SOME WRITERS – AND MOM – SCARE THE DAYLIGHTS OUT OF ME

By El Ochiis

I didn’t grow up with a television, a fact that my High School English teacher stated made me a more creative writer.  She said I had only my imagination – funny, this was the excuse my mother used to justify the reason we were the only people without a square gadget with images flickering through windows of homes along our street in some non-descript small town.

She would often tell the me the story about a man - Tesla - who dreamed of creating a source of inexhaustible, clean energy that was free for everyone. He, like mom, strongly opposed centralized coal-fired power stations that spewed carbon dioxide into the air that humans breathed. Just how mom was going to harness that lightning bolt to convert it to a form that would power her electric stove which she used to bake bread with flour milled using an ancient, home grain milling machine was never fully explained by the dear woman.

 

Mom’s greatest eco belief was that indoor plumbing was killing the fish because of the sewage being drained into rivers and streams.  When you are a kid, idealistic, off-the-grid, hippie-like parents like my mom were just an embarrassment, and, you as the offspring of such parentage was a recipe for getting chased home by the kids whose parents religiously worshipped showers, sinks, toilet bowls, and, multiple televisions.

 

One night, after my crazy mother had demanded that we save the planet by turning off the electric lights and reading a good book, by candlelight. I picked a book, from one of our five shelves, a novel by Harry Max Harrison, born Henry Maxwell Dempsey, entitled: “Make Room, Make Room “– I guess the pen name had a certain writer’s ring to it over his given one. 

 

Harrison was a citizen of both the UK and Ireland who distrusted generals, prime ministers and tax official with sardonic and cruel wit – he made plain his acute intelligence and astonishing range of moral, ethical and literary sensibilities - ah, the kind of writer whose prose would mirror my mom’s eccentric, erudite lunacy, I thought. 

 

I propped up on two pillows and lost myself in a story that explored the consequences of both unchecked population growth on society and the hoarding of resources by a wealthy minority - set in 1999 – thirty-three years after the time of writing - where the trends in the proportion of world resources used by the United States and other countries compared to population growth, depicting a world in which the global population was seven billion people, plagued with overcrowding, resource shortages and a crumbling infrastructure.  Max’s plot jumped from character to character, recounting the lives of people in various walks of life in New York City whose population had reached 35 million.

 

Then, in 1973, a movie, called “Soylent Green”, was made, based on Harrison’s novel. Perhaps influenced by the 1972 heat wave in the Northeast and the oil crisis of the early 1970’s, Soylent Green imagines a sweltering future where the temperature never dips below 90, Margarine spoils in the fridge and sickly fog, similar to London’s historical “pea-soupers,” hangs in the air, forcing the city’s last remaining trees to be shielded under a tent. The film changed much of the plot and theme and introduced cannibalism as a solution to feeding people.

 

Were these calamities the fault of humankind or a natural disaster?  The film isn’t clear, but, in the source novel, it’s implied to be the former.  After sitting through the movie in college; I rang mom to tell her about it, for which she chimed “Some of those writers are prophesiers.”  She sent me a window solarium so I could grow my own food.

 

I was petrified after reading Max Harrison’s novel, that is, until I picked up Mick Jackson’s “Threads”, written in 1984 – an unflinching account of nuclear holocaust – one that guessed how ugly we might become if we continue to allow ourselves to be run by greed. 

 

The elite of “Soylent Green” had a novel way to unwind:  video games – in luxury apartment of a Soylent board member, a sleek cabinet contains Computer Space, which, in real-life 1971 had become the very first coin-operated arcade game.  Ah, but we've avoided pushing the big red launch button; We're too happy to keep pushing the buttons on our digital devices instead.

 

Mom’s not here to witness the iPhone or the laptop, but she left me a legacy of books by writers who had predicted the future of most of it – and, quite frankly, I am too afraid to stop reading them – though, somewhat relieved mom didn’t take to that 1936 Underwood Model 6 Typewriter she inherited from her grandmother and banged out her own stories – she wasn’t going to call them sci-fi either…

WRITING on NARROW ROADS to a FESTIVAL

By El Ochiis

A college friend, Droad, decided to make a film that we’d enter into a festival to win some prize money. I’d write the story in route – it didn’t matter where, specifically. Droad owned a Paillard-Bolex H16 Deluxe Cinema Camera that he inherited from his grandfather, who once worked on the set of a famous movie.

Our group consisted of five of college students: two with two part-time jobs; one was from a filthy rich family, one from a middle-income family and I had driving and map reading skills.

“I can ask ‘grams’ to loan us the chauffer, it’s a university project,” Bonn volunteered, gazing out into the crowd, with vague interest.

His grandmother, the matriarch with the cash, told him he would have to have a normal life with ordinary friends if he wanted to inherit any of her money; we were his social experiment.

“The whole point was for us to make a film, a story about doing college kids’ stuff,” lamented Seville, who had a crush on Bonn so big, it hurt to watch.

We all knew Bonn was going to marry a society chick from the Upper East Side. Seville was a vegan from the Lower East Side who played the saxophone. Bonn only knew she was alive when she would lug her horn to his dorm room and insist he listen to real music, like Coltrane instead of rock. I think they made out a couple of times.

