Brush Strokes

BRUSH STROKES

It seems obvious to say that the deepest kind of learning is an active process. I myself came to writing relatively late after a different career, and though I was lucky enough to be published quickly (right agent, right publisher, right time), in many ways I had no conscious idea at the time of craft. And I knew that whatever came naturally in my writing wasn't going to sustain me long-term. I wanted to be a better writer than I was. I wanted to write stories akin to the ones I treasured. And I was determined to find out how.

But it's a little awkward to take a course after you've published two novels. People are suspicious; they don't really understand why you're there. Plus, by this point I had been invited to teach writing, on the strength of publication.

So what did I do?

I went straight to the source: the books of the writers I love.  All kinds of writers, all kinds of genres and styles.

I became obsessed with craft. And I still am. Whenever a problem arises in a current story I am writing, when I can't make something work and it is coming out all wrong, I think of a writer I know who handles this kind of challenge extremely well, and I pull one of their novels off the shelf and start to read. I make charts of their sentence shapes and rhythms. (I’m not the only one to do this – have a read of the stats in Ursula K Le Guin’s excellent essays on rhythm in her collection, the wave of the mind.)  I check whether the fictional town in which the characters live is named or left un-named. I notice what the writer gives space and attention to in their sentences: how much setting and external stimuli, how much of what the character is doing and saying, how much internal thought or emotion. I observe when they leave long sections of dialogue without any gestures attached, and when they return us to gesture. I look up a group scene, to see how the large cast of characters was handled without any confusion or lack of continuity. I look up a romantic scene and deconstruct how it was achieved movingly without cliche.

And then I copy.

Any students of mine, from when I taught at the University of Sussex or on the Creative Writing Programme at New Writing South, will probably remember the writing exercise I call Templating. (I'm not sure whether it will be remembered with pleasure!) And the fact that I have never found any exercise similar to this proposed in any of the wonderful books on writing I have pored through over the years makes me slightly doubt my methods.

However, I created Templating for myself. And I still use it myself, and stand by it as an effective way to develop one's personal toolkit. (With one important caveat - see ** at the end.)

Here's the Templating Exercise I have used in my classes:

1) The following are the opening paragraphs from Chapter 9 of Anna Karenina, by Leopold Tolstoy. (Translation: David Magarshack, Signet Classics )                 

At four o'clock that afternoon, Levin got out of the hired sleigh at the Zoological Gardens and, conscious that his heart was beating fast, went down the path leading to the ice hills and the skating rink, certain that he would find Kitty there, for he had seen the Scherbatsky's carriage at the entrance.

            It was a bright, frosty day. At the gates there were rows of carriages, private sleighs, sleighs on hire, and policemen. Well-dressed people, their hats shining in the bright sunlight, swarmed at the entrance and along the well-swept eaves: the feathery old birch trees in the gardens, their branches weighed down with snow, looked as if they had been dressed up in new festive vestments.

2) Now here's my personal, imperfect breakdown of what's going on in Tolstoy's sentences:

At….time of day, (comma) Character name performed (we are in past tense) an ACTION involving a CONCRETE Object in a LOCATION and, (comma) having a sensation or emotion or thought, performed a second ACTION involving two more landmarks, objects or specific areas in this LOCATION, (comma) followed by another thought or sensation or conviction, for/because he/she had... a final past ACTION involving a CONCRETE OBJECT that explains the reason for the feeling which preceded it. (full stop - ONE LONG SENTENCE in paragraph)

            A six-word sentence about the weather. (full stop) In a section of the location associated with an object, there were…4 details in the location (no actions). (full stop) Plural noun (as subject of sentence), (comma) a detail about that plural noun, (comma) perform ACTION in/by 2 different parts of the location; (semi-colon) another plural noun somewhere else in location, (comma) detail about that plural noun, looked as if leading to some kind of anthropomorphism, metaphor, or simile.

3) Now write your own prose, using your own story and your own words. But following EXACTLY the structure. (And that means the punctuation too, so the first paragraph is one long sentence!)

Example:

            At ten past nine in the morning, Sullivan Grant turned the key in the front door of his stepmother's house and, convinced she would be none the wiser, began to search through the drawers in the kitchen and the desk in his deceased father's study, a little appalled by the mess, because he had organized the papers within these drawers only a week before.

            It had been raining all day. Hanging off the coat rack in the entryway there were two overcoats, a rain poncho, a leather jacket, and two over-sized cardigans. Dead moths, their pale, papery wings shimmering against the dark blue carpet in the sitting room, littered the floor behind the sofa and under the baby grand piano; the curtains on the two front windows, their folds tied back by tasseled ropes on either side, looked as if they were the tabs in a proscenium theatre being drawn aside to reveal the drama on the stage within.

(I've just written the above lines for this post, without any planning beforehand. I must have copied this template on more than fifty occasions, but it never comes out the same. Yet it exercises my imagination each time. And always pushes me to create detail in a way I might not have otherwise.)

And what did I learn when I first attempted this template of a passage from one of my most beloved books?

I learned that by simply turning the reader’s eyes to many different areas in one location, a writer can very quickly give a widespread snapshot of the setting.

I learned the satisfaction (and release) of a simple short sentence that follows a long, complex one.

I learned the evocative power of stacking up concrete details, in simple nouns, not over-described.

And I absorbed these techniques first-hand, more deeply than if I had been told them by a teacher, no matter how brilliant, in a creative writing class.

You can template ANY author in this way. I've done it with Raymond Carver (hardly any adverbs or adjectives), Cormac McCarthy, Amy Bloom, Mark Twain, Donna Tartt, Charles Dickens (who constantly surprises me!) ...the list is as long and continuous as the number of writers, old and new, who  inspire me.

Give it a go! Figure out how your favourite writers do what they do, how they create these people and pictures and stories in your head. Copy their brushstrokes. And you will at the same time be expanding your own.

** Here's the caveat I promised earlier: do the above, exactly and to the letter…and then let it go. Don’t get sucked down the hole of trying to write like someone else. Use templating to better understand what works effectively, and in that way you will have more options as to how you tell your own stories. The new learning will feel self-conscious at first, but really you're learning in order to forget, so that you can blend the new learning within the voice that is already uniquely yours.