How to NOT Cut Adjectives

It's an oft-cited Rule of Writing that adjectives are bad, that overuse will lead to a godawful purpling of one's prose. Who needs an adjective when the right noun will do? Aren't these (along with adverbs) pretty much the most-often redundant part of speech? Cut them! we cry. Take a cut-throat razor and flense that fat from the bloated corpse of your dead and rotting prose! And this is not entirely bad advice, not by any means.

Being a thrawn cocksucker, however, and a cocksure motherfucker whose grave shall read, "Fuck that shit!" I thought I'd smack that advice upside its vapid little head with a baseball bat, dump this petty axiom of the mediocre out a top floor window and offer you a completely contrary lesson. Yeah, that's right. Today's lesson in the craft of writing is how to not cut adjectives. Let's take a random example of adjective overuse, sourced from some corner of the interwebs:

"Stepping out into the bright sunshine amidst the delicate singing of the birds, she sensed a passionate stirring in her spirit that left her open to the mysterious excitement of the brave challenge that lay ahead of her."

Now if we were to prune this ruthlessly of all the adjectives, what we'd get is this:

"Stepping out into the sunshine amidst the singing of the birds, she sensed a stirring in her spirit that left her open to the excitement of the challenge that lay ahead of her."

Yeah, whatever. It's not as overwrought as the original, but it's hardly deathless prose. I say we can fix that sentence a whole lot better, and I say we can do so without lowering the adjective count by a single word. Surely it can't be done! I hear you say, There's fricking five adjectives in there! Surely some of them just gotta go!

Pfft! says I. Piece of piss.

Let's start by applying the first principle of decent prose: clarity. Is the sunshine "amidst" the birdsong? Can light be physically "amidst" sound? Does that even make sense? Don't be silly, you say. It's her that's "amidst" the sound. As she steps out? I say. Surely she's stepping out into the birdsong just as much as she's stepping out into the sunshine, entering them both at the exact same point. The birdsong isn't swirling around her such that it follows her out the fucking door. So:

"Stepping out into the bright sunshine and the delicate singing of the birds, she sensed a passionate stirring in her spirit that left her open to the mysterious excitement of the brave challenge that lay ahead of her."

But, wait! Let's apply economy too! Why are we calling it "singing of the birds" when there's the perfectly good "birdsong," as I just referred to it above? So:

"Stepping out into the bright sunshine and the delicate birdsong, she sensed a passionate stirring in her spirit that left her open to the mysterious excitement of the brave challenge that lay ahead of her."

Not that much better yet, eh? But, look! Now there's a logical pairing of sight and sound, a parallel emphasised by the compound construction of "sun-shine" and "bird-song," which makes it a logical balance to have the second adjective.

Still, they're both redundant. When is sunshine not bright? When is birdsong not delicate? (The cawing of crows or gulls is not song. Song is musical. If we're talking birdsong, we're talking canaries, nightingales and other such ickle tweety-birds.) To be purposeful, the adjectives here must conjure the additional import of the object in the narrative, what it is about them that makes these instances distinct. Here, it's clearly as much the affective experience of the ephemera, the degree to which and the way in which they impact on the character as she steps out into them. The right adjectives could conjure that and not be redundant:

"Stepping out into the glorious sunshine and the tender birdsong, she sensed a passionate stirring in her spirit that left her open to the mysterious excitement of the brave challenge that lay ahead of her."

While we're at it though, we might as well change that "brave." A challenge isn't brave; the person that responds to it is. If they have to be brave to respond to it, that means it's formidable:

"Stepping out into the glorious sunshine and the tender birdsong, she sensed a passionate stirring in her spirit that left her open to the mysterious excitement of the formidable challenge that lay ahead of her."

OK, so where were we? Well, now it's only the second half of the sentence that goes purple. With the first half tightened, we can just about accept "passionate stirring," but when we hit "mysterious excitement," we throw up a little in our mouths, right? But we don't have quite the same redundancy in that vomit-point pairing. Not all excitement involves a sense of mystery. It's only when we have a sense of mystery together with a sense of excitement that... oh, wait.

Hang on.

