I did a classroom visit today for a high school creative writing class and it got me reminiscing about my own writing workshop experiences and the exercises we used to do. My favorite one was from undergrad. On one of the first days of class we were assigned to write the worst story we could think of. What was so neat about the assignment is how differently everyone approached it based on their answer to the question: what makes a story unreadable to you. Is it unsympathetic characters? Bad grammar? Poor structure? Genre out of your interest area?
Those are all great answers, but they weren't what I thought made a bad story. No, in my infancy as a writer I thought what made a bad story was a repulsive premise with excessive description of bodily functions.
So I wrote a story about a man having a difficult, odorific bowel movement. Pages of description, incorporating every adjective I could think of. Oh, and he runs out of toilet paper. See what I did there? That, my friends, was my attempt at dramatic irony.
Guess what our next assignment was? If you guessed "revise that story into something readable" you are officially ten times more intelligent than I was at 19. Somehow, I didn't see it coming, and when the hammer came down I was mortified. Had I only relied on poor grammar and incorrect punctuation to define my story as bad, I would've had it made, but instead my entire premise had no merit. And I somehow had to make it work or I WOULD FAIL AT LIFE.
I don't remember the particulars of the finished product, but it was successful enough to win raves from the instructor. And it taught me a lesson I've held onto ever since that day all those years ago: never write about diarrhea.
Er...no, actually what it taught me was that any story, no matter how misguided, can become better upon revision. Everything is salvageable if you're willing to put the work into it. Or, in the parlance of that long ago tale, even a turd can be polished.
How about you? What's your favorite writing exercise?
After taking a blogging hiatus, it seems appropriate that I pop back in on the anniversary of Pearl Harbor. I have to admit that I was shocked to discover that it was the 70th anniversary of the attack, which left more than 2,400 American servicemen dead.Writing about World War II makes the attack feel so much more recent and relevant in my mind, so much so that it was a bit shocking to find that today’s anniversary isn’t getting more press. Oh, it’s being mentioned in the news, but when you consider what a drastic role Pearl Harbor had in changing the course of American History, it seems awfully strange that it gets less ink that the Kardashian’s latest antics.
And what were those changes? Of course, we, as a nation, left our position of neutrality over the war and entered the fray, full tilt. This was a gross miscalculation on Japan’s part. They already knew we had greater capacity for war production and that the odds were good we could defeat them, but by attacking us on our own land, they awoke a beast so desperate for vengeance that nothing would satisfy us but complete victory. Or as Japan’s Fleet Admiral put it, "I fear all we have done is awakened a sleeping giant and filled him with terrible resolve.”
But how else did it change us?
No longer did we consider the home front safe. After years of watching wars from a distance, we had to conclude that an enemy could strike on American soil at any time, a lesson that we, sadly, learned again on September 11th.
Prior to Pearl Harbor, we were hardly enthusiastic about entering the war, but after the tragedy many people changed their opinions of the necessity of joining the fray. Pearl Harbor gave us a rallying cry and a convenient piece of home front propaganda to wave around as the war lingered on, we tired of the loss of life, and the restrictions on resources. No matter how self-centered you were, it would be hard not to soldier on when you were reminded of the tremendous sacrifices those who were at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941 made.
Just as the U.S.’s policy of isolationism ended with our entry into the war, so, in some ways, did the isolation of her citizens. Faced with such tremendous loss, we enlisted, volunteered our time, gathered resources, and looked for other ways to band together as a community for the greater good.
Pearl Harbor helped to instigate one of America’s favorite past times, the government conspiracy theory. Long before we obsessed over aliens landing in Roswell or the government ordering the attacks on 9/11, the American public questioned how much we knew or didn’t know about the attack on Pearl Harbor in the days before it happened.
The attack gave us an enemy to hate unequivocally. From the language used to describe the attack (“Sneaky”) and the caricatures of Japanese people in the media to the deportation and internment of 100,000 people of Japanese descent, Pearl Harbor gave Americans permission to hate an entire nation of people because of the actions of a few. It was an unfortunate blueprint for the ways in which we would respond to people of Middle Eastern descent after 9/11.
