Episode 199 - Writing a scene with many people and lots of motion.

Hello from Seattle writers. Welcome to a new episode on the craft of writing novels and short stories. This is Jim Fayer. If we had the chance to ask a famous novelist, what is the single most important thing you would advise a new or young writer? What would that be? Here are six of them. The most important advice from famous novelists. I couldn't determine whether this would be the first and most important advice they would tell a writer, but they sound it sounds like it and they sound like this is the first piece of advice. Stephen King said, "If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others. Read a lot and write a lot. There's no way around these two things that I'm aware of, no shortcut." Neil Gaiman said, "This is how you do it. You sit down at the keyboard and you put one word after another until it's done. It's that easy and that hard." Here is from JK Rowling. "Don't write like me, write like you. Nobody else can do that. Finish that book." And Ray Bradbury, "If you are writing without zest, without gusto, without love, without fun, you are only half a writer." And here is from Ernest Hemingway, write hard and clear about what hurts. And from Beverly Cleary, "If you don't see the book you want on the shelf, write it. These have been from famous novelists and what may be their one or two sentence best advice for us writers." I'd like to mention the rule of exceptions. I received a nice email from our listener Owen, who is reading a massive bestseller, and who is finding a lot of examples of telling rather than showing in the novel. Owen wrote, "I notice that the author often uses lines like Tom felt a surge of anger to directly tell the reader what a character is feeling. I was surprised by that since he breaks the show, don't tell, rule often." That's from our listener Owen, "An exception isn't anonymally or an instance where a rule does not apply. Sometimes in our pleasure reading, we'll come across elements in the writing that might not be the best way to do things." Here's a funny thing about our learning and getting better at fiction writing. The drawback to learning how to write fiction is that we'll begin to see the author's hand in much of our pleasure reading, and it may make our pleasure reading less pleasurable. Neil Gaiman said, "You can see the joints. It's like a professional magician going to a magic show." When we learn a technique for good writing, we begin to spot the lack of technique in our pleasure reading. So we'll read Jane Austen's sense and sensibility, and we'll think, "Haven't I learned not to use so much interior monologue?" Or, "We'll read our —read to our children and Nancy Drew novel, and we'll think there sure are a lot of dialogue tag modifiers here." Or, "We'll read a Roddy Doyle novel, and we'll think he doesn't use quotation marks. How can I tell who's speaking?" Or, "We'll read Ernest Hemingway's, the sun also rises, and come across the phrase, 'The girl looked sullen.'" And we'll think, "How about showing instead of telling Ernest?" When we know a strong technique, and we read these technical gaps in our pleasure reading, our heads come up from the novels. We no longer see the story, but rather the awkward words on the page. The bad technique takes us out of the story. That happened to our listener Owen, and I'll bet it's happened to you, too. A strong story can hide some poor technique. Simon and Schuster Editor Michael Cordes said the three most important words regarding writing a novel are story, story, story. The master storyteller Ernest Hemingway might occasionally tell instead of show, doesn't matter to readers because they're getting what they want from the story, to be taken to a place far away long ago and meeting fascinating characters in perilous adventures. Any writing is better if the writer shows rather than tells, but it doesn't matter much in some big and bold stories because occasionally poor techniques are camouflage by the strength of the story. So should we allow ourselves poor techniques? Not if we can help it. When I read a novel from Willock, Willockathor, or F. Scott Fitzgerald, or Zadie Smith, or Ian MacKewin, or Colson Whitehead, or Stephen King, or John Grisham, when we read these, we not only get a big and bold story, but we also get technical mastery. It's such a pleasure to come across writers who really know what they are doing. The sentences, the pages become beautiful and give us a reminder and a lift about the power of technically good writing. We can raise up any story we're working on by using strong fiction writing techniques. And what about when we have a reason to diverge from good and standard techniques? Sure, sometimes that works, but the poet T. S. Eliot said, "It's not wise to violate the rules until you know how to observe them." I try to avoid bad things from happening, and