On Violence, Conscience and Lawrence of Arabia

In light of my trip to Morocco, I just rewatched Lawrence of Arabia. It is an extremely well-made movie and with good reason remains in the top 10 movies of all time. It was an exhilarating feeling watching them ride camels over the same dunes we did and fun to revisit the locations, including Ouarzazate and Merzouga. If you know anything about filmmaking, especially if you’ve worked in production, you know how difficult that shoot must have been (even without the problem of beginning the shoot with an unfinished script!). David Lean was a master.

Last week, 70 people were shot in a movie theater in Aurora, CO and (so far) 12 fatally. There’s a lot of speculation flying around including the role of movie violence. I am not here to debate that, but I did take note of the way David Lean handled violence in Lawrence of Arabia. Almost all of it happens off screen and it is more powerful for it. It’s an approach for an audience with a conscience. We now have a chicken and egg situation: has a deadened conscience led to a demand for graphic, bloody violence with screamingly loud soundtracks or has the increasingly graphic depiction affected us? It’s likely not either/or but both/and. Both things are probably true or partly so. I’m not much for censorship, but I am in favor of self-censorship and a sense of responsibility for the creative person (or studio). It is self-indulgent and lazy to show everything. There is art in concealment, in the placement of the camera.

our 2 person caravan

There’s another aspect of violence in the movie that ties into today’s international terrorism. Another Lawrence, Lawrence Wright states in his book on 9/11, The Looming Tower, that much of the current unrest in the Mid-East began in 1916 with the secret Sykes-Picot Agreement where France and Britain divvied up the Arab lands for themselves. While there are issues with some of the historical accuracy of the movie, this is shown and the character of T.E. Lawrence understands its implications. Again, Lean has “placed his camera” – not physically this time – but to give the audience an overview of the major interests in one scene that gathers French, British, and Arab representatives in one room with Lawrence. It’s one reason why the movie works on multiple levels.

David Mamet said, “All art is where you put the camera.” David Lean understood that as well as any director who’s ever made a movie. Julian Barnes uses it to great effect in The Sense of An Ending (2011 Man Booker Prize). The question is, do you understand that in your writing? Where will you “place your camera”? What will you show and what will you let your reader discern?

 

Kurt Vonnegut’s Eighth (and Final) Rule for Writing Fiction

And then we came to the end. This has been a great series by Aaron and I’m grateful for his guest posts, but this is the last one (at least for awhile). Without further ado, Vonnegut’s 8th Rule:

by adgansky

8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages. –Kurt Vonnegut

See, and you thought I was making stuff up in my Mystery v. Murky post.

Aside from keeping our books away from cockroaches, there are a few other things we can look at here to better inform our writing process. Really, Vonnegut’s encouraging us to look at writing in a different light. We’re often told to create mystery and suspense. Why then does Vonnegut tell us to forget about it?

Because we’re too wrapped up in it. We aspire to create mystery to the determent of other, more important “rules.” Some of these rules include telling a coherent story, using foreshadowing to help illuminate the ultimate outcome. I think of Flannery O’Connor’s advice to have a story end with an action that is both genuine and unexpected, something completely in character, but that transcends character. I don’t know if O’Connor and Vonnegut ever hung out, but they probably should have. Can you imagine their conversation?

You may find yourself disagreeing. You may feel that if the reader knows where the story is going, they will get bored, call the book “predictable” and put it down. I think the key to mystery is allowing the reader to accurately “guess” the ending at the right time.

As Brandon Sanderson says on Writing Excuses (which, by the way, if you don’t listen to this podcast, you should. Find them on the iTunes store. It’s free and totally helpful, though slanted a bit to fantasy/sci-fi), the best endings are the ones that readers “guess” a few pages before it happens. They’re able to do so, because the writer has taken the time to set it up with foreshadowing and a healthy amount of detail. Essentially, you tell your readers the ending ahead of time, and they feel like they “guess” it. That way, at the end of the book, they’re satisfied, and they feel better about themselves.

If they can’t accurately guess the end, they’ll feel like you’ve tricked them. If they guess too early, then they’ll call you predictable. Like Johnny Cash, we’ve a fine line to walk.

Please don’t forget, I’m taking suggestions for my next few topics. If you have questions, comments, or concerns, either on something specific you’re working on, or on the craft in general, feel free to leave a comment or e-mail me (adgansky@msn.com).

Until then; good writing.

 

Kurt Vonnegut’s Seventh Rule for Writing Fiction

We’re almost there – here’s #7 of 8 rules for writing fiction by Mr. Vonnegut as delivered by guest blogger Aaron Gansky.

by adgansky

7. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia. –Kurt Vonnegut

Pneumonia, maybe, and a host of other things. Would we call this literary promiscuity? Perhaps, and the same risks apply. Vonnegut is not alone in his call for monogamous literature. Stephen King, in his book On Writing discusses a similar idea. He mentions that every writer has an ideal reader, and should hold that ideal reader in their mind as they’re writing. For King, his wife is his ideal reader.

We’ve heard the adage that “you can’t please all of the people all of the time.” The same holds true for fiction. If you write to please all of the people, more often than not, you will fail to please anyone (most notably and sadly, yourself). Your story will lose itself in trying to be something that it’s not, that it shouldn’t be. It will get lost in itself, so to speak, and perhaps never see the light of day.

Your ideal reader may be the same for all your books, or they may change. For example, if you’re writing a western, you’ll likely have one reader in mind, maybe your father with whom you grew up watching Bonanza. Maybe, after the western, you try your hand at a fantasy, and your ideal reader is now your first girlfriend, who swore she wanted to save up her money to have plastic surgery on her ears to make them pointed like an elf’s. Maybe you write a horror, and you think of your best friend with whom you spent every Halloween for the last twenty years. Then again, you may be lucky enough to have, as King does, a wife that fulfills multiple roles and, regardless of the genre, serves as an ideal reader.

