Pop quiz: Who wrote the following…

1. “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
2. “Tomorrow is always fresh, with no mistakes in it yet.”
3. “There are darknesses in life and there are lights, and you are one of the lights, the light of all lights.”
4. “She wasn’t doing a thing that I could see, except standing there leaning on the balcony railing, holding the universe together.”
5. “It does not do well to dwell on dreams and forget to live, remember that.”
6. “What are men to rocks and mountains?” 

Impressive stuff, right?  How wonderful to run across such lines.  We jot them on yellow sticky notes and slap them on the fridge, the repository of all that is precious, wise and edible.  Such lines are profound.

Profound means penetrating, deep, not superficial, sweeping, and containing universal truth.   Profound statements cause us to nod, see, grasp, and murmur in agreement.  Yes!  That!  So true! 

What if I told you that the lines above were written by a drunk, a lonely proofreader, a math whiz, the son of a cheesemaker who was dumped by a girl in favor of a movie star, a divorced secretary, and a spinster?  Anyone can be profound.  Everyone is, at times.  Children.  Crazies.  You.

Profound statements are always true, meaning also always available.  Let’s prove that.  Grab a pen or open a document.  Right now.  Jot down something that you know to be always true about living or about people.  What’s your life lesson?  What principle guides you?  How would you sum it all up?

Profound statements can be grounded in metaphor.  What meaning have you seen in, or truth you have deduced from, investing money, or managing people, or building a home, or selecting paint, or hammering a nail, or watering the grass, or focusing a camera, or lighting a match, or home runs, or the directions of the wind?

Profound statements ring.  They contain contradictions and work reversals.  They pose puzzles and ask rhetorical questions.  They sock us with strong nouns.  They arrive in shapely sentences.  They are pithy.  They declare.  They surprise us not because their truths are obscure, but because their truths arrive in unexpected ways.

Here, I’ll try one: “When our sails fill with wind we surge forward but also spill over, wanting to capsize.”

Ah.  A sailboat metaphor.  It’s dialectical.  Poetic.  That which gives us momentum can also tip us over.  Flying high means that you have far to fall.  We carry the seeds of our own destruction.  And so on, blah-blah.  The more common the expression of a truth, the less we feel the force of it. [Read more…]

Ask yourself these questions: Do I wish for my readers to experience quiet, peace, placidity, and calm?  Or, do I wish for my readers’ experience to be intense?  I suspect I know your answer.  Who does not want their novel to be intense?

A couple of weeks ago, guest contributor Gaëtane Burkolter introduced us to her Excite-O-Meter, a tool to chart the intensity of her WIP.  It’s a graph with the horizontal axis representing each chapter and the vertical axis measuring intensity on a scale of zero to one hundred.  The line produced is a visual picture of her novel’s rising (one hopes) level of intensity.

But what exactly is intensity?  What causes the action of a novel to provoke that feeling in characters, readers and authors?  How is intensity produced on the page, so that readers feel it?  How is it generated by authors within themselves on any given writing day?

When most of us think of intensity, we probably think of experiencing what is extreme.  That’s not wrong.  Extreme action can be intense.  Dean Koontz’s novel Intensity (1995) is a good example.  It’s the story of graduate student Chyna Shepherd who is recovering from an abusive childhood.  Her weekend visit with the family of her lifelong friend Laura Templeton, however, turns into a violent nightmare.  Serial killer Edgler Vess breaks in at night and kills everyone except Laura, whom he abducts, and Chyna, who stows away on Vess’s motor home.

The story that follows is about as horrifying as they get.  I’ll spare you, or save for you, the lurid and violent details, but there are two points to note.  First is that Vess (modeled on real life serial killer Edmund Kemper) kills in order to experience “intensity”.  Second is that Chyna is able to endure and defeat Vess because she, thanks to her abusive childhood, has a greater tolerance for intensity than he.  Trust me, the read is quite intense.

In science, intensity is a measure of power per unit area (physics), such as radiant heat flux (heat transfer), or field strength (electromagnetism).  It can also be luminous intensity (optics), radiance (astronomy), or peak ground acceleration (as in earthquakes, geology).  In other words, intensity is when force is packed tightly into something.  It’s not the object itself but its effect.  In writing terms, that means that intensity isn’t action per se, it’s the effect that any given story moment has on us.

Violence can be intense but it’s not the only way to produce the effect of intensity.  In psychological terms, intensity is a high degree of emotional excitement.  Over-excitability used to be seen as a personality problem, but is now understood not as a cause but a consequence of something else; a consequence that can be constructive, in important ways forming and strengthening personality instead of impairing it.

Psychologist Kazimierz Dabrowski’s Theory of Positive Disintegration explains, among other things, the extreme excitability of gifted children.  Once seen as hyperactive, distractible, disruptive, immature and oppositional, Dabrowski and later researchers revealed that such children are instead high energy, imaginative, passionate, sensitive and creative.  They react more quickly and intensely, moved by inner forces that generate over-stimulation.

That’s true in all healthy personality formation.  Conflict and pain lead to an inner collapse or “disintegration”, which in turn builds stronger personality based on an individual’s values.  The result is autonomy, or what informally we would call maturity.  Grown up, if not gifted, individuals are curious and driven to challenge conformity, complacency and self-satisfaction.