I'll bet you do too. And much of what we do in life is designed to avoid bad things happening to us, but sometimes bad things happen. That's how the world works. I wonder, can negative things that sometimes occur in our lives make us better writers? I'm not saying we should trade skilled writing in exchange for being inflicted by something miserable, I sure wouldn't, but might there be an angle we haven't thought of? I have a copy of the Longman Anthology of British Literature, the Victorian Age. It's a wonderful book written and compiled by Heather Henderson and William Sharp. It has several selections from Charles Dickens' writing. And in the biography about Dickens, it mentions two pivotal things in Dickens' life, both occurring when he was 12 or 13 or 14. The book says, "But before Dickens was 12, family fortunes took a turn for the worse. He was taken out of school and later sent to work for six or seven months beside common laboring boys in a warehouse." That's from the book. It was a shoe-blacking factory, a boot polish, and Dickens' job was to put polish into bottles. The anthology continues, "For the rest of his life, he would wonder bitterly how I could have been so easily cast away at such an age." Many years later, he wrote, "No words can express the secret agony of my soul as I sunk into this companionship, compared these everyday associates with those of my happier childhood and felt my early hopes of growing up to be a learned and distinguished man crushed in my breast." The longman anthology says, "As if this were not dreadful enough, his father was arrested for debt and thrown into the martial-shape debtors' prison where his wife and younger children soon joined him. The twelve-year-old Charles was left to fend for himself. Even after his father was released, Charles' mother opposed his decision to take the boy away from the factory. I never afterwards forgot. I never shall forget. I never can forget that my mother was warm for my being sent back." That's Charles Dickens and the book goes on, Dickens went on to become England's most celebrated novelist, but no achievement could erase the terrible memory of shame. My whole nature was so penetrated with the grief and humiliation that even now famous and caressed and happy, I often forget in my dreams that I have a dear wife and children, even though I am a man, and wandered decilately back to the time of my life. Dickens' novels feature children and young people who have been turned out and turned away, as the longman anthology says, "In workhouses and orphanages, bad schools, inhuman factories and hideous slums." How popular was Dickens. The novelist Anthony Trollup said that Dickens' work could be found in every house in which books are kept. And listen to this, Dickens' serialized installments were printed in magazines which came by ship from Great Britain to the U.S. In 1841, when the ship carrying the last installment of Dickens' "The Old Curiosity" shop, as the ship approached New York Harbor, newspaper reporters went out into the harbor on small boats to meet the ship hoping to get the latest pages before rival papers, and they shouted to the ship, "Is Little Nell dead?" Ernest Hemingway said, "The world breaks everyone, and afterwards many are strong at the broken places." Maybe that's true. Maybe Charles Dickens wouldn't have written his classic novels had he not been sent to a shoe polish factory when he was 14, and had his mother not insisted he belonged there instead of at school. Maybe this wretched episode in his life helped make him a great writer. I've had a lucky life and have avoided much of the misery that can be inflicted on us humans. I hope you have too. I wouldn't trade misery for writing skill. I wouldn't accept that bargain because misery is misery and it can be deep and unrelenting. If a quantum trickster, a modern, mefastopheles, were to offer me Shakespeare's writing skill and exchange for some wretchedness tossed into my life I'd laugh him off. No, no, thank you, pal. Still, it's interesting to speculate about Charles Dickens. Did his hated time at the shoe-blacking factory and his mother's suggestion that he stay there instead of return to school contribute to his writing skill. Maybe you've had a hard knock in life. Maybe it has made you a better writer. I've received a message from Sam in Western Australia regarding battle scenes, and he wrote battle scenes as a hybrid of a fight scene and a crowd scene. Battle scenes present unique challenges, including perspective, authorial distance, and showing versus telling what lessons can we learn from great war novels. What a good question from Sam. I want to mention several techniques for writing a battle scene, and these apply not just to war novels, but to fantasies, science fiction, military fiction, of course, historicals, and action-adventure novels, and historicals have these scenes so to sports