“We should go to Park City Utah, my grandpa might be able to hook us up at an independent festival called Sundance,” Droad piped.

“What, no way, Bonn protested. “Too far, I can’t ride in some rented car, for, like a million miles across the whole country.”

“Seville wants to blow her sax in a national park, Droad has a real movie camera, I can write while someone helps with driving and you can go skiing.” I affirmed.

“But, I want to relax, on plush leather,” whined Bonn

“It would impress your grams, think about it,” I inveigled.

It was settled, we would hit the road for fourteen days, and, roughly 5,300 miles.

Bonn bailed on us for an airplane to Salt Lake City before we reached Cleveland, leaving one of gram’s credit cards for road expenses.

Seville’s first music score was for a film whose final scenes ended in Zion National Park, entitled: Narrow Roads. I wrote the script, Droad shot the footage and Bonn was the leading man. It was about relationships that were hard to navigate, like the many two-lane highways we’d trekked across Cleveland, to Nebraska, through Wyoming, into Utah – more of a metaphor for Seville and Bonn – Bonn and us. Bonn moved to Budapest; Seville shacked up with a punk rocker; I left for Paris and Droad took an apprenticeship on a movie set in Stockholm - it was our last road trip together. Our film didn’t make it into the festival – which had to be submitted months in advance – an official at the event said Droad was a natural born filmmaker and I had real writing talent – that counted towards widening the roads, a bit.

DISAGREEING WITH MY NARRATORS

By El Ochiis

My internal monologue plays out as heterosexual males; they are never one ethnic group. Sometimes he is European with pale skin and other times he is an indigenous brown man of African descent. None of them have names, the only time he has one is when I give it to him. Frequently, a number of them will argue over point of view.

These men have compelling stories that they urge me to tell. The problem begins when I disagree with their point of view; the conflict; the drama and/or the plot twist. It is, at this time, when I must face the task of re-working the piece from a different perspective, that my friendly confidantes become unfriendly.

Their suggestions and stories can be misogynistic or steeped in prejudice, preferring one ethnicity over the other – may or may not yield retribution for the protagonist. Each man, can be, surprisingly, quite altruistic and, rather fair - seeing the other’s side of life – and, other times, not viewing the other’s side – and highly prejudiced - which makes my part of the storytelling process harder and, subject to confrontation.

When I veer from the original idea, my narrator can become recalcitrant, and, for days, weeks and months, refuse to talk to me. I am like a jilted lover needing a social call, I wander about aimlessly, waiting for my suitor to ring – waiting for those inner monologues that fill my brain while the engine stands idling.

I had assumed I was bordering on insanity, or sounded completely mad, until I read a story about the last great mystery of the mind – people who have unusual – or non-existent – inner voices.

One woman, who is not Italian, has an Italian couple who argue: “They were chatting non-stop before I handed in my notice,” she stated, with a hard sigh. “I’d wake up and they’d be arguing. I’d be driving to work and they’d be arguing. It was exhausting, to be honest.”

I know from whence she speaks because my narrators, when speaking to me, sometimes, can be like a TV screen, or a slide projector, that are continuously playing inside an attic, inside my head, with so many ideas that I can’t possibly keep up – it becomes overwhelming - I don’t have enough time to produce all the interesting stories they want me to write.

A neuroscientist, who studies this phenomenon, has also found people for whom there isn’t a voice at all, just silence – an emptiness - a still, warm air before a rustling breeze.

I wish I could download mine onto some sort of hard drive, so the people without any monologues in their heads, could look at it - it’s a shame no one gets to meet my guys but me.

Wait, should I be worried that they’ll be mad at me for exposing our little spats? Nah, it was their suggestion that I write about my inner voices – them – see, now that’s a tad narcissistic I argue.

CAN’T HURRY THAT NOVEL

By El Ochiis

Some novels take time to write. Just as one shouldn’t pan-fry brisket, sometimes one can’t hurry a novel that needs to be slow-cooked. Karl Marlantes, a Yale graduate and Rhodes Scholar, slow-cooked his powerful novel, Matterhorn, for 33 years. Published in 2009, it was set during the Vietnam war – he was also a decorated soldier of that war.

I mention this because, lately, I’ve been dreading the days on the calendar due to a hopeful decision, well, promise, to complete a piece that I had been working on before the end of 2021. That deadline will not be met. There is a professional colleague, editor/coach, who will ring me up and make me feel even more guilty than I already am by admonishing me in the manner one does with a two-year old:

“Turn off the internet, make a writing schedule, stay inside for a month and just work on your piece, meditate procrastination away, work less hours,” she will cajole, as if I had not tried all of the suggestions she has texted, emailed and left so many messages, my voice mail on both phones are full.

But, the one criticism that she uses to break my soul is:

“Not getting any younger, time, there is no time,” she warns, in her seventh voice message.

