Tag Archives: Ernest Hemingway

November 18, 2019 · 6:00 am

Art, Hemingway, and World Building #amwriting

It’s our job as writers to show the world in three dimensions. Some of us become masters at this, others get very good, and still others never quite achieve it.

It takes thought and the ability to recognize and cast aside prose that doesn’t say what we want it to.

“I was learning something from the painting of Cézanne that made writing simple true sentences far from enough to make the stories have the dimensions that I was trying to put in them. I was learning very much from him but I was not articulate enough to explain it to anyone. Besides it was a secret.”

~~Ernest Hemmingway, A Movable Feast

You’ve heard the saying that one picture is worth a thousand words.

As authors, our craft is that of shaping words to form a picture of the world.

In other words, when we write, we are painting a picture using words.

Let’s assume it does take 1000 words to show that picture to the reader. Can you look at a single brushstroke and see the happy little tree? No, but when combined with 999 other brushstrokes, the tree is made clear to us.

Each word is a packet of information, but it is a single brushstroke.
The intention of each word only becomes clear when combined with the other 999 packets of information.
Each individual word in the 1000 has a specific task; if that word doesn’t do the job, cut it and find one that does.

The fact is, unless we are there physically, other places don’t really exist for us. I see world building as not a hurdle, but a natural outgrowth of living.

It goes back to physics and how the universe works on a fundamental level. The only world that really exists in this incarnation is the space we physically occupy as individuals. The only true reality is the space we can see, hear, smell, and touch.

Authors and artists make the imaginary world real.

People who are not authors and artists build worlds every day just by thinking about their next move.

They do it by planning where they are going next, and recounting to others where they’ve just come from.

If you can visualize stopping at the mini-mart on your way home after work, you can visualize the convenience store on a space station.

You must practice world-building. A good exercise is to write a word picture of your immediate environment.

Detail the furniture, the smells, the sounds, the way certain doors creak.

Use as many descriptors as you can think of.
Use all the strong, power words you can think of to build that world.

It’s only a practice piece, and no one will see it but you.

Let that piece sit for a day or two, then come back to it with fresh eyes. Pare away every unnecessary word until you have the simplest picture of that space, the equivalent of a line-drawing.

That is the world that your readers can hang their imagination on.

Cézanne’s visual perceptions in art, via Wikipedia:

Cézanne was interested in the simplification of naturally occurring forms to their geometric essentials: he wanted to “treat nature by the cylinder, the sphere, the cone” (a tree trunk may be conceived of as a cylinder, an apple or orange a sphere, for example).

Additionally, Cézanne’s desire to capture the truth of perception led him to explore binocular vision graphically, rendering slightly different, yet simultaneous visual perceptions of the same phenomena to provide the viewer with an aesthetic experience of depth different from those of earlier ideals of perspective, in particular single-point perspective.

His interest in new ways of modelling space and volume derived from the stereoscopy obsession of his era and from reading Hippolyte Taine’s Berkelean theory of spatial perception.[21][22]

Credits and Attributions:

Quote from A Moveable Feast, by Ernest Hemingway, Scribners 1964

Wikipedia contributors, “Paul Cézanne,” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia,

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Paul_C%C3%A9zanne&oldid=925729485 (accessed November 17, 2019).

Wikimedia Commons contributors, “File:Les Joueurs de cartes, par , collection Al-Thani, Yorck.jpg,” Wikimedia Commons, the free media repository, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Les_Joueurs_de_cartes,_par_Paul_C%C3%A9zanne,_collection_Al-Thani,_Yorck.jpg&oldid=355049009 (accessed November 17, 2019).

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August 22, 2016 · 6:45 am

#amwriting: breaking the rules with style

Much of my blog time revolves around grammar and the mechanics of writing. As authors, it’s important to understand the rules of how the language in which we write works, no matter what that language is. Yet powerful writing often breaks those rules, and we are better for having read it.

So why am I always pressing you to buy and use the Chicago Manual of Style?

