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the power of ‘oh’. More than many a word I have seen used for emphasis, this one strikes me as particularly potent, inviting the reader to say it aloud and participate in it, to some extent creating for themselves the emotional impact of any given scene. Simply by reading the word, one immediately attributes one’s own remembered experience to the scene being described. The sex, the fear, the sadness… all of it sees Koja’s ‘oh’ deployed to great effect, cutting down the need for endless descriptive paragraphs yet still
capturing great power.
The second technique I noted is one I wish to start using immediately, namely to flow into dialogue mid-sentence. Koja will often describe the features of a scene and then make a bit of speech almost a physical feature thereof. Lines such as “…as they lay side by side in the deep four-poster, princess bed draped in lace and gauze and “Don’t ever buy me a ring,” she said”. These avoid the need to mechanically shift from descriptive text to dialogue, and also infuse a space with the essence of what a character has said.
One jumps straight into the juicy stuff without fluff and moreover, one creates a truly tangible mood, a character’s words carrying the weight of their surroundings rather than existing in a stylistic vacuum. In light of this, I plan to start weaving dialogue into my scenes more naturally.
- I have been immersed in the Little Deaths collection of short stories, and noted two particularly interesting things in the story “Lover Doll”, by Wayne Allen Sallee. For one, the author’s use of intermissions, as it were, to break up paragraphs, sections of real-time narrative in italics that splice up the reminiscing which comprises the bulk of the story. I am moving more toward such episodic writing in my own work, and tried a little of it in my most recent assignment. I had previously felt compelled to set up any scene before going into it. My characters could not, for instance, go to a restaurant; they had to drive there first, and something had to happen on the drive. I have since realized the efficacy of just jumping right in, scene hopping of sorts, as it both keeps up the pace for the reader and means that one needn’t waste time writing fluff. Using these intermissions presents me with further potential in this regard, as it means I can tell two stories at once, and potentially do so in different narrative styles, or through the voices of different characters.
- In reading Altmann’s Tongue by Brian Evenson, I noted that the writing was tight in focus and careful in its construction. His short stories often begin with a deliberately strong line. The girl is dead, Altmann has been shot, the daughter has committed suicide, and the cats are going to be killed. These things are stated frankly and immediately, and the reader is immediately invested. I have come to appreciate the value of a strong starting sentence, and aim to implement this trick in my own writing.
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- I have learned the value of brevity and with it, understatement. Of the recent pieces I have produced that were deemed effective by my peers, they all shared a few common traits. A punchline was delivered and the story was ended soon after; some revelation was made and then, with that impact being essentially the core of the piece, it necessarily wrapped up quickly. Moreover, since said punchline was often a sticky end for the protagonist (or someone in the plot at any rate), these pieces did well to end on the implication of the awfulness to come rather than spelling it out for the reader. Not only was this found to be more disturbing (the reader readily imagines things far worse than I could ever write), but more subtle, avoiding the pitfall of heavy-handed text that might belabour an otherwise good idea. With both of these in mind, I have necessarily tended more towards shorter pieces, between a thousand or two thousand words. This has not only been a weight off my shoulders, it has been a rediscovery of the fun of writing. A macabre idea may be spun out for as long as it needs to be, and then I move on to the next one.
- I now care far less about leaving elements of a story unexplained, or unrelated to the central theme. By way of example, a story by Katherine Ong Muslim featured a boy regarding a kite in a neighbour’s backyard. This object was utterly unrelated to the story at large, neither symbolically relevant nor mentioned more than once throughout. I find this nothing short of mind-blowing, having laboured under the misconception that any element in a story should have relevance or not be included at all. Checkov’s Gun taken to its extreme, I strived to make everything either a call back or call forward, and
inevitably ended up with purple prose. I am far happier now to introduce a bit of scenery or backstory into my narrative and leave it there, focusing instead on telling my core story.
My key learnings in this section were naturally diverse, but largely pertained to matters of pacing and setting. I learned that one need not agonize over every element of a story’s world, nor how the characters traverse it. Window dressing is permissible, as is scene hopping, provided the story retains its pace. Conversely, a story’s setting need not change at all for it to be effective.
More important were the techniques of drawing a reader into one’s story with arresting openers, and concluding on powerful enders. A story should neither ask its reader to stick around till it gets interesting, nor continue overlong after its climax, a principle which applies as much to individual paragraphs as to the piece as a whole.
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