Ouch, that one so hurts my feeling, not because I have any deep-rooted issues with getting older, rather because I haven’t been able to commission some entity, Julius Caesar, maybe, that I need more hours added to the day, more days added to the week, more weeks added to the month and, finally, more months added to the year – Caesar’s solar year was already miscalculated by eleven minutes:

Listen to me, miss ‘Negative Nancy’, Harriet Doerr was 74 when her debut novel, Stones for Ibarra, was published; It went on to win the National Book Award. Eudora Welty was 75 when One Writer’s Beginnings was published; Edith Wharton, 75, when The Buccaneers was published (after her death), still counts; Herman Wouk, at 100 years old, published: Sailor and Fiddler: Reflections of a 100-Year-Old Author. – And, he was still alive past April 2019.” I will rattle off, in my head, too ashamed to pick up the phone and confront the deadline demon.

Did I forget Stan Lee, creator of Marvel Comics, who died in 2018 at the age of 95, he kept going till the very end. Margaret Atwood redefined herself and her work in her mid-70’s when The Handmaid’s Tale, published in 1985, reached the small but powerful screen in 2017.

May Sarton—who wrote dozens of books, including poetry, fiction, children’s books and nonfiction into her early 80’s—quotes Humphry Trevelyan on Goethe: “It seems that two qualities are necessary if a great artist is to remain creative to the end of a long life: he must on the one hand retain an abnormally keen awareness of life, he must never grow complacent...”

I’ll just keep writing, and, moving up that deadline, because, you see, it’s my humble opinion that writers and artists tend to go until they can’t go on any longer – brisket anyone?

HERE ARE FOUR OF LITERATURE’S MOST POWERFUL INVENTIONS THAT YOU PROBABLY USE TO TELL STORIES, BUT DIDN’T REALIZE THE ACTUAL NEUROSCIENCE BEHIND THEM

By El Ochiis

I had an English professor who was considered an eccentric by New York standards; he collected shopping bags. His position was that each bag told a story about the store and the patrons who shopped there – that these containers for capitalism were a most interesting invention. Now this wouldn’t have been such an oddball thing save for the fact that he was as spendthrift as he was inimitable; he never shopped in these stores – merely using them to hold books he had checked out of The New York Public Library.

We waited each week for the bag and its contents therein. He never let us down with each introduction of something new in literature and writing. One week the professor brought a few books in his arms, sans a bag, and announced that he would be introducing us to literary inventions, through the ages, showing how writers have created technical breakthroughs—rivaling any scientific inventions—and engineering enhancements to the human heart and mind

1. Plot Twist - This literary invention is now so well-known that we often learn to identify it as children. But it thrilled Aristotle when he first discovered it, and for two reasons. First, it supported his hunch that literature’s inventions were constructed from story. And second, it confirmed that literary inventions could have potent psychological effects. Who hasn’t felt a burst of wonder—or as Aristotle called it, thaumazein—when a story pivots unexpectedly? That’s why holy scriptures brim with plot twists: David beating Goliath, parting the Sea of Reeds to escape an evil Pharaoh …

2. The Hurt Delay - this invention’s blueprint is a plot that discloses to the audience that a character is going to get hurt—prior to the hurt actually arriving. The classic example is Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus, where we learn before Oedipus that he’s about to undergo the horror of discovering that he’s killed his father and married his mother. But it occurs in a range of later literature, from Shakespeare’s Macbeth to paperback bestsellers such as John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars.

3. The Tale Told From Our Future - This invention was created simultaneously by many different global authors, among them the 13th-century West African griot poet who composed the Epic of Sundiata. Basically, a narrator uses a future-tense voice to address us in our present. As it goes in the Epic: “Listen to my words, you who want to know; by my mouth you will learn the history of Mali. By my mouth you will get to know the story. . .”

4. The Almighty Heart - This invention is an anthropomorphic omniscient narrator—or, to be more colloquial, a story told by someone with a human heart and a god’s all-seeing eye. It was first devised by the ancient Greek poet Homer in The Iliad, but you can find it throughout more recent fiction. The invention works by tricking your brain into feeling like you’re chanting along with a greater human voice.

FEMALE PHILOSOPHERS WHO HELPED SHAPE MODERN THOUGHT

By El Ochiis

Some of the greatest literary writers wrote philosophical fiction. I took a philosophy course in Athens, in college; actually, the reason I had travelled to Greece was to study philosophy, but, I did not need to venture that far to learn any more about, Socrates, Plato or Aristotle. No, I journeyed there to find out about some of the most famous, or, should I have said, infamous philosophers that interested me:

“What - who are you talking about?” Demanded Professor Skoplitius, when I raised my hand to ask about Aspasia of Miletus’ influence on Plato. 

“Her house became a center for intellectuals in Athens,” I stated, breathlessly. 

“Are you a Moroccan, no, you couldn’t be, where are you from?” Mr. Skoplitius queried. 

“My passport and birth certificate officiated in the states,” I offered, uneasily, since anyone I had ever met in Europe considered me anything but American. I wasn’t sure if I should have been insulted that he had estimated that I couldn’t be from Morocco, however. 

“This is most strange, I, I never met no one who speak of this, for which you are so passionate, tell us more,” he challenged, pushing his glasses further down a nose that appeared as if it had been carved onto his face. 

“Ahem, well, there were three I find quite intriguing: Aspasia, Clea and Thecla, I rattled off from my notebook, barely pronouncing their names correctly."

