Mindful Writing
The general theme of this edition’s piece is quiet. Which is rather apt as I’ve just started a Mindfulness course. Mindfulness is a meditation-like technique designed to help us pause and take full notice of the present moment, clearing our head of past troubles and future anxieties and taking in only what our senses are relaying at this precise moment.
Now, this isn’t just about what I do with my leisure time. I was introduced a couple of years ago to the idea of mindful writing by the author Satya Robyn (http://www.fionarobyn.com/). She is behind a wonderful project called A River of Small Stones, which has joined together more than 300 writers from all over the world (http://www.satyarobyn.com/?page_id=49).
A “small stone” is a very simple kind of mindful writing. It is a fully attentive observation of something. Anything. The idea behind the river of small stones was for writers to observe one thing each day in all its facets. It is not just an incredibly good way to practice really looking at the world, but it is, in itself, an act of meditation that takes you out of the buzz of thoughts that intrude upon our lives from every side. As such, it is the perfect way to start any, or indeed every, writing session.
Let me cast the first small stone, with the first thing to hand, a staple I’ve just removed from a document on my desk.
“White and black, pitted with tiny nicks at uneven spaces along its length. At either end mix of curves and angles cutting across planes like arthritic bones, whilst its spine is stiff save for the subtle curve of old age around the neck”
Now, this isn’t just about what I do with my leisure time. I was introduced a couple of years ago to the idea of mindful writing by the author Satya Robyn (http://www.fionarobyn.com/). She is behind a wonderful project called A River of Small Stones, which has joined together more than 300 writers from all over the world (http://www.satyarobyn.com/?page_id=49).
A “small stone” is a very simple kind of mindful writing. It is a fully attentive observation of something. Anything. The idea behind the river of small stones was for writers to observe one thing each day in all its facets. It is not just an incredibly good way to practice really looking at the world, but it is, in itself, an act of meditation that takes you out of the buzz of thoughts that intrude upon our lives from every side. As such, it is the perfect way to start any, or indeed every, writing session.
Let me cast the first small stone, with the first thing to hand, a staple I’ve just removed from a document on my desk.
“White and black, pitted with tiny nicks at uneven spaces along its length. At either end mix of curves and angles cutting across planes like arthritic bones, whilst its spine is stiff save for the subtle curve of old age around the neck”
Dan Holloway (http://danholloway.wordpress.com) is a writer, spoken word performer, and curator of the literary project eight cuts gallery (http://eightcuts.com) . In 2010 he won the international spoken word show, Literary Death Match.
Writing the Senses
I have recently been involved in the most wonderful project, funded by the Arts Council of England, that interwove the crafts of perfumery and poetry. Penning Perfumes (www.penningperfumes.tumblr.com) saw poets sent anonymous samples of scent through the post from which, in any way they chose, they were instructed to craft a poem. At the same time, perfumers were receiving poems from which they had to craft a scent. The two strands were then combined at a series of events where poets performed whilst the audience sat with small paper strips taking in the series of aromas.
Now that’s a lovely anecdote about a wonderful project, but it also cast a light at some of the most obscure but important crevices of the creative process. What’s key for here is that it showed both how important, and how complicated, it is to write the senses. Really write the senses, that is, and not just write the words we associate with sensations. A local perfumer carried out a very simple but effective experiment on the night I took part in – handing round the same scent to the whole room and asking people to rate its pleasantness on a piece of paper. Half the people were given paper that described it as extract from a mature French cheese, and half were told (correctly, ewww) it was the acid found in the secretions from unwashed feet. The latter scored it around 15% less pleasant than the former. What that showed was just how much our senses are shaped by what we are told.
Think about that as a writer. On the one hand you have an incredible responsibility to your reader. Your words will shape the world they inhabit through your page. On the other hand you are faced with the task of somehow capturing and communicating that very particular sensory world you want to convey. Letting our readers truly inhabit the world we create, and more than that, the world we have envisaged, is our holy grail. And that level of what I can best describe as wearing a world like a second skin is something we can only achieve through conjuring with sensation.
What the perfumer showed is both how easy it is to lead our readers astray if we paint our sensual portrait injudiciously and the possibilities we have to form our readers’ experiences by being attentive.