Does that sound like a guideline to creating great protagonists? [Read more…]

Wonderful.  Wouldn’t it be marvelous if readers used that adjective to describe your current novel?  Or your every novel?  I imagine so.  What if you could be sure of provoking that feeling every time?  Is that possible?

Let’s start by breaking down the experience of wonder.  What does it feel like to undergo wonder?  Dictionary definitions say that the feeling of wonder is excited by, a) what is strange, and, b) what is surprising.  Wonder is puzzled interest, tinged with admiration.

I think that the dictionaries understate it.  Wonder isn’t a mild feeling.  It’s exuberant.  When we feel wonder we are more than simply surprised, we are amazed.  We are more than merely puzzled; we are intrigued, excited and delighted.  It’s a feeling of childlike discovery.  It’s a kind of awe.

What conditions provoke such strong feeling?  We are overwhelmed by wonder when the impossible comes possible.  When something we’ve never seen before appears.  When something that we imagined could not happen actually does.

When the unreal becomes real we are astonished.  Dumbfounded.  We can’t believe it.  But we can’t deny it either.  We are experiencing something miraculous.  That’s especially true when that miraculous occurrence feels good.  Wonder has a quality of joy.  It feels like a delightful gift.

Think about snow days.  Second chances.  Flashes of inspiration.  Declarations of peace.  Shoes that fit.  Walking on the Moon.  The theory of Relativity.  Card tricks.  Catches on the flying trapeze.  Finding a twenty.  All your kids napping at the same time.  Home runs in the bottom of the ninth.  Flowers blooming in the rubble.  Answered prayers.

All of those things are surprising, but also things that we desire.  Things we believed that we’d never see.  Things that we feared would never happen.  Things that felt impossible…but they are possible, they do happen, and we’ve seen them with our own eyes.

Thus, to excite wonder with our stories we can start with two principles.  First, cause readers to believe that something could not possibly happen.  Second, make that impossible something a something that is desired.

Wonder also provokes the question how can that be?  Well, “it” can.  You have made it so.  You just haven’t told your readers—yet—why their beliefs were wrong.  So, here is the third principle of exciting wonder: There’s a reason for the impossible to happen, but not one that’s obvious.

Okay, let’s turn all that into steps that get the results on your pages: [Read more…]

The question comes up during Q&A at almost every writers’ conference: What makes fiction literary?  I’ve frequently been on that panel.  I’ve listened as smart and experienced editors and agents try to pin it down.  Literary?  It’s…well, it’s…

Mostly the stabs at an answer boil down to, literary fiction is beautifully written.  But wait, so is some commercial fiction.  Or, maybe literary fiction is the stuff that is highly regarded but achieves low sales? Um, you could say that about much commercial fiction too.  Well, perhaps it’s subject matter, you know, being grounded in the real world?  Then how do you explain Cormac McCarthy’s The Road?  Or it’s something about characters…arc…voice…themes?  Sure, but commercial fiction has plenty of those as well.

For every factor that could identify fiction as literary, we can find examples of the same factors at work in fiction that’s considered commercial.  And vice versa.  The swift pace, active characters, high stakes and urgency that are associated with commercial fiction can be spotted in literary fiction.

So what’s the answer?  Is it a matter of subjective judgment?  Is literary a label allocated by the publishing gods to certain imprints at certain houses?  To debunk that idea, try this thought experiment: If your novel is published by Nan Talese’s imprint it’s called literary, but if the exact same novel comes out under a different imprint at Penguin Random House, say Dell, then it’s commercial?  That doesn’t make any sense, does it.

Clearly, what causes us to feel that a given novel is literary is something about the way it reads, which in turn starts with the way it’s written.  Beautifully written is often accurate of literary fiction but it’s also broad and vague.  Ask me, it’s time to stop guessing and hone our understanding.  Literary comes from something and if we grasp that something we can use it when it suits our purposes.

One thing we’re talking about is the difference between scenes and what I call postcards.  What are the building blocks of a novel?  The term “scenes” is most often used, but that is imprecise.  Scenes, summary and postcards are three different ways to shape the discrete blocks of narration that build a novel.  These blocks are arranged either in strict chronological order, or in some other pattern, which taken together tell a story.

However, there are differences, such as:

• A scene enacts a change in story circumstances; a postcard illuminates something that we haven’t yet fathomed or perceived.
• A scene leads to further action; a postcard leads to deeper understanding.
• A scene is about what happens; a postcard is about what we discover.
• A scene is an event that has implications; a postcard is a moment with meaning.
• Scenes change characters; in postcards, the change is in readers.

We’re not only talking about the author’s intention.  It’s not just wanting to entertain versus wanting to illuminate.  It’s not only in pushing characters to a new place versus pushing readers to new ways of seeing.  The difference is hard-baked into a discrete block of text.  What will this text-unit in the novel accomplish?  How will it be constructed and what will be its effect?

The difference between scenes and postcards can be seen in two recent novels that on the surface are very similar, Kristin Hannah’s The Nightingale and Anthony Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot See.  Both novels are set in France during World War II.  Both have paired protagonists.  Both are well written.  Both are well reviewed.  Both were published by well-regarded imprints (St. Martin’s and Scribner, respectively).  Both have trendy dark-turquoise jackets with discrete embossing and foil.  Both are enormous best sellers.

However, they are not the same. [Read more…]