I had written my final paper on the largely unknown female philosophers of Ancient Greece, it was that paper that got me nominated to take the trip to study in Athens. The professor at the university in New York was not happy about my choice of subject matter, however, he did not know enough about these women to add much pros or cons.

Professor Skopltius, on the other hand, tolerated my intrusion of his class in the classic males of Greek philosophy; He half-heartedly read to the class, in an acerbic monotone: 

"Aspasia was born in the Greek city of Miletus (today’s providence Aydin, Turkey). Her family must have been quite wealthy due to the excellent education the young woman received. It was uncertain just why she came to Athens – however, her house became a center for intellectuals in Athens. It was assumed that even Socrates spent much time discussing in her home and, that her teaching would have influenced Socrates, the most important of all Greek philosophers. Though little is known of her, she appears in the writings of Plato, Aristophanes, of Miletus Xenophon and other Greek philosophers. 

Clea was the teacher of Pythagoras, the great philosopher-mathematician from Samos, who has been called the ‘father of philosopher’. It has been also claimed that Pythagoras may have derived his ethical doctrines from her. 

Thecla first appeared on the scene, in the Acts of Paul and Thecla, leading a normal middle-class life, sequestered at home and about to make an advantageous marriage. But leaning out of her balcony, she hears the dynamic preaching of Paul and decides on a radically different path. As priestess at Delphi, she held a highly esteemed political and intellectual role in the ancient world – religious practitioners at the shrine received frequent requests from world leaders for divine advice about political matters. She found many opportunities for in-depth philosophical conversations with Plutarch, the most famous intellectual of his time.

There were a few more: Sosipatra; Macrina the Younger; Diotima of Mantinea; Hypatia of Alexandria; Leontion; Theano; Arignote; Arete of Cyrene; and, Perictione." 

As writers, we should be mindful of the women who shaped modern thought and who influenced the well-known philosophers – the next time you are quoting what you believe are male Greek philosophers, you may just be quoting a female: “I dream of a world where there are neither masters nor slave.” Arete of Cyrene.

 

 

 

THE ANATOMY OF A CHAPTER

By El Ochiis

Chapters tend to get little, if any, respect, yet, for most writers, they are a non-negotiable part of the novel-reading experience.  Unless you have a very good reason to not have chapters, you need them.  For me, as a writer, chapters and their titles are a necessity for creating structure within my novels and/or short stories. 

Your story may be fascinating and bewitching, but humans aren’t meant to consume an entire 200-plus page novel in one sitting. It’s just too much to process. Chapters give the reader a chance to think about what’s happened in the story thus far and anticipate what happens next - helping you tighten your storytelling so that the readers stay on the edge of their seats. Thematically relevant titles connect to the story and give cohesion to your novels and stories:

“He disagreed with something that ate him,” chapter 14, Live and Let Die, Ian Fleming. 

“I Begin Life on My Own Account, And Don’t Like It,” chapter 11, David Copperfield, Charles Dickens. 

Writers tend to get confused between a chapter and a scene.  A scene happens when your characters interact with each other. The scene does not mean scenery. In other words, a scene is not the same thing as the setting or the location where the action takes place. The scene is the action. Each scene has a beginning, middle, and end.

A chapter, on the other hand, may contain one scene, or, it may contain multiple scenes. A chapter is not a scene. Rather, a chapter is a division in your book. It’s where you, the writer, decide to give the reader a chance to process what they’ve read while you rearrange stuff in the background: 

 “Nikki, the name we finally gave my younger daughter, is not an abbreviation; it was a compromise I reached with her father. For paradoxically it was he who wanted to give her a Japanese name and I – perhaps out of some selfish desire not to be reminded of the past – insisted on an English one.” - A Pale View of Hills, Kazuo Ishiguro.  In only two sentences the narrator has hinted at tensions between past and present, mother and father, England and Japan.

“Everyone had always said that John would be a preacher when he grew up, just like his father. It had been said so often that John, without ever thinking about it, had come to believe it himself. Not until the morning of his 14th birthday did he really begin to think about it, and by then it was already too late.” - Go Tell It on the Mountain, James Baldwin.  Deliciously clear language, yet, the content is about how brutal and controlling an inherited story can be, how the repeated words of others can predetermine the life of another. 

Here are some tips you can use when building out book chapters:

Start with action - try opening a chapter in the middle of a scene.  Shape around plot development – an unresolved conflict between characters, a new crucial piece of information, or an actual cliff, keep the reader engaged. Approach each chapter with a specific goal - One chapter might be focused on a chase scene; The goal of another might be introducing the hero; Use chapter titling to distill your focus - Chapter titles can be a summary not only of where the story has come from, but where it plans to go next.  Consider pacing – the chance for your main character to recap all that’s happened and plan what he/she will do next.; show a different point of view - Each new chapter can allow different characters to take over as the main POV and chime in with their view of an unfolding event; seek balance - mark the passages that are scenes, leaving the passages that are dramatic narration unmarked. Is there an imbalance between the two types of narration? If so, add some dramatic narration into scenes or vice versa.