The key distinction I learned through the experience is one I had always known about but had never thought about explicitly. It’s the distinction between describing a sense through its associations and describing it with clinical neutrality. Now, it’s impossible of course to achieve complete neutrality with language – we all bring different associations to different descriptive words. But there is a fundamental difference in the language the perfumer employs, with its sandalwood groundnotes and citrus topnotes, and that of the poet with their transportation to childhood summers by the sea and warmth of mother’s woollen jumpers. The former seeks to pin down, to reduce sensation to something we can all agree on (our perfumer put it very pragmatically – “If a perfume isn’t working I can’t change it to make it better unless I can describe to my team exactly what’s wrong with it in terms we all understand to mean the same thing”). The latter seeks to elaborate, to build on a sense, to make it personal.
As a writer, this distinction becomes a very powerful tool, because understanding it enables us both to do more (and increasing our palette is always handy) but more important than that it enables us to create shades of nuance and vary the distance in our point of view. With two different sets of vocabulary – or at least, two different sets of intent, two different understandings of what we are using vocabulary to do – we can create passages that relate narrator to reader in different ways. If it suits us, we can play the perfumer, building a sensory scene in neutral terms from which the reader will then create their own reality. That will serve to distance us from the reader, will make the point of view more impersonal, but it also serves to make the reader create the emotional experience of a scene for themselves. That in itself can be a valuable way of drawing them into the story, having them invest their own creative energy into the world-making process, engaging them fully with what we have to say.
At different times, we can evoke, we can suggest, using the poet’s brushstrokes of metaphor and allusion. This creates a much closer point of view. We are creating the reader’s world for them, subtly showing them how to feel about a scene, controlling the emotional flow of a passage. And this can be incredibly important when we are showing where our sympathies lie, or trying to draw out one very specific part of a complicated scene.
Writing the senses is one of the most important things we do as writers. Making me blend two completely different creative worlds has had the effect of enabling me to untangle two entirely different strands within my own creative world, strands I had no concrete idea were different – and that, I am sure, will increase the subtle variations in my literary landscape and give me more control over the flow of my text than I had before.
Now that’s a lovely anecdote about a wonderful project, but it also cast a light at some of the most obscure but important crevices of the creative process. What’s key for here is that it showed both how important, and how complicated, it is to write the senses. Really write the senses, that is, and not just write the words we associate with sensations. A local perfumer carried out a very simple but effective experiment on the night I took part in – handing round the same scent to the whole room and asking people to rate its pleasantness on a piece of paper. Half the people were given paper that described it as extract from a mature French cheese, and half were told (correctly, ewww) it was the acid found in the secretions from unwashed feet. The latter scored it around 15% less pleasant than the former. What that showed was just how much our senses are shaped by what we are told.
Think about that as a writer. On the one hand you have an incredible responsibility to your reader. Your words will shape the world they inhabit through your page. On the other hand you are faced with the task of somehow capturing and communicating that very particular sensory world you want to convey. Letting our readers truly inhabit the world we create, and more than that, the world we have envisaged, is our holy grail. And that level of what I can best describe as wearing a world like a second skin is something we can only achieve through conjuring with sensation.
What the perfumer showed is both how easy it is to lead our readers astray if we paint our sensual portrait injudiciously and the possibilities we have to form our readers’ experiences by being attentive.
The key distinction I learned through the experience is one I had always known about but had never thought about explicitly. It’s the distinction between describing a sense through its associations and describing it with clinical neutrality. Now, it’s impossible of course to achieve complete neutrality with language – we all bring different associations to different descriptive words. But there is a fundamental difference in the language the perfumer employs, with its sandalwood groundnotes and citrus topnotes, and that of the poet with their transportation to childhood summers by the sea and warmth of mother’s woollen jumpers. The former seeks to pin down, to reduce sensation to something we can all agree on (our perfumer put it very pragmatically – “If a perfume isn’t working I can’t change it to make it better unless I can describe to my team exactly what’s wrong with it in terms we all understand to mean the same thing”). The latter seeks to elaborate, to build on a sense, to make it personal.