novels, and not just to battles, but to mob scenes or crowd scenes or any scene that has a lot of people in constant motion. These are some suggestions for writing about a lot of people doing lots of things all at once. Lord Wellington said of the battle of Water Lou regarding trying to write a history of it, he said, "The history of a battle is not unlike the history of a ball." He means that there's no—there's so much going on in a battle, and it's almost impossible to record everything. I own a copy of John McDonald's history of battles, titled "Great Battlefields of the World." It has a lot of colorful maps and drawings, and concise descriptions of famous battles, and it's a terrific book for those interested in battle history. But it is a steady account of large troop movements, such as this regarding the Battle of Water Lou in 1815 in Belgium near the village of Water Lou. The battle was fought over three square miles and involved 190,000 soldiers. Here are a couple of sentences from the book. The mast cannon, 24 of which were twelve pounders, the biggest field pieces then available, began to pound the Mount St. John Ridge in a fury of shot and shell without doing significant damage. Wellington had drawn up his army on the reverse slope out of reach of the cannonballs, many of which plunged harmlessly into the ground on the front slope. At 1.30pm, the French drums beat the insistent brattle of the Pada Sharge, and four divisions of infantry marched forward, the sun glinting on 16,000 bayonets. Up the ridge they marched, rank upon closely packed rank, straight into the waiting field artillery's siding point blank fire. That's from the book. For military history buffs, one of whom you're listening to at the moment, this is a thrilling account, and I'd sure rather read about it than be there that day. But showing everything that happens in a battle, or a riot, or a mob scene, or airplane dogfight, or battleship engagement, or crowded street, or fictional football game is difficult, and it's easy to slip into encyclopedia Britannica mode. So in his suggestion that the history of a battle is like the history of a big dance, Wellington then goes on to suggest how we fiction writers might approach it. He wrote, "Some individuals may recollect all the little events of which the great result is the battle won or lost, but no individual can recollect the order in which or the exact moment at which they occurred, which makes all the difference as to their value or importance." Here's a key technique. Make the protagonists horizon short, meaning the protagonist experiences only a portion of what's going on. An example of this technique is found in Leo Tolstoy's novel War and Peace, where the scene is at the Battle of Osterlitz, which was a real battle fought in 1805 between the French and, on the other side, the Russians and Austrians. The battle was fought over 10 square miles. Some of Tolstoy's fictional characters take part in the battle, including Nikolai Rostov and Andrei Bulkonsky. But during the battle, Rostov nor Bulkonsky can see much due to smoke and mist and the rolling terrain. Soldiers go in and out of the mist, much as hidden, much as in confusion. In other words, their horizons are short. They know only what is in front of them. This is from the novel. Rostov stopped his horse for a moment on a hillock, to see what was going on, but strain his attention as he would he could not understand or make out anything of what was happening. There in the smoke men of some sort were moving about. In front and behind, moved lines of troops, but why, wither and who they were, it was impossible to make out. At that moment, as the horseguards, something past him disappeared in the smoke, Rostov hesitated whether to gallop after them or to go where he was sent. That's Leo Tolstoy, describing Rostov's short horizon. If in our scene we don't have Tolstoy's smoke and fog limiting the horizon, we the writer can just make the horizon short. In any dangerous fight, the fighter is going to concentrate pretty much exclusively on who's in front of him. That's our character's horizon. The enemy right there. Our horizon is small and we can exclude things beyond the short circumference. In Patrick O'Brien's novel, Master in Commander, the first in his series of 18 novels about the Royal Navy during the Napoleonic Wars, the first big sea battle in the novel is between the HMS Sophie, which he commands, and the Spanish Zebeck frigate Kakafwagel. The fight is between two ships, and the author wonderfully describes their maneuvering, but he seldom loses focus on the protagonist. The reader is up close to Jack Aubrey, such as when Jack is boarding the enemy Spanish ship, the Kakafwagel. Jack was over the shattered bulwark straight down onto a hot gun, run in and smoking, and its swabber thrust at him with his pole. He cut sideways at the swabber's head. The swabber