Above all, be sure to give each chapter a purpose that ties into the bigger story.

 

A PROFOUND PARAGRAPH IS A WORK OF ART

By El Ochiis

The great writers begin their stories with a killer hook which migrates into distinct blocks of text which section out a larger piece of writing – paragraph(s) —making it easier to read and understand. These blocks of text aid readability, setting the pace of the narrative, generating mood and helping to make characters three-dimensional.

“Call me Ishmael. Some years ago — never mind how long precisely — having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen, and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul...” Herman Melville, Moby Dick

There are some major strategies that those writers used to create compelling opening paragraphs - They can help you too: Create a mystery; Describe the emotional landscape; Build characters; Bring the energy; Start with an unusual point of view; Dazzle with the last sentence and Set up the theme. Melville has used at least six of them in his prelude to Moby Dick.

A scene can be constructed in any number of ways – it is up to the writer to break it down to the most dramatic effect – managing content.

“Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday, I don’t know. I had a telegram from the home: ‘Mother passed away. Funeral tomorrow. Yours sincerely.’ That doesn’t mean anything. It may have been yesterday.” Albert Camus, The Stranger

How a writer’s narrator sounds and thinks affects the rhythm and even the design of the paragraph – amplifying voice:

“All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. Everything was in confusion in the Oblonskys’ house. The wife had discovered that the husband was carrying on an intrigue with a French girl, who had been a governess in their family, and she had announced to her husband that she could not go on living in the same house with him.” Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

A paragraph can set mood; Ask yourself, is mine introspective and thoughtful, or hurried and staccato? The length and type of the paragraphs can maintain or change the mood in a scene:

“The future is always changing, and we're all going to have to live there. Possibly as soon as next week.” Douglas Adams, Hitchhikers Guide

“It was a pleasure to burn.” Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

"Take the universe and grind it down to the finest powder and sieve it through the finest sieve and then show me one atom of justice.” Terry Pratchett, Hogfather

A writer’s first line should open up a rib cage. It should reach in and twist the reader’s heart backward. It should suggest that the world will never be the same again. Then, remembering that paragraphing is more an element of individual style than of grammar, and, it’s you who’s in charge of what a paragraph should do or what shape it should take, think holistically: What preceded this moment, and what must happen next.

We know that we can’t write like Tolstoy, Bradbury, Adams, Bronte, Baldwin or many of the other prolific scribes, so, how can we learn to create great openings, transporting them into even greater paragraphs? Well, a piece of advice that I hold dear was that motivation runs out pretty soon once we get to the nuts and bolts of the grind, but discipline, on the other hand, is about doing the task no matter what. Read and listen to the masters, then sit yourself down and write every chance you get – because, as Jodi Picoult said, “you can edit a bad page but not a blank one.” How will you orchestrate your story, using the paragraphing techniques above?

IT ALL STARTS WITH A GREAT SENTENCE

By El Ochiis

You think you care about what a book is about, but, really, you care how it sounds, even if that sound can only be heard in your head.

Words are lyrics for the eyes – a line of words where logic and rhythm meet. Good sentences should be as lucid and sincere as good cooking. Even people who can’t boil water for soup will find pleasure in reading this line from a recipe: Warm two tablespoons of olive oil in a pan, then add the sliced onion. The verdict in the following sentence sounds fairer and truer in a way that those in life rarely are: Yesterday’s bread has less moisture and so makes crisper toast. Good writing is clean, full of flavor and a meal in itself.

Great sentences give a start to the beginnings of superb paragraphs which flows into extraordinary chapters, culminating to exceptional stories - a memorable sentence makes immediate sense but sounds just slightly odd:

A screaming comes across the sky. -Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow (1973)

The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new. -Samuel Beckett, Murphy (1938)

Every summer Lin Kong returned to Goose Village to divorce his wife, Shuyu. -Ha Jin, Waiting (1999)

Life is to be lived, not controlled; and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat. -Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (1952)

There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it. -C. S. Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (1952)

We started dying before the snow, and like the snow, we continued to fall. -Louise Erdrich, Tracks (1988

We were the people who were not in the papers. We lived in the blank white spaces at the edges of print. It gave us more freedom. We lived in the gaps between the stories. - Margaret Atwood The Handmaid’s Tale (1985)

Orwell advised cutting as many words as possible, Woolf found energy in verbs, and Baldwin aimed for ‘a sentence as clean as a bone.’ Though some of this is true, none of it is a good way of learning how to write a sentence. More ethical demand than useful advice, it forces writers back to their own reserves of wisdom and authenticity. It blames bad writing on laziness and dishonesty, when a likelier culprit is lack of skill. If someone were to order me to make a soufflé, all I could come up with would be a gloopy, inedible mess – not because I am languid or untruthful, but because, although I have some vague idea that it needs eggs, milk, flour and a lot of beating, I don’t know how to make a soufflé.

A good sentence imposes a logic on the world’s weirdness, getting power from the tension between the ease of its phrasing and the shock of its thought as it slides cleanly into the mind and as it proceeds, is a paring away of options. Each added word, because of the English language’s dependence on word order, reduces the writer’s alternatives and narrows the reader’s expectations. But even up to the last word the writer has choices and can throw in a curveball. A sentence can begin in one place and end in another galaxy, without breaking a single syntactic rule.