As a writer, this distinction becomes a very powerful tool, because understanding it enables us both to do more (and increasing our palette is always handy) but more important than that it enables us to create shades of nuance and vary the distance in our point of view. With two different sets of vocabulary – or at least, two different sets of intent, two different understandings of what we are using vocabulary to do – we can create passages that relate narrator to reader in different ways. If it suits us, we can play the perfumer, building a sensory scene in neutral terms from which the reader will then create their own reality. That will serve to distance us from the reader, will make the point of view more impersonal, but it also serves to make the reader create the emotional experience of a scene for themselves. That in itself can be a valuable way of drawing them into the story, having them invest their own creative energy into the world-making process, engaging them fully with what we have to say.
At different times, we can evoke, we can suggest, using the poet’s brushstrokes of metaphor and allusion. This creates a much closer point of view. We are creating the reader’s world for them, subtly showing them how to feel about a scene, controlling the emotional flow of a passage. And this can be incredibly important when we are showing where our sympathies lie, or trying to draw out one very specific part of a complicated scene.
Writing the senses is one of the most important things we do as writers. Making me blend two completely different creative worlds has had the effect of enabling me to untangle two entirely different strands within my own creative world, strands I had no concrete idea were different – and that, I am sure, will increase the subtle variations in my literary landscape and give me more control over the flow of my text than I had before.
The Music of Words
(Find a video rendering of this article below. If it's not accessible, please use this link.)
Most writers I know will agree behind closed doors they’d have been an artist or musician if only they could draw, or weren’t tone deaf. I’m no different, only I’ll happily admit it in public.
But whilst I can’t sing or play, I love music and I’m fascinated by the way it’s put together, and that can be incredibly helpful in writing. When it comes to pacing, for example, it’s very easy for us to dilute the effects of our beautiful descriptive prose, or our powerful staccato chew-it-up-and-spit-it-out dialogue by not varying our sentences, by putting too many beautiful descriptions side by side, by making the rat-a-tat-tat so relentless it loses its effect.
The thing is, we know in theory that short, muscular dialogue and long, languid phrasing works best if it punctuates our prose rather than constituting it. But it’s not always easy actually doing that. Which is where musical technique helps.
Today I want to look at one of those basic building blocks that piano pupils everywhere will roll their eyes at: arpeggios. Arpeggio is simply what happens when you take a chord, a sound made up of several notes played together, and play those notes separately (rather like colour, in fact, where you might break orange into red and yellow, or maths, where you would break a perfect number down into its factors).
You can apply this technique incredibly effectively in sentence-building. It’s particularly useful if you are struggling to convey the full depth of what you want to say, in particular the full impact of an image, or the full emotional impact of an event. This can often be because you haven’t sufficiently unpacked your idea and drilled down to the basic elements that give it the power you want to convey.
Say there’s a sunset over the Danube. There’s so much packed into a sunset. It’s like a chord. Ask yourself what are the notes that make it up, the ones it couldn’t do without, and then write the sentence that way. So instead of “I watched the sun set over the Danube” you can write, “I stood on the Szechenyi Bridge and watched the red sun and the black water and the geometric shapes of the old city on the hill until each had disappeared.”
Now take a complex emotion. We all know how devastating it can be, say, to get bad news, and how joyous to get good news. But we get very little of that joy or devastation across if we say, “he was incredibly upset” or, “she was so happy.”
Here, arpeggio can be a great way of showing not telling.
Try thinking about a time of intense emotion. Try and be there, in that moment. You almost certainly weren’t thinking “I’m so happy.” Instead there was a whole group of sensations that combined to form that happiness. The light shone more brightly off the walls, the air felt warm like it was wrapping you in feathers, you became intensely aware of the sound of a bird singing or a train speeding in the distance, you felt each breath as it entered your lungs, fresh with possibility. If you want to convey what you were feeling, you wouldn’t need to say “happy.” You’d break it down into those things and the reader would build it back up in their head. That’s how arpeggio works.
Now you wouldn’t do that all the time – remember the thing about varying our rhythm. But if there’s magic in an image for you and you’re struggling to convey it on the page, try breaking that image down, and you’ll be amazed how often the magic comes into focus.
Most writers I know will agree behind closed doors they’d have been an artist or musician if only they could draw, or weren’t tone deaf. I’m no different, only I’ll happily admit it in public.
