along the coast during storm season and shoot video, and perform field tests of his arcane equipment. Happily, those days seem to be gone, and none too soon. It’s rumored my predecessor, daughter numero uno, was blown to smithereens, and her ashes scattered upon the tides, during one of those summer outings.
Here again, sentences are leanly fleshed and adverbs like “rather” and “extremely” are used sparingly. Notice that sentences are not uniformly long. The average sentence is 12 words long, so let’s see how Barron’s passage maps against that. Its sentences by word count go 20/17/11/5/7/4/29/20/23/8/17/30/11/24. Looking at that, you can see how although usually sentences are longer than average, some short ones are interspersed, creating what I would describe as texture or perhaps rhythm, to the writing. Along the same lines, look at the Valente sentences by word count: 5/20/20/34/16/10/7/26.
This is important but subtle stuff, and I am not suggesting that anyone needs to go through and count the words in their sentences, just that they do need to consider length. Writers don’t have to just construct stories on the level of character and situation. They must also convey that story through sentences that are constructed as optimally as possible to deliver the experience of the story to the reader.
I think this is why it Neil Clarke is referencing on the submissions page. He wants stories that pay attention not just to the plotting, that the language in which it is conveyed and the skill with which the experience is created for the reader. This is one of the hard to acquire but essential skills that end up elevating writing from good to great, in my opinion.
John: Thanks for clearing that up, now that I look at it more closely, I can see that the sentences aren’t that complex, just seem dense when read as a whole. And there are very few “dress-up” words. Does a writer need poetic techniques to give the story quality? Asimov’s and some of the work in F&SF have pretty transparent prose?
I don’t know that a writer needs poetic techniques, but they certainly help. A story has to have some reason for the reader to want to keep going — beauty of style helps but it’s not enough. There must also be plot and the characters and the cool world-building, etc. Some writers get by on something else and stick to a very plain — and sometimes downright awkward, hence my reluctance to say “needs” — prose, but they’re going full out with killer plots or heart-wringing characters or snappy dialogue, all in spades.
For me sometimes a dense style — one with conscious use of poetic technique, symbology, and sensory input — has worked well, and it is something that seems to appeal to Clarkesworld.
Here’s a sample passage from The Worm Within, which appeared there. It’s meant to be read aloud, and plays with repeated sounds. It’s also an unreliable narrator and the sentence structures are meant to provide a sense of unease in the reader, as are some of the sensory details.
But after only a single pirouette, my inner tenant stirs. He plucks pizzicato at my spine, each painful twang reminding me of his presence, somewhere inside.
He says, They’ll find you soon enough TICK they’ll hunt you down. They’ll realize TICK what you are, a meat-puppet in a TICK robot world, all the shiny men and women and TICK in-betweens will cry out, knowing what you are. They’ll find TICK you. They’ll find you.
Here is a section where I use plainer language, in another Clarkesworld story, “The Mermaids Singing, Each to Each”.
Sometimes I used to imagine crashing her on a reef and swimming away, leaving her to be covered with birdshit and seaweed, her voice lasting, pleading, as long as the batteries held out. Sometimes I used to imagine taking one of the little cutting lasers, chopping away everything but her defenseless brainbox, deep in the planking below the cabin, then severing its inputs one by one, leaving her alone. Sometimes I imagined worse things.
I inherited her from my uncle Fortunato. My uncle loved his boat like a woman, and she’d do things for him, stretch out the last bit of fuel, turn just a bit sharper, that she wouldn’t do for me or anyone else. Like an abandoned woman, pining for a lover who’d moved on. I could have the AI stripped down and retooled, re-imprint her, but I’d lose all her knowledge. Her ability to recognize me.
I tried in this passage to convey something about the main character’s emotional state. When it breaks into more poetic language with the repeated “Sometimes I used to imagine beginning each sentence” the repeated structure is intended to intensify the emotion that underlines the passage, the deep anger that the protagonist feels towards the Mary Magdalena.
In conclusion, I hope these examples have shown that studying poetry is not time wasted for a writer, particularly when learning strategies involving repeated sounds, rhythms, and figures of speech. That sort of attention to detail is what leads to the degree of skill that allows a writer to get away with “wordy” prose.
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