Rawther ironically, the most useful piece of advice I've gotten from Butler's From Where You Dream is solidly stylistic. The white hot center doesn't enter into it. HORRORS.
I found it in Chapter 8, the Anecdote Experience, where Butler is doing a sharp bit of on-the-fly editing for his writing students as they try to describe a personal experience. It takes some brave writers to get up there with him, I gotta say. I wish I could say I'd have the courage to but....UM.
OKAY. MAYBE IN A MINUTE, PROFESSOR.
Anyway, it was a little revealing I think to hear Butler walk the walk like this. It made a lot of his WHITE HOT CENTER stuff concrete. And one piece of that advice really jumped out at me. You've all probably read this chapter and everything by now but I thought it deserved it own little bloggy spotlight:
ROB: Let his face turn to you. Let me see his face in the moment.
SANDRA: He is not surprised to see me.
ROB: OK, you have just analyzed his face. He's not surprised to see you. We're not seeing a not-there; what are we seeing?
SANDRA: He's looking as though he was expecting me to walk in.
ROB: You just analyzed it again. What do you reading the face? Because the little girl standing there perhaps rightly analyzes the look on his face, but what is it that's on the face she sees that leads her to that analysis? That's what we're after.
SANDRA: That's abstraction?
ROB: That's abstraction.
As I see it, there are two mad nuggets of advice here. The first is very important, and overarching: write through your characters, not at them. Let them tell us what they see and what they feel -- don't speak for them! LET YOUR PEOPLE GO, ETC.
But secondly, more specifically and
(I think) much more helpfully....DON'T WRITE WHAT DOESN'T HAPPEN. WRITE HOW IT DIDN'T HAPPEN. I've already been catching myself with this. "She looked like she was trying to lift the rock." How can someone look like they are not doing something Laurel be more specific. Course, this isn't to say that this is never right, or useful. I mean, I think in negative actions all the time. But that's my own internal narration, like my character's internal narration. It is not THE LITERARY VOICE.
Ahhh jeeze, I went on for way to long here. What a surprise. In any case, tell me your thoughts! Is this bullpoo?
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1 comment:
Yes yes yes! I have nothing more to add. Very well put. Rules are meant to be broken but showing not telling, details and specifics not abstraction is nearly always a rule to follow. A fun exercise might be to do the opposite, to write a story entirely made up of vagueness, of telling, to better learn what they look like. Might be hard to do.
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