But whilst I can’t sing or play, I love music and I’m fascinated by the way it’s put together, and that can be incredibly helpful in writing. When it comes to pacing, for example, it’s very easy for us to dilute the effects of our beautiful descriptive prose, or our powerful staccato chew-it-up-and-spit-it-out dialogue by not varying our sentences, by putting too many beautiful descriptions side by side, by making the rat-a-tat-tat so relentless it loses its effect.
The thing is, we know in theory that short, muscular dialogue and long, languid phrasing works best if it punctuates our prose rather than constituting it. But it’s not always easy actually doing that. Which is where musical technique helps.
Today I want to look at one of those basic building blocks that piano pupils everywhere will roll their eyes at: arpeggios. Arpeggio is simply what happens when you take a chord, a sound made up of several notes played together, and play those notes separately (rather like colour, in fact, where you might break orange into red and yellow, or maths, where you would break a perfect number down into its factors).
You can apply this technique incredibly effectively in sentence-building. It’s particularly useful if you are struggling to convey the full depth of what you want to say, in particular the full impact of an image, or the full emotional impact of an event. This can often be because you haven’t sufficiently unpacked your idea and drilled down to the basic elements that give it the power you want to convey.
Say there’s a sunset over the Danube. There’s so much packed into a sunset. It’s like a chord. Ask yourself what are the notes that make it up, the ones it couldn’t do without, and then write the sentence that way. So instead of “I watched the sun set over the Danube” you can write, “I stood on the Szechenyi Bridge and watched the red sun and the black water and the geometric shapes of the old city on the hill until each had disappeared.”
Now take a complex emotion. We all know how devastating it can be, say, to get bad news, and how joyous to get good news. But we get very little of that joy or devastation across if we say, “he was incredibly upset” or, “she was so happy.”
Here, arpeggio can be a great way of showing not telling.
Try thinking about a time of intense emotion. Try and be there, in that moment. You almost certainly weren’t thinking “I’m so happy.” Instead there was a whole group of sensations that combined to form that happiness. The light shone more brightly off the walls, the air felt warm like it was wrapping you in feathers, you became intensely aware of the sound of a bird singing or a train speeding in the distance, you felt each breath as it entered your lungs, fresh with possibility. If you want to convey what you were feeling, you wouldn’t need to say “happy.” You’d break it down into those things and the reader would build it back up in their head. That’s how arpeggio works.
Now you wouldn’t do that all the time – remember the thing about varying our rhythm. But if there’s magic in an image for you and you’re struggling to convey it on the page, try breaking that image down, and you’ll be amazed how often the magic comes into focus.
He Said What?
When I was at college my best friend and later best man at my wedding used to read through rainforests’ worth of my stories with a red pen, a critical eye, and infinite patience. He would say all kinds of interesting things about characters and structure before circling in on the inevitable conclusion, “You can’t write dialogue for toffee.”
That was 20 years ago. I still tease him about giving me a complex for life. Which he did. I must have devoted more hours to figuring out dialogue than every other part of writing put together. Now quite possibly I still “can’t write dialogue for toffee.” On the other hand, I’ve learned, forgotten, relearned, and messed around with more rules than there are toppings on my favourite pizza.
If I had just one piece of advice on dialogue it would be to think how you use tags, the simple he said/she said stuff. You know, those little bits that get in the way.
We know what tags are for – they’re there to stop us getting lost. They’re most definitely not there to showcase our verbal flair. He didn’t say it empathically; she didn’t ululate the words. She said it. He asked it. And only so many times as is necessary to stop you going “Eh? Who was that?”
That’s the rule. We know it. But we’re wordsmiths. It does seem a shame to have words that don’t really add anything to the language, doesn’t it?
Consider this piece of dialogue.
Pete: “When did you stop loving me?”
Kelly: “I think it was the night our daughter died.”
Now I imagine the rules would tell us to present it like this:
Pete looked Kelly straight in the eye and through his tears he asked her, “When did you stop loving me?”
“I think it was the night our daughter died.”
We don’t need “she said” at all. Only. Well, the scene is flat. It doesn’t breathe. Now the clunky but conventional way of adding tension would be to say:
She hesitated for a moment, looked away, and answered...