Authors must know the rules to break them with style.

Readers expect words to flow in a certain way. If you break a grammatical rule, know what you are breaking and be consistent about it.

Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, Alexander Chee, and George Saunders all have unique voices in their writing. Each of these writers has written highly acclaimed work. Their prose is magnificent. When you have fallen in love with one of these authors’ works, you will recognize their voice.

Ernest Hemingway used the word “and” in place of commas too freely.

Alexander Chee employs run-on sentences and dispenses with quotation marks.

James Joyce wrote hallucinogenic prose and at times dispensed with punctuation completely.

George Saunders writes as if he is speaking to you, and is, at times, choppy in his delivery.

But their voices work. They each break certain rules as set down by Strunk and White, but they produce brilliant prose that stands the test of time. Readers fall into the rhythm of their prose.

I will admit, I had to take a college class to be able to understand James Joyce’s work, and I did have to resort to the audio book for Alexander Chee’s work. It’s the hypercritical editor coming out in me, making it difficult for me to set that part of my awareness aside. It’s my job to notice those things.

I can hear you now: these are literary authors, and you are writing genre fantasy fiction or sci-fi. Shall I toss out a few more names?

Tad Williams mixes his styles. His Bobby Dollar series is Paranormal Film Noir: dark, choppy, and reminiscent of Chandler’s Philip Marlowe stories. In this series, he seems to be somewhat influenced by the style of crime authors, such as Raymond Chandler or Dashiell Hammett. It is a quick read and is commercial in that it is for casual readers.

Raymond Chandler was the creator of Philip Marlowe, the original hard-boiled, disillusioned, copper-turned-private-eye. His people take center stage, rather than the violence that characterizes so many detective novels of his era.

In his article, The Chandler Style, Martin Edwards writes: Devising puzzles was always less important to him than style. He said, ‘I don’t really seem to take the mystery element in the detective story as seriously should,’ and joked about solving plot problems by having a man come to the door with a gun Style mattered much more: ‘I had learn American just like a foreign language. To learn it I had to study and analyse it. As a result, when I use slang . . . I do it deliberately.’ And as he told one magazine editor whose proof-reader presumed to tidy up the Chandler grammar, ‘When I split an infinitive, God damn it, I split it so it will stay split.’

Chandler understood how grammar worked. He knew what he was doing and did it deliberately. He was able to convey (to those who didn’t appreciate his style) why he broke those rules and was secure enough in his choice to continue writing in his own voice.

But Chandler also had to deal with the sort of sniping we all must deal with in our writing groups. Wikipedia says: The high regard in which Chandler is generally held today is in contrast to the critical sniping that stung the author during his lifetime. In a March 1942 letter to Blanche Knopf, published in Selected Letters of Raymond Chandler, he wrote, “The thing that rather gets me down is that when I write something that is tough and fast and full of mayhem and murder, I get panned for being tough and fast and full of mayhem and murder, and then when I try to tone down a bit and develop the mental and emotional side of a situation, I get panned for leaving out what I was panned for putting in the first time.”

Yet, although he writes Bobby Dollar in a Chandler-esque style, Tad Williams’s Memory Sorrow and Thorn Trilogy is true epic fantasy, with lush, poetic prose, multiple story-lines, and dark themes. It is written for serious fantasy readers who want nothing less than the big novel. The story starts slow, but the powerful writing has generated millions of fans who are thrilled to know he has set more work in that world.

Beginning slow, going off on side quests, writing poetic prose, and gradually working up to an epic ending is highly frowned upon in today’s writing groups, but Tad broke that rule and believe me, it works.

Roger Zelazny wrote one of the most famous fantasy series of all time, the Chronicles of Amber, and was famous for his crisp, minimalistic dialogue, and he was also heavily influenced by the style of wisecracking hard-boiled crime authors like Chandler.