And, of course, perhaps the most dastardly thing about Dec. 7, 1941, is that it spawned this:
Slang is one of those terms that’s surprisingly hard to define, though I think we all intuitively known what it is and recognize it when we encounter it. It’s, basically, informal language that is often tied to a particular subculture or group. We tend to think of slang and young people’s lingo, but really it’s not restricted to youth. Those of us who adopted slang terms as teens, often continue to use the same terms well into adulthood, much to the horror of our kids. Oh, and it’s hardly an English-speaking phenomena – slang is found in most major languages.
Slang always seemed to be an oral medium, but today, with text messaging and the internet, it’s become increasingly written as well, often starting that way and then filtering into our speech.
Slang can work two ways: it can either invent new terms for familiar objects (in the late 1930s people began referring to a phone as an “Ameche,” in reference to the actor, Don Ameche, who had played Alexander Graham Bell in a film) or it can attribute new meaning to familiar words (using the word “hot” to imply someone’s good looking). The types of terms it often embodies are for “forbidden” things, which is why there are so darn many words for sex and body parts.
Every era seems to produce its own slang, but the first half of the twentieth-century seemed particularly ripe for it. Part of that may stem from a more clearly defined youth culture. As teens became a population unto themselves after World War I, they may have found it necessary to create their own language.
In Iris’s world the slang is coming out of the Jazz music and swing dancing phenomena – many of the terms originating in the dance halls and then filtered into other parts of society. Speaking these words means you’re branding yourself as part of that subculture. Suze, Rhona and Maria all use terms that would’ve originally been spoken at places like the Savoy.
But that isn’t the only kind of slang Iris encounters. Her more upper class friends use teen-speak that probably developed out of their cliques. And the world around her is increasingly using G.I. talk, a unique form of slang developing out of the war.
It can be a challenge to figure out how to integrate slang into a story without overwhelming the writing. On the one hand, the terms are going to be unfamiliar to your audience and may potentially rip them out of the story. On the other, though, if you’re trying to realistically depict a subsection of the population during a moment in history, you have to honestly depict how they communicated with each other, and that means integrating some of these unfamiliar terms and hoping your audience can suss out the meaning from the context. It can feel forced if you don’t do it delicately and you can, of course, completely overwhelm the dialogue by using too much slang (see my first Rosie Winter novel, when I was enjoying slang a little too much). Sometimes utilizing the rhythm of how people talked “back then” is just as successful as sprinkling dialogue with unfamiliar words.
I’m going to tell you one of the worst things about being a mystery writer. It’s not rejection, or bad reviews, or writer’s block (though all of those certainly make me question my vocation), it’s that writing mysteries has ruined reading mysteries for me.
I was reminded of this last week as I reached the halfway point on a book I was really enjoying reading. Just like that, long before the narrator or anyone else in the story, I was certain I knew who was behind the murders and why. And what had been a pleasant escape for the bus ride to work became irritating: why can’t everyone in this story see what’s so freaking obvious to me?
Probably, because they’re fictional. And not writers. I can’t turn off the writer part of my brain when I read, which not only means that I’m frequently revising other people’s sentences, but I’m also painfully aware of the mechanics of the story: the clues, the suspects, the red herrings. It’s highly unusual for me not to have the culprit pegged before I reach the halfway point of a book. When I don’t, it’s dizzyingly exciting, especially when the novel is well-constructed enough that I should’ve seen it coming but didn’t. But when I do pick up on things too fast, I’m left wondering if it’s the fault of the writer for making the solution so obvious, or if the fault lies with me being more attuned to what to look for than the averagebear.
It’s part of the reason that I don’t write book reviews. It hardly seems fare to lambast a mystery for being too easy when I’m not really sure that’s the case. More often than not, I find myself reading other people’s reviews to confirm if the problem I experienced is widespread or unique to me.
This plot prognostication spills over to other media too: my husband hates watching mysteries or thrillers with me because I’ll peg the culprit early on. I’ve learned not to say it out loud, but he can always tell when that “aha!” has hit me and the rest of the evening devolves into his begging me to tell him what I think is going on.
This sixth sense can be detrimental to my own work. I’m so desperate to make a mystery hard to solve that I worry that I over complicate things so that readers like me won’t be spoiled halfway through the book. I do have rules though: any solution must be supported by the text, so that the re-reader can go back and see that the answer was there, if heavily cloaked, just like in the books I love. I don’t want the reader to feel cheated because I didn’t bother to introduce the culprit until the last chapter. As anyone who’s ever been a debater knows: you can’t have new arguments in the 2AR.
Have you been surprised by a mystery lately (in a good way)?