Or some such.
But that’s stage direction, and we’re not writing a film, we’re writing a book. So consider this:
Pete looked Kelly straight in the eye and through his tears he asked her, “When did you stop loving me?”
She said, “I think it was the night our daughter died.”
Or
Pete looked Kelly straight in the eye and through his tears he asked her, “When did you stop loving me?”
“I think,” she said, “it was the night our daughter died.”
You see what’s happened. That simple dialogue tag has added a breathing space, a rhythm as we read. In the first instance it does exactly what the rather clumsy stage direction did – it lets us know there is a pause, it lets us feel the awkwardness in Kelly’s voice. In the second example, it creates tension. It’s a pause. We’re there with Pete wondering what she’s going to say. We’re there with Kelly wondering if we can bring ourselves to say it. And like a well-timed pause in a rock song (next time you’re on YouTube listen to Smells Like Teen Spirit – Nirvana were masters of this), it adds more impact to what comes next.
I see the question, “Where should I put the tag?” on writing forums all the time. The answer is, until you’re happy with it, stick to the end of the dialogue. Once you are comfortable enough with constructing conversations on the page, you can move to where it should really go – the place where it will add most to the rhythm and tension of the scene – and you’ll find that by using tags judiciously to break up a scene you can cut out whole chunks of filler description that lifts the reader out of the scene, detracting from rather than adding to the tension and dynamic that every conversation should have.
That was 20 years ago. I still tease him about giving me a complex for life. Which he did. I must have devoted more hours to figuring out dialogue than every other part of writing put together. Now quite possibly I still “can’t write dialogue for toffee.” On the other hand, I’ve learned, forgotten, relearned, and messed around with more rules than there are toppings on my favourite pizza.
If I had just one piece of advice on dialogue it would be to think how you use tags, the simple he said/she said stuff. You know, those little bits that get in the way.
We know what tags are for – they’re there to stop us getting lost. They’re most definitely not there to showcase our verbal flair. He didn’t say it empathically; she didn’t ululate the words. She said it. He asked it. And only so many times as is necessary to stop you going “Eh? Who was that?”
That’s the rule. We know it. But we’re wordsmiths. It does seem a shame to have words that don’t really add anything to the language, doesn’t it?
Consider this piece of dialogue.
Pete: “When did you stop loving me?”
Kelly: “I think it was the night our daughter died.”
Now I imagine the rules would tell us to present it like this:
Pete looked Kelly straight in the eye and through his tears he asked her, “When did you stop loving me?”
“I think it was the night our daughter died.”
We don’t need “she said” at all. Only. Well, the scene is flat. It doesn’t breathe. Now the clunky but conventional way of adding tension would be to say:
She hesitated for a moment, looked away, and answered...
Or some such.
But that’s stage direction, and we’re not writing a film, we’re writing a book. So consider this:
Pete looked Kelly straight in the eye and through his tears he asked her, “When did you stop loving me?”
She said, “I think it was the night our daughter died.”
Or
Pete looked Kelly straight in the eye and through his tears he asked her, “When did you stop loving me?”
“I think,” she said, “it was the night our daughter died.”
You see what’s happened. That simple dialogue tag has added a breathing space, a rhythm as we read. In the first instance it does exactly what the rather clumsy stage direction did – it lets us know there is a pause, it lets us feel the awkwardness in Kelly’s voice. In the second example, it creates tension. It’s a pause. We’re there with Pete wondering what she’s going to say. We’re there with Kelly wondering if we can bring ourselves to say it. And like a well-timed pause in a rock song (next time you’re on YouTube listen to Smells Like Teen Spirit – Nirvana were masters of this), it adds more impact to what comes next.
I see the question, “Where should I put the tag?” on writing forums all the time. The answer is, until you’re happy with it, stick to the end of the dialogue. Once you are comfortable enough with constructing conversations on the page, you can move to where it should really go – the place where it will add most to the rhythm and tension of the scene – and you’ll find that by using tags judiciously to break up a scene you can cut out whole chunks of filler description that lifts the reader out of the scene, detracting from rather than adding to the tension and dynamic that every conversation should have.
