Syntax-focused Revision (Writing Tip #927)

Okay.  Say you've got a good draft of a short story or a chapter, and now it's time for revision.  Revision should cover a bunch of areas.  Let's lay out an obvious one, and one that's a little more slippery.

• Description
Is  there enough?  Too much?  The goal is have just crisp, clear description in order to set the scene in the reader's head–they can "see it."  Ah, but that's not enough.  Yes we need to see, but we also need to hear, smell, taste, and maybe touch it.  Or feel like we could.  One aspect of revision, then, should be you re-examining the quality of your descriptive writing.  First drafts are often plot-driven and a bit thin in terms of the writing . In revision you can make sure you use, with reason, a fuller range of imagery.  We have five senses.  Use all that seem appropriate for the scene at hand.  Make it "real." Make your scene play like a little movie in the reader's head.  Good description can do that.

•Syntax
This is a trickier area of revision.  It asks you to take a very close look at your prose, your sentences.  "Syntax," defined, often has a lot of mumbo-jumbo about "the rules of orderly grammatical constructions."  For example, the main order of sentence  is Subject + Verb + Object.  Okay, we get that. But a better way to understand syntax is think of the order of your phrases and clauses.  Below, is an example sentence from a chapter I just broke away from (my new novel):

1. "He became more flamboyant after his mother died, and his wild parties–for men only– were the talk of the town."

Okay.  A solid sentence.  Character development and conflict moving forward.  But I kept thinking there was something slightly wrong with the sentence.  So I revised its syntax:

2.  "After his mother died he became more flamboyant, and his wild parties–for men only– were the talk of the town. 
 

Aha.  What was amiss in #1 is what I might call Syntactical Chronology. That is, the order of the ongoing phrases.  In your writing, do your phrases move forward in logical chronology?  Or are they inverted or in some way out of causal order?  In my #2, the mother dies and because of this, he becomes more flamboyant–which is really what I want to convey.  I also think #2 has a slightly smoother flow, plus places a potential "black-hole word"* in the middle of the sentence, thereby lessening its potential to detract from the overall message of the sentence, which is "talk of the town."  

Geeky stuff here.  Revision-as-brain-surgery.  But if your short story or novel has its syntax well-thought out and well-revised, your prose will have a subtle but felt effect as being better than the other submissions–those in which writers have not fully considered syntax.  

*Black-hole word:  a diction choice, by its nature of being dramatic or colorful, that can suck away all the attention from the rest of the sentence. (My term, thank you very much.)  The goal is to have blended diction in which no one word dominates the sentence.

What's In A Name?

No, this is not about your novel's title (though titles are fun to talk about–let's do that soon).  Rather, I've renamed my blog.

"Write Right" always nagged at me, because it suggests there's one way. One correct way, that is, to write.  And nothing could be further from the truth.  So let's use IN THE WRITE.  Because that's what this blog really wants to do–get you inside the conversation about writing and the writing life.

For example, and real topic of this post: once you publish a novel or two, you start to get invitations to come and say something about it. Let's call this your Public Life as a Writer.

Invitations to speak span a range from small book clubs in living rooms to keynoting a library convention or giving a commencement address (if you've generated some serious attention) .  But most will fall somewhere in the middle.  Like my visit yesterday to Winona State University in southeastern Minnesota.

I met an afternoon Intro to Creative Writing class, with about twenty-five students and their lively, pony-tailed English professor, Dr. James Armstrong. A school visit is only as good as the students' preparation, and Jim had them ready.  They'd read all the short stories in my SWEET LAND collection, and were packing with "three questions" each.  I didn't get to all of the questions, but many, and we had a good class.  One of the students, a guy, lingered afterward, and said he hadn't expected to like some of my "farm stories," because he had no background in any way in terms of farming. However, he said I had made some of the stories "living things" that kept him reading. "Living things!"  How cool is that as a descriptor of what we authors should aspire to with everything piece we write!  I thought it was a deeply insightful comment about literature and writing, and told him so.

Then, later in the afternoon I did an on-campus reading for about fifty folks, students and community members.  The time (5 p.m) was a bit awkward, as people's biorhythms late in the day are on the wane (I know mine are). And that matter itself–the time of your gig– is yet another part of your challenge as a performing writer: you've got to consider the needs of your audience.  I've developed a habit of picking 2-3 reading options, then, upon seeing the audience in their seats, making a choice at the last minute.  It's a bit risky, but I've made it work.