What we're trying to conjure here is a composite affect, right? It's an affect with two dimensions, so the writer has picked one and shaded it with the other. But is the character open to the "mysterious excitement" or to the "exciting mystery"? Do those flipped phrasings really signify anything different, I mean? Cause if we have two affects, and one is not essentially a subordinate quality of the other, if their relationship could be flipped, then we can just have her open to both, duh. I'm going to apply the principle of specificity here though, cause the reason an adjective has been slapped on "excitement" is that "excitement" is a bit generic in and of itself. Since we want something as precise as mystery to pair with it, I'm going to switch excitiment to "thrill":

"Stepping out into the glorious sunshine and the tender birdsong, she sensed a passionate stirring in her spirit that left her open to the mystery and thrill of the formidable challenge that lay ahead of her."

So, now we have actually removed one adjective, by turning it back into the noun it's derived from. (Don't worry. It ain't over yet.) Still, even doing that, while I no longer gag at that point in the sentence, that "passionate stirring" remains... a bit bothersome. Again, it feels a bit redundant. If you sense a stirring in your spirit, that's obviously a matter of affect, of passion. If you're stirred, then said passion is by definition elevated, you are by definition feeling passionate. But you know what? I'm not going to cut that, because clearly the idea is to drive home just how stirred she is. In fact, I'm going to add an adjective. That's right, motherfuckers, add. Hey, we cut one, and the game here is to fix the sentence without just pruning modifiers, so to take us back up to the original total, I'm going to bring back one that got lost along the way--"brave."

I'm not just going to tack it on to a noun though. Fuck that shit. I'm going to show how the adjective need not be bound to the heteropartist orthodoxy in which it must always be paired with a noun, married to a different part of speech, subjugated, enslaved. Let our two little adjectives bond together in a same-part marriage, strike out together, proud and dauntless, passionate and brave!

"Stepping out into the glorious sunshine and the tender birdsong, she sensed a stirring in her spirit, passionate and brave, that left her open to the mystery and thrill of the formidable challenge that lay ahead of her."

You want to cut things from this sentence? Three "X and Y" pairings in one sentence is a bit much, so let's make those adjectives snuggle even tighter, make them even more fierce, even more in-yer-face. Adjective Rights, motherfucker! Let's go for the bam! bam! effect of conjunction elision.

"Stepping out into the glorious sunshine and the tender birdsong, she sensed a stirring in her spirit, passionate, brave, that left her open to the mystery and thrill of the formidable challenge that lay ahead of her."

Might as well prune a couple of other redundancies while we're at it. Let's bring the first pair a little closer together by dropping the second "the," and let's tighten up the last phrasing by dropping "that lay" and "of her":

"Stepping out into the glorious sunshine and tender birdsong, she sensed a stirring in her spirit, passionate, brave, that left her open to the mystery and thrill of the formidable challenge ahead."

Actually, fuck it, who needs the first "the"? And if it's the unknown potentials of the challenge that are getting her all excited, is it really a singular mystery, a singular thrill, or is it a fabulous, formless plethora of possibilities we're dealing with? So:

"Stepping out into glorious sunshine and tender birdsong, she sensed a stirring in her spirit, passionate, brave, that left her open to the mysteries and thrills of the formidable challenge ahead."

And hey presto! We have a perfectly usable sentence that's shorter by some half dozen words, but with no fewer adjectives than we began with. Is it still a bit precious? Sure, but it's articulating a moment of rapture; what do you expect? The point is, the lyricism required to conjure the moment is not achieved simply by slapping an emotional button-pushing adjective onto every noun, painting everything: bright; delicate; passionate; mysterious; brave. (Puke.) In the original, this trowelling-on of vapid effusiveness only gives us prose that's crude, saccharine and false. But is the fault overuse of adjectives or simply misuse? The right choice of five adjectives and the right placement for them, and you can piss on the shallow piffle of bush-league gurus churning out the same trite mantras over and over again: don't overuse adjectives; don't overuse adjectives; don't overuzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

Yawn.

This is pedestrian bollocks:

"Stepping out into the sunshine amidst the singing of the birds, she sensed a stirring in her spirit that left her open to the excitement of the challenge that lay ahead of her."

This is actual narrative prose:

"Stepping out into glorious sunshine and tender birdsong, she sensed a stirring in her spirit, passionate, brave, that left her open to the mysteries and thrills of the formidable challenge ahead."

And I tell you what... I could add a sixth adjective in there and it would still work--work better arguably. Yeah, you heard me, baby, brazen in my braggadocio. One hundred internets if you can guess what and where, answers in the comments below, prize to whoever gets closest.

