The Writing Life Too

So the morning sky is tinged with pink and full of promise—of heat that is. I know we’re much better off here in Portland than all those pitiful folks in the path of Hurricane Ike, so I’ll try not to complain that the temperatures are going to top 90 today when people are still missing from the hurricane. The financial markets aren’t open yet, but there is more news that the banking industry is in big trouble. Merrill Lynch has found a buyer, but Nieman Brothers has not and is filing for bankruptcy. Hang on to your butts….

Meanwhile, we lost a great writer when David Foster Wallace hanged himself on September 12. He was 46 and a great voice was silenced. I’ve never read his fiction, although Infinite Jest has long been on my radar screen, but at more than 1,000 pages I haven’t dug into to it yet. But his nonfiction was darkly witty, innovative, accurate, and deep. You might want to read his essay McCain's Promise that was recently republished. I’m so sorry for his wife, family, friends, and students.

Yesterday afternoon I returned from a trip to Central Oregon, weaving through mountains and canyons and sage and past pastures of grazing horses and cattle. I stayed in a small town oozing with charm and decided I’d move to a small town in a heartbeat if there was a way to make a living and there were enough progressives around. However, I returned home with too many symptoms and problems from my travels. So because of my continued saga of body and brain injuries, and on the advice of one of my doctors, I’ve canceled my gigs for the next two weekends. My apologies to anyone planning on attending—the spirit is willing, the flesh is falling apart. Enough about my dilapidated self (remember: don’t answer your cell phone when you’re driving, you never know who you might crash into). Also, I’m still looking for guest bloggers.

Here’s a tip on writing: Effective fiction is nuanced and layered. It also, in a sense, haunts the reader with its subtle refrains like a powerful melody. So how is this accomplished without creating a muddled mess or a story as naked as a newborn hatchling?Let’s focus on details, the mainstay of fiction that resonates. Details stir a reader’s senses and haunt with their clarity. Yet details should never be catalogued or listed. Instead, they need to appear natural, enhancing the story in some way. If the details aren’t adding to the story, then leave them out.

Remember, too, that description is static, another reason to insert it sparingly. If you constantly stop your story to describe sunsets, seashores, interiors, hairstyles, and heartbeats, your story will likely lose its momentum. Readers are interested in the forward motion of the story and their eyes veer to dialogue and other places where action and movement is on the page.
A solution is to put description in motion or slip it in through a character’s viewpoint. Thus, insert details via a character’s thoughts, amid action scenes, in the middle of dialogue, while characters are moving.

Old School, a novel by Tobias Wolff, is told with a kind of aching subtlety. Dialogue is spare, descriptions pared down to essentials, but still the story manages to soar, to offer moments when the reader pauses and lingers over words and scenes because they contain so much yet seem to be written with so little. It is a story of a boy who is an outsider, attending a small New England prep school on a scholarship in the early 1960s. In a school filled with “book drunk boys,” there are a number of contests and honors centered on writing and literature. These prizes bring out the best and worst in the boys and eventually result in disgrace for the narrator.

Here is a brief passage right before his downfall, the story’s major reversal:
I was glad for the day of grace I’d been given. After my last class that afternoon I went AWOL across the river and mucked through freshly ploughed fields to the tallest of the neighboring hills, Mount Winston as we called it. …

I paced the hilltop, exhausted but too nervous to sit. In my classes the blood-roar in my head had rendered me nearly deaf. Most of this was explosive relief and exhilaration, yet with a thumping underpulse of dread. It was one thing to confide your hidden life to a piece of paper in an empty room, quite another to have it broadcast.

A warm wind blew across the hilltop, and with it the faint cries of boys chasing balls. The school lawns and fields were a rich, unreal green against the muddy brown expanse of surrounding farmland. Between the wooded banks of the river two shells raced upstream, oars flashing. The chapel with its tall crenellated bell tower and streaming pennant looked like an engraving in a child’s book. From this height it was possible to see into the dream that produced the school, not mere English-envy but the yearning for a chivalric world apart from the din of scandal and cheap dispute, the hustles and schemes of modernity itself. As I recognized this dream I also sensed its futility, but so what? I loved my school no less for begging gallantly unequal to our appetites—more, if anything. With still a month to graduation I was already damp with nostalgia.
I stretched out on a slab of rock. The sun in my face and radiant warmth on my back lulled me to sleep. Then the wind cooled and I woke with a wolfish hunger and started back.

This passage, a transition leading to the action that follows, creates a moment of significance because it reveals his love for the school; it shows us the school from a fresh perspective, a hillside; it reveals the stakes involved; it foreshadows what is to come; and yet lulls the reader with its pastoral mood so that the events that follow are more disturbing. And while it is a fairly long descriptive passage, it is not an inert blob. One technique that keeps this passage from being static is the active verbs scattered throughout: mucked, paced, blew, chasing, raced, flashing, yearning, sensed, loved, begging, stretched, lulled, cooled, and started.

Wolf’s example is a good reminder to add life to descriptions by writing in the active voice whenever possible. For example, here is the passive version: There were hundreds of spectators on the lawn. The active voice can be written: Hundreds of spectators dotted the lawn. An easy tip is to avoid using There is, There was, There are, or It was to begin your sentences because this construction guarantees these sentences will be passive.