Can you give your readers something that’s illuminating and cherishable, all on its own as American writer, Gary Lutz once lectured, because "Tomorrow is always fresh, with no mistakes in it yet.”? -L. M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables. When you get sentences right, everything else solves itself or ceases to matter.

MAYBE THE RULES FOR WRITING FICTION IS TO IGNORE THE RULES

 

By El Ochiis

I once read an article about the “Ten Rules of Writing Fiction” and one of them was to never begin the story with the weather. What if the very thing you needed to write about was central to the story you are about to tell? I meant, if your character is stuck on a road in a remote part of the Yukon, in the dead of winter, weather will be central to the plot. And, a great opening would be: “It was one of those white-outs in Yukon Territory where the blizzard fought for dominance over the impending wind and freezing rain.” Would you not get a visible image of that scene – even if you lived in Bali?

Dorothy Parker once famously quipped, “If you have any young friends who aspire to become writers, the second-greatest favor you can do them is to present them with copies of The Elements of Style. The first-greatest, of course, is to shoot them now, while they’re happy.”

Rarely is a Parker quip a compliment, but, speaking of the “Style” Bible, it’s been over one hundred years after the birth of E.B. White and good number of years after I first encountered his classic style guide (originally written by William Strunk Jr. in 1918 – but much expanded by White), it may be time to admit that it’s not all it is cracked up to be.

"Don’t use active voice, paragraphs should be more than one sentence, place yourself in the background, avoid foreign languages; stay clear of accents"... Nabokov’s novels are full of foreign languages, and if Nabokov did it, it can’t be that wrong.

Then, there is Rule Sixteen which implores the writer to “prefer the specific to the general, the definite to the vague, the concrete to the abstract.” The book presents two examples, the first, in each, being “wrong:”

A period of unfavorable weather set in.
vs.
It rained every day for a week.

and

He showed satisfaction as he took possession of his well-earned reward.
vs.
He grinned as he pocketed the coin.

Excuse me, but I prefer “a period of unfavorable weather set in,” if only because it’s less usual and banal.

Recently, the New York Times attempted to explain Jane Austen’s enduring popularity by unpacking her word choices – what they discovered was that Austen had a propensity for words like: quite, really and very – the sort that writers are urged to avoid if they want muscular prose. So, writers are to avoid the very language that has made Jane one of the most beloved writers of all time?

Professional writers probably won’t be tied to any rule book, but, students will need to be taught that clarity is king – still, rules learned early on can be tough to shake, and most of us learned, at least a little, from Strunk & White. I understand that writing teachers know that most people need to master the rules before they can break them. But, as a reader, I prefer the offbeat to the standard – in word choice, in subject matter and in structure.

I think my greatest rule is that a piece of writing should follow a path – if readers don’t have a path to follow, they will get lost. Truth is paradox – in the greatest story ever told, the universe was created “as something out of nothing” – the first and most basic creation metaphor. Opposing ideas form the tension of its very premise. My point, there is no writing guide that can teach you style with any skill – it is in choosing which rules to learn and which to break – to what end – that you can begin to construct your own.

HERE ARE the FOUR DESIRES DRIVING ALL HUMAN BEHAVIOR that YOU CAN USE to CREATE COMPELLING CHARACTERS

By El Ochiis

“What is fueling your character’s desire?” Drilled Elias Dillard of The Italia Conti Academy of Theatre Arts, in London, which specialized in theatre arts training, where I had been offered a non-paid position assisting in production. It was one of those dream jobs that sounded much better on paper than in real life.

“I’m not sure what you mean?” I groaned, with timid insolence, looking down at my script for mercy.

One day, an understudy for a top actor was ill and, another duty got added to my list of unpaid responsibilities - I was asked to read. I read the line like I would have written it, not like the writer had intended. Though my action was met with consternation by the director, my version worked better and he became interested in my work. I was given permission to present to him one of my plays from a series called Splitting Seconds.

“All human activity is prompted by passion - man differs from other animals in one very important respect, he has some desires which are, so to speak, infinite, which can never be fully gratified, and which would keep him restless even in Paradise.”

“Um?” I choked, trying not to cry. I was young, I had no clue what he was referring to. Affecting the stance of an authoritative figure from one of Dickens’ novels, he gestured for me to follow him to his office, a place that housed leather-bound books that were older than the building itself. He had everything in alphabetical order. Pulling one from the “B” Section, he looked up, then down:

“The great British philosophy, Sir Bertrand Arthur William Russell will help you there, my dear.” He offered, with a hint of condescension.

“I had assumed all philosophers were French.” I acerbically responded, taking the book and spending the next week absorbing it like a sponge.

Bertrand Russell, as he is known, states that there are four infinite desires driving all human behavior:

1. Acquisitiveness — the wish to possess as much as possible of goods, or the title to goods — is a motive which, I suppose, has its origin in a combination of fear with the desire for necessaries.

2. Rivalry — he argues, is in turn upstaged by human narcissism - many men would cheerfully face impoverishment if they could thereby secure complete ruin for their rivals.