ducked fast and Jack leaped over his bowed shoulder onto the Kakafwagel's deck. Come on, come on, he roared and rushed forward, striking furiously at the fleeting gun crew, and then at the pikes and swords opposing him. There were hundreds of men crowding the deck, and all the time he kept roaring, come on. That's Patrick O'Brien, and then when the author wants to expand the setting, or the camera eye, he pulls it back, and this is O'Brien. For some moments, the Spaniards gave way, as though amazed, and every one of the Sophie's men and boys came aboard, amid ships, and over the bow. The Spaniards gave way from a bath to the main mast, backing into the waste, but there they rallied, and now there was hard fighting. Now there were cruel blows given and received, a dense mass of struggling men tripping among the spars, scarcely room to fall, beating, hacking, pistoling one another, and detached flights of two or three men together round the edges, yelling like beasts. And then Patrick O'Brien's camera eye closes in on Aubrey again. In the looser part of the main battle, Jack had forced his way, he had a soldier in front of him, and as their swords clashed high, so a pikeman drove under his right arm, ripping the flesh outside his ribs and pulling out to stab again, immediately behind him, Bonden fired his pistol, blowing off the lower part of Jack's ear, and killing the pikeman where he stood. Jack fainted at the soldier, a quickly double slash, and he brought his sword down on his shoulder with terrible force. The fight surged back. The soldier fell. This had been from Patrick O'Brien's novel Master and Commander. The technique here is to focus on a character, like likely your protagonist, let the reader get up close and personal, and let the reader see and feel and touch and smell. What your character is seeing and feeling and touching and smelling, so the reader feels he is fighting right alongside your hero. And when we mention the larger battle, do so quickly, maybe in just a couple of sentences or a paragraph or two, then back to our hero. The reader is more interested in the fate of our hero than in the course of the battle. Here's another thought about big crowd scenes. In times of stress and battles are of course stressful. People experience things more intensely than at other times. In his book The Things They Carried, which is fiction but influenced by the author's experiences in Vietnam, Tim O'Brien wrote, "It's a hard thing to explain to somebody who hasn't felt it, but the presence of death and danger has a way of bringing you fully awake. It makes things vivid. When you're afraid, really afraid, you see things. You never saw before and pay attention to the world." That is Tim O'Brien. So we should consider focusing on the hero's senses, make them intense and immediate. And here's another idea. Our battle scene or our riot scene or mob scene or busy marketplace scene or our pill girmage scene or festival scene or church bingo game scene. Any scene with a lot of people and a lot of motion, the scene may need less setup and wind down than when we were initially thinking about the scene. In a battle scene, there's often no need to discuss strategy and troop movements, no need to discuss casualties and repercussions from the battle. Often we can focus on that one incident where the reader is alongside our hero. We likely can avoid discussing the big picture. The reader will get it without a lot of setup or explanation. This is a strong technique when our scene has a lot of people in motion. Focus on the essential action, usually involving our hero and cut away the front and back. Have our camera right there right now. I've never been asked this question but I wish I had been because I have a snappy answer. The question is, "Do some writers come from big families?" The answer is, "You bet." The poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning had ten siblings. She was the eldest. The author of one of the greatest poems in the English language at the rhyme of the ancient Mariner, Samuel Taylor College, had thirteen siblings and he was the youngest. The poet Alfred Lord Tennyson had eleven siblings and he was the fourth eldest. In the poet Gerald Manley Hopkins had nine siblings and he was the eldest. Jane Austin had seven siblings and she was the youngest. Novelest Nancy Mittford had six siblings and she was the oldest. I love Nancy Mittford's novel Love in a Cold Climate. Patti and I were in the Cotswalls in Great Britain, 90 miles northwest of London, last June and we visited Nancy Mittford's grave at St. Mary's Church in Swinbrook. Her sister's unity and Diana are also buried there. Three headstones in a row. I hope you can find time this week to work on your novel or short story. Some quiet time to yourself to make some good progress. This is Jim Thayer and I'm signing off until next week. Please keep tapping those keys.