Most readers are not editors. They will either love or hate your work based on your voice, but they won’t know why. Voice is how you break the rules, but you must understand what you are doing, and do it deliberately. Craft your work so it says what you want, in the way you want it said.

If your editor asks you to change something you did deliberately, you are the author. Explain why you want that particular grammatical no-no to stand, and your editor will most likely understand. If you know the rule you are breaking, you will be better able to explain why you are doing so.

However, if I am your editor, you must be prepared to break that rule consistently. Readers do notice inconsistencies.

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Tagged as Alexander Chee, Ernest Hemingway, George Saunders, James Joyce, Roger Zelazny, Tad Williams, writing style vs proper grammar

July 26, 2014 · 10:23 am

The Flâneur ~ the 4th POV

In a literary fiction seminar I attended at a recent convention in Seattle, University of Washington professor, Scott Driscoll, discussed a fourth point of view I had heard of in college, that of the detached observer. I had forgotten about it, and Driscoll gave it a name I’d never heard of: the Flâneur (idler, lounger, loiterer.) Many of you have heard of it as third-person objective or third-person dramatic. I see it as a completely separate way to show a story.

Writing in 1962, Cornelia Otis Skinner said that there is no English equivalent of the term, flâneur, “just as there is no Anglo-Saxon counterpart of that essentially Gallic individual, the deliberately aimless pedestrian, unencumbered by any obligation or sense of urgency, who, being French and therefore frugal, wastes nothing, including his time which he spends with the leisurely discrimination of a gourmet, savoring the multiple flavors of his city”.

The French author, Charles Baudelaire, characterized the flâneur as a “gentleman stroller of city streets.” He saw the flâneur as having a key role in understanding, participating in and portraying the city. Thus, in the narrative, a flâneur plays a double role by existing as a present, but ignored, member of society who remains a detached observer of all that occurs within the story.

Having the option to use this point of view in the narrative of genre fiction opens up many possibilities for originality an author may not have considered:

he is NOT omniscient as in having complete or unlimited knowledge, awareness, or understanding of the fictional universe–he doesn’t know everything–but he does know what he sees.
he sees more than the individual characters do because his random travels take him all over town regularly, and he observes most of the tale as it unfolds.
Because he only knows what he sees, some information crucial to the resolution of the final events will be revealed to him at the last minute–a surprise to him too. When the last pieces of the puzzle are put together, his commentary summarizes the fall-out and final outcome of the characters involved.

It is a POV used in classic french modernist literature to describe the story of certain social scenes in the city, but I can see this as a useful way to relate the events on a space-station, or indeed in many traditional genre fiction social settings.

Now for the downside of using the flâneur as your vehicle to convey your narrative:

He is not reliable—he has his own personality, offering subtle judgments and unconscious opinions on the behavior of the characters. Therefore, just as in a first-person narrative, the reader cannot be sure he is telling the unbiased truth.
The narrator tells the story without describing any of the character’s thoughts, opinions, or feelings; so the reader can only guess at character motivations, and must assume the objective observer truly is objective and has told the truth in that regard.
It separates the reader from the intimacy of the action and slows the pace down.
It could become voyeuristic, if one writes graphic love scenes. {eeew.}

The POV of a flâneur is also a vehicle used in in art, and in street photography. Susan Sontag in her 1977 collection of essays, On Photography, describes how, since the development of hand-held cameras in the early 20th century, the camera has become the tool of the flâneur:

The photographer is an armed version of the solitary walker reconnoitering, stalking, cruising the urban inferno, the voyeuristic stroller who discovers the city as a landscape of voluptuous extremes. Adept of the joys of watching, connoisseur of empathy, the flâneur finds the world “picturesque.”

—Susan Sontag, On Photography, pg. 55

I don’t see myself using this style of POV for an entire novel, but I can think of a thousand ways to use it in short-stories. Come November, when NaNoWriMo begins, I may give it a whirl, just for practice. Writing is a craft and I love finding different ways to express it. A fresh point of view to write from can only stretch my writing skills.