3. Vanity — a motive of immense potency. Think, children who are constantly performing some antic, and saying “Look at me.”

4. Love of power —the most potent of the four impulses, he would argue – is closely akin to vanity, but it is not by any means the same thing. What vanity needs for its satisfaction is glory, and it’s easy to have glory without power -Power, like vanity, is insatiable. Nothing short of omnipotence could satisfy it completely.

Which of these will you use to drive your character(s) – which two - or all four of them, if you dare?

HAVE YOU EVER CONSIDERED USING INTERESTING WORDS TO MAKE YOUR CHARACTERS SOUND MORE INTELLIGENT?

By El Ochiis

I was studying abroad when an opportunity to intern at a publishing house, presented itself in the form of a requirement from a professor who had a reputation for his dislike of foreign students – his position was that they suffered from an ignorance of intelligent language above common words. Shifting his cigarette from the right side of his mouth to the left, with a flick of his tongue, he would emphatically state that American writers wrote so relentlessly about themselves, it exhausted him. Rumor was if he liked your writing you got a letter from his spouse, a noted editor – a shoo-in for that internship. 

“I take offense to Professor Brodeur’s opinion. I need to pen an essay filled with such uncommonly smart words that it will greatly annoy him,” I announced to Julien, a former student who has gone on to achieve some writing success, offering him my first draft.

 “This is brilliant. He WILL send you to his wife – she is more torturous than he, but in fewer words,” Julien announced, making edits with a pencil he kept behind his right ear. “But, you can raise it to the height of greater intelligence with a few more unusual words."

I took the points Julien made, incorporated them, and, submitted the piece.

One week and a day later, I was summoned for an interview lunch at the Centre Pompidou by Madame Lilou-Arlette Brodeur.  

I arrived half an hour early; I was nervously anxious. Then, I saw her; she flitted through the passageway on black-tipped Chanel sling-backs, moving with the aloofness of a pedigree feline. Laying a leather-bound diary on my backpack, she summoned a waiter. The Centre Pompidou, at that time, was frequented by artist and writers who could barely afford a cup of coffee, wait staff would be a stretch.

My black, torn jeans with the Janis Joplin and John Coltrane patches, topped off with an even blacker Harley Davison tee-shirt and worn cowboy boots were in stark contrast to her couture.  

She placed some crisp francs into the hands of a man walking by, instructing him to purchase a café au lait, fixating her eyes over my head, at something more interesting, finally resting a momentary gaze on me:

“An agelast, apropos,” she spewed, with a French accent, scanning my essay, taking the steaming cup from the gentleman, pushing it towards me.

I thought I recognized some of the terms she was using as the ones Julien had added, but she spoke them with such a precise French accent; I wasn’t sure – this was interesting and scary.  

“I Conspuer a bioviate.” she reasoned, flicking her cigarette in the saucer of the still warm café, opening her book in a manner that let me know I was either being dismissed or she was departing. 

I tried to give the impression that I wasn’t completely dumbfounded by smiling and nodding – I wrote stuff down in the pretense of astute notetaking. Her faint smile told me she wasn’t displeased. But, were those interview questions or stark criticism of my writing?  

 “Hiraeth, logophilic, n'est-ce pas?” she affirmed, rising, checking her watch before retrieving a piece of paper from her diary, scribbling an address and phone number, pushing it at me. Then, she sauntered off. 

I ran all the way to Julien. I breathlessly retold him everything that happened.   

“I think I got the internship, but I couldn’t understand how she was using some of the words you added – the woman is odd.” I exclaimed, holding out the notes I’d taken.

 Julien perused my badly scribbled handwriting. 

“She was saying that you’re a person who rarely laughs (agelast) - she suspects it’s because you only wear black (atrate). She spits in contempt (conspeur) at people who are long-winded with little to say (biovate) – she feels that the essence of your piece was about the homesickness of a place that you can never return to, or never really existed (hiraeth) - you have a gift for words (logophile),” Julien surmised with the confidence of a cryptographer. 

“How do you know this?” I asked, incredulously. 

“I read one of her favorite books – the words I added to your piece were from a book she edited entitled Interesting Words You Should Slip Into Your Writing To Make Your Characters Sound Much More Intelligent – it’s great that she didn’t quiz you,” Julien chortle. 

Can you, as a writer, write a scene for a novel, short story or an essay using words that have no English translation, or interesting words that would help your characters sound smarter in any conversation? Here is a place to start: https://www.dictionary.com/e/keep-classy-fancy-words-listicle/

 

 

 

 

 

 

THE DETAILS ARE IN THE DIALOGUE

By El Ochiis

When critics read my writing, they comment that it reads like a television or movie script.  Both genres use dialogue judiciously. What’s most interesting is that I didn’t have a television growing up – I did have an imagination that produced a lot of imaginary characters.  Though conversations between people appear to be a natural to me, I still rely on some key tools to write good dialogue:

1. Keep characters completely unenlightened

One book that every writer of fiction should read is Michael Shurtleff’s Audition. His advice equally applies to actors and writers.  Shurtleff observed that actors often play a scene as if they know the scene’s ending beforehand. For example, at the climax of one particular scene of a Tennessee Williams’ play, an insane person puts out a cigarette in the palm of the hand of the nurse who’s trying to help her.  But the nurse, according to Shurtleff, wrongly played the whole scene as if she didn’t like the patient.  Shurtleff told the actress: “If you treat the patient really nicely and kindly throughout the scene, and you show the audience you like her, and you’re trying to help her, it’s a thousand times more powerful if she then turns around and puts that cigarette out in your palm.”  That makes a lot of sense.  If you know the how the scene will end before you start to write it, don’t let your character act and speak as if they know where it’s going.  Preserve surprise and the scene will be much more efficacious.