Either way, understanding who  your ideal reader is can help shape the path of the novel—what would they most like to see next? What would surprise them here? How would they feel about this particular scene?

Knowing your reader (singular) can also help you finish your book. Two often we get caught up in trying to add something for everyone, which is both futile and frustrating. Somewhere, about a hundred pages in or so, you’ll realize that your novel lacks a clear direction. There are too many threads to make a quilt. Instead, you’re working with enough threads to make several bed sets.

Streamline and focus. Your reader will thank you.

 

Kurt Vonnegut’s Sixth Rule for Writing Fiction

Well, this is embarrassing – I lost track of the days, but better late than never. #6! Thanks, Aaron. Now let’s all go make life difficult for our characters.

Also, a hearty shoutout to friend and mentor Cheryl Strayed: Her memoir Wild hit #1 on the New York Times bestseller list!!

Now here’s Aaron:

by adgansky

6. Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them–in order that the reader may see what they’re made of. –Kurt Vonnegut

No one likes to betray a friend, but we sometimes feel that way when we make bad things happen to our characters. But then, maybe you don’t feel that way. maybe it’s easy for you to throw obstacles at your protagonist because you don’t care much for them. Ideally, though, you will feel a little bit bad when you, as I did recently, have a Sasquatch jump out of a forest and beat your favorite character near to death (it’s a fantasy–work with me here). I may have cried a little. I do that sometimes.

For me, this rule, like the greatest two-handed broadsword, is double-edged. On one edge, we need to create (or, as some might say, build or discover, depending on your personal writing philosophy) characters that we love, that we hate to hurt. If we’re not doing this–if we as their creator don’t have an intense emotional connection to them, how much less will the reader care?–we’re letting our readership down. Our characters’ pain should, at least in some small part, become our pain.

The second side we need to allow our characters to experience these misfortunes. If we don’t, we’ll never really know them. How do they react when faced with Sasquatch in a dimly lit forest and the break of day? How do they cope when their loved one dies? How do their bodies mend after a car crash? How do they recover psychologically after a messy divorce? After being betrayed by their best friend? What does this do to them?

This is not to say that the characters life must be one tragedy after another, a veritable helicopter rotary blade of horrors. Your character should overcome, should be rewarded for their efforts. Just understand, that, once they do, something else must threaten them, or their families, or their fortunes, or whatever it is that they care most about.

Wallace Stevens says that, “Death is mother of beauty.” This may suggest that we only appreciate beauty because we know it is temporary, we know that there is an ever-abiding threat. If beauty persisted indefinitely, we would not call it beauty. We would not even notice it to begin with.

Make something beautiful by introducing something that threatens it. Take something your character feels is permanent, and then threaten it. Then, and only then, can you see what your character is truly made of.

 

Kurt Vonnegut’s Fifth Rule for Writing Fiction

Thanks to Aaron for another guest post while I’m on the road in Morocco.

By adgansky

5. Start as close to the end as possible. –Kurt Vonnegut

Last week, I had a student approach me to ask my opinion on something they were working on. The story opened inside a hospital with the birth of a child. I liked the idea immediately, and anticipated some sort of tragic transpiring—mom’s life would be in danger, or baby’s. Or maybe baby would have a tale. Or maybe there was no dad. Or maybe dad was off to war. What an amazing opportunity for conflict.

Unfortunately, nothing so tragic happened. It was a standard birth, with no complications. And while the protagonist (baby) would eventually lead a revolution (I think) and save a world, and while their birth was significant in that regard, the birth itself felt as if it were included because the student didn’t know where else to begin. He’s in very good company.

The story goes, as I recall, that F. Scott Fitzgerald read an early version of The Sun Also Rises. He praised the novel as a whole, but took a few issues with the first two chapters. He gently encouraged Hemmingway to revise them. Hemmingway, in spectacular diva fashion, tore the first two chapters out completely. Turns out, that wasn’t such a bad idea.

There seems to be within us, especially as we begin writing, a desire—a compulsion, really—to tell “the whole story.” And we want to start at the beginning so that our readers can know every detail of characters’ lives. The problem is, readers seldom care. What they care about is conflict. And the closer you begin to the end, the more conflict exists, the more readers are immersed in your world.

To do this, it may help to have a rough outline of where you want to go with your story. Find out where you want your characters to end up, then start as close to that point as possible. Some writers actually choose to begin the story a few minutes from the end, then flash back and show everything that happened to lead up to that point (think Thelma and Louise). While that’s an interesting tactic, we can’t use it every time. Sometimes it’s just better to do the Hemmingway bit—write the book, then rip out the first two chapters. Usually, what you’ll find, is that the rest of the story does an excellent job revealing whatever back story is necessary in a more natural way. Besides, doing this well allows you to create a sense of mystery.

But of course there are always exceptions to the rules. Fantasy and Science Fiction, generally speaking, would be the exception. Most readers of these genres understand that they’re in for the long haul. They also expect that most stories in these genre take a certain shape (usually the undertaking of a quest that sets the protagonist on a journey across an unfamiliar world or worlds).

This is a rule that has a lot more play room than some of the others. Which strategy is right for you? Regardless of genre, stories need conflict immediately. Check your novel for which conflict you establish on page one. The second step is to read. A lot. What are the masters doing? How are they doing it? Can you do something similar? It might benefit you to make a list of your favorite books and writers and go back and analyze the opening of each of their beginnings. How close to the end do they begin? What does that tell you about your writing.

For what it’s worth, I actually went back and deleted the first two paragraphs of this post. No lie.

Happy starting.