In this case, I read two shorter pieces, one older, one new.  The older piece was my short story, "Dispersal," about a very sad farm auction. In it there's an auctioneer, and his voice affords me the opportunity to mimic his "crying of the lot" (riffing here on a Thomas Pynchon title), and punch up my reading.

 I talked a little between selections; excused, as promised, students who saw me earlier in class (they were dragging); came down off the podium to make the reading more of conversation; then tried to finish strong once again at the mic. I wrapped up by reading my introduction to a new anthology, TAKING AIM: GUNS IN AMERICA (HarperCollins).  It's controversial piece (things with guns have to get way worse before they will get better).  But remember: as a writer your first job is to get people's attention. After that it's to push them to think–about their lives, their ideas, their values.  If you can do that, you've had a successful reading.

You have fulfilled that tricky, complicated, public side of being an author.  Ideally you've made it look easy, left some good ideas and energy in your wake, and returned home ever more committed to the writing life.

P.S. Here's a link to that guns anthology.  Joyce Carol Oates, Walter Dean Myers, and more top authors.

https://www.harpercollins.com/9780062327352/taking-aim

But Is It Worth Writing About?

A quote from Orson Scott Card:  "Everybody walks past a thousand stories every day.  The good writers are the ones who see five or six of them.  Most people don't see any."

Exaggerations aside, you can see what he's saying, and there's lots of truth to it. It's writers who, as Flannery O'Connor said,"look twice and three times" at something, because they instinctively feel that whatever has caught their attention, has meaning. Then it's question of:  what's the story behind it?

That "most people don't see any" story is a bit harsh.  Non-writers see meaning (heartbreak, joy, humor) in life around them, too, but most don't know what to do with it.  Writers have a leg up in this matter, but we have decisions to make.  For example, let's say we see something, read something, or overhear a snippet of conversation that clearly has something very interesting behind it. But now we have a choice before us:  is it really worth writing about?

I've blogged a bit about this matter before, but an idea is different than a Story.  An idea catches the attention of our brain; a Story tugs at our heart.  An idea engages our analytical side; a "true" Story engages our emotions. The better the story, the more deeply our emotional reaction to its possibilities.

That, in a nutshell, is a good test to employ when judging whether to commit to a new writing project.  Is what you have mainly an idea?  Or is it a real, deeply felt human story that needs to be told?

Novel Writing: The Slog Through The Middle Part

Pretty sure it was Margaret Atwood who said, generally:  "Writing the opening chapters is exciting.  Writing the last chapters is an exhilarating rush to the end. It's the middle part that's hard."

If you look closely, you'll see that she's divided the novel into a three-part structure--which is pretty much the way screen plays are written.  In fact, pretty much like ALL mainstream movie plots are structured.  So we're looking at "Trouble" in act one.  "Trouble With A Capital 'T'" in act two.  And "Trouble Resolved/Ended"  in act three.  So it probably behooves the novel writer to pump the plot jam in the middle part (second part) in order to sustain interest–anything to get us to the last part where the real action (the Big Fight, the Resolution) happens.

It also happens that I'm talking to myself here, talking myself through a middle part of a big fat novel of the Midwest for adults.  Hey, it's high time:  Red Earth, White Earth came out thirty years ago. (You can see that I try not to be hard on trees).   During that time I've been largely answering an internal bell to keep young people, boys especially, reading.  My novels for grades 6-12 have taken me on a wonderful ride, but it's nice to be back in the middle of seriously adult matters. And a novel the structure of which is challenging me to the max, mainly because I've broken a main tenet of my advice to younger, would-be novel writers.

• Cover the least amount of time possible.  That is, make life easy on yourself by limiting the time span in your novel. A year?  A summer?  Even, better, why not a week?  (Or, like James Joyce, one day in Dublin.)

So in my big fat, multigenerational novel, I'm covering the 1890's to 2015. (Do as I say, not as I do.) It's not like I can't succeed at that, but to do so, I have to find creative narrative solutions to small matters such Point of View, Protagonist (who is it, really?). Those small matters. . . .

But hey, solving literary problems is what writers do.  Every novel is its own puzzle, and I'm happy to see–I think–that my pieces are fitting together.

Wish I could say more about this new novel, but it's a great jinx to talk about your work in progress. That advice I'm sticking with.