         2. Become the Character

Amy Tan stated that her when she wrote dialogue, her technique was to stare at her shoes until she suddenly became the character.  I use a version of this; I pretend to be each of my characters whilst I drive – this is tricky because I wouldn’t want to be in the character of my villain when I order tea at Starbucks.

         3. Leave Transcripts for Court Reporters

Superb dialogue sometimes just happens, but most often, we have to sit there for a long time until we get exactly the right words we want.   At an audition, a director told me he’d deduct a hundred dollars from actors’ pay for each word they uttered that was not in the script.  As a writer, you aren’t in charge of getting down every single word the characters might say – you just have to report the dialogue that’s most important to the story.

         4. Make Every Word Count – Like You’re Being Charged for Them

Here’s the dialogue on the first page of Amy Tan’s Joy Luck Club:

[Mother:] “Auntie Lin cooked red bean soup for Joy Luck. I’m going to cook black bean sesame soup.”

[Daughter:] “Don’t show off.”

The daughter’s three little words tell us a lot about both characters:  1) the mother was trying to one-up Auntie Lin; 2) the relationship between mother and daughter is combative; and, 3) the nature of the daughter who’s hard - she isn’t always nice.  So, when the mother comes back with this retort: “It’s not showoff.”  We know the mother is hurt, we also know that the spelling means the speaker’s first language is not English – “showoff” instead of “show off”.  Use dialogue to provide the evidence of who your characters are and let the reader draw the conclusion.

         5. Read Your Dialogue Aloud, into a Tape Recorder

When you speak your own dialogue, you suddenly know which lines need attention and which lines are fine.

 

A SOLUTION TO WRITER’S BLOCK MIGHT BE FOUND IN THE POWER OF MUSIC

by El Ochiis

I had had a traumatic experience as a young college student, one that drastically impacted my writing life. For some time, I was unable to sit down at a typewriter or computer and write with the voraciousness that I had written throughout high school. Until, I discovered a piece of music that rekindled my creativity. I had always stood in veneration of: blues, opera, jazz, classical and blues rock. John Lee Hooker, Rosetta Thorpe and BB King helped me practice guitar licks; Vivaldi’s Four Seasons picked me up; Les McCain, Eddie Harris and Nina Simone infused a desire to travel - to Switzerland – just to see them on stage; Beethoven’s Concerto in D Major made me think; Pavarotti’s "Nessum Dorma" transported me to another galaxy.

 

That painful experience, which stifled my writing, was assuaged by Aretha Franklin’s gifted voice and astute piano virtuoso. Aretha sang a song called “Oh Mary Don’t You Weep.”  When Aretha’s song ended, I had written the beginnings of a powerful, short story, based on that horrific incident; this piece of prose won several awards and I started writing, again, with avidity – thanks to a woman who could play and belt out despondency, redemption and hope, faster than keys on a keyboard could make an impression.   

 

You see, artists borrow from each other:  Chuck Berry’s pianist, Johnnie Johnson, took some of his inspirational chords from Rachmaninoff. Few took Chuck literally when he “told Beethoven to roll over and tell Tchaikovsky the news” – he was hinting to his listeners about the origin of his and Johnnie’s chords – their way.

 

It’s also my opinion that Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina (1873-1877) was influenced by Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1857). For Tolstoy and Flaubert, the high arts of literature and music stood in a curious relationship to one another, at once securely comfortable and deeply uneasy – rather like a long-term marriage. I’ve spent my efforts trying to copy the storytelling style of both men. But, it was James Baldwin whose prose that I longed to emulate; Baldwin could turn a phrase like James Brown could sing lyrics whilst doing complicated splits. If you’ve ever played an instrument and sang at the same time, you’d know why James Brown had to be an extraterrestrial to be able to sing, and, to perform the way he did – no human could accomplish that.

 

This got me to thinking about prominent writers and what they had to say about the power of music. Susan Sontag stated: “Music is the best means we have of digesting time.” Igor Stravinsky once remarked (one that’s often misattributed to W.H. Auden). “Music is the sound wave of the soul.” Kurt Vonnegut wrote that music, above all else, “made being alive almost worthwhile” for him. Friedrich Nietzsche declared: “Without music life would be a mistake.”  Aldous Huxley wrote, “After silence that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.” So, next time you find yourself stuck, feeling like you can’t write another word, sentence or paragraph, don’t stress, "just take those old records off the self and listen to them by yourself." Aretha can tell you a story about two sisters, named Mary and Martha – if you’re not moved with inspiration, check your pulse.