Come on, motherfuckers. Show me your adjectival audacity.

Bring it on.

Manuscript Critique Service

I normally offer this service through an online agency, but there's nothing coming in from there at the moment, so I thought I'd open up a direct channel, and offer what I look at as a sort of literary MOT.

So here's the skinny:

Who am I?

I'm an internationally-renowned, award-winning professional author; a novelist, short story writer and poet; songwriter, playwright and critic; translated and published in nigh on a dozen countries; winner and nominee in multiple high-profile awards; judge in the 2012 British Fantasy Awards; with over twenty years experience workshopping as part of the Glasgow SF Writers' Circle (other grandees including William King, Gary Gibson, Mike Cobley, Neil Williamson and Phil Raines); currently a professional editor with the Writer' Workshop, providing in-depth feedback on manuscripts; my first novel, VELLUM, was described by no less than Lucius Shepard as "at very least, the Guernica of genre fiction."

Who are you?

You're a writer at whatever level with a novel manuscript (of 50K words plus) you'd like feedback on. Maybe you've shown it to family and friends and got positive responses, but you're not sure how much weight to put on them. Maybe you haven't shown it to anyone, unsure if a workshop group will give you feedback of substance or just well-intentioned but less-than-useful backslapping. Maybe you think your work is pretty damn good, but you know your own bias, want an objective judgement. Maybe you have niggling doubts that you can't quite resolve into articulable problems. Maybe you can see exactly what's wrong, but don't know where to begin with fixing the issues. Maybe you're bogged down in a work that feels an insoluble mess, but the idea at the heart of it is one you're still in love with, one you know would make a great book if you could just bring your skills up to scratch to thrash it into shape.

What can I offer you?

What I can offer is:

1) The report: an in-depth critique, an analysis of your text on every level, from the basics of manuscript presentation through to the more high-level aspects of general narrative structure and dynamics. I'll aim to provide this within a month of the manuscript's arrival and my agreement to work on it, and you can expect the report to be a minimum of 10K words. In the past, actually, reports have stretched as high as 30K words, which is a mark of just how thorough I'll go if need be.

2) A follow-up call: when you get the report back, there may well be things you'd like to clarify in it, ideas on how to proceed that you'd like to run by me, so included with the report is the option for an informal back-and-forth via phone or Skype, to be arranged at our mutual convenience. I'll happily extend this to cover aspects of the business, if you want advice in that area.

What exactly are you in for?

The purpose here is not validation or support. As with an MOT on a car, I'll be reading for issues, on the look-out for flaws to fix, with absolute honesty a prerequisite--or you simply won't be getting your money's worth, after all. I like to think I'm like that doctor in The Big Lebowski--a good man, and thorough, so my aim is always to galvanise rather than discourage, but if a book needs me to be brutally blunt, I won't soft-pedal or sugar-coat the bottom line. I will do my damnedest to find a workable solution to any issue though, and one that's sympathetic to the book's ambitions, as best I understand them. The aim is to make the book the best it can be, to help it achieve the standards it sets for itself, not to fit a mold of my personal preferences.

Reports are usually broken down into sections, so as to deal with every aspect of narrative from the ground up. I'll cover: manuscript presentation; basic prose quality; narrative prose quality; Point of View and voice; dialogue; action (problems of logic, activity, deposition, skimwriting); description and exposition; worldscape (problems with premises/conceits, the basic environs, creatures, cultures); setting (staging, blocking, dressing); character; formal narrative structure on the scene, chapter and act level; general plot dynamics (the narrative trigger, the core conflict, the resolution.)

If you look at the Writing 101 entries under the Learn menu option above, you'll get a sense of the depth I'm liable to go into, as and when required, the sort of elbow-deep advice I'll be giving, unpacking your text to explore the techniques you could and should be using. With close reference to your text, I'll be aiming to give clear practical guidance on every aspect of the craft, not just a broad description of flaws and potential fixes, but the next best thing to a book on writing tailored specifically to your manuscript.

How do I arrange a critique?

In the first instance, send me a query email at hal@halduncan.com, with "MS CRITIQUE" in the subject line, attaching a copy of your manuscript in MS Word .doc or .docx format. I'll send confirmation so you know it's got through. Then, once I've had a glance at the text, if I think I can help you, I'll send you a quote. If this is agreeable, you can make a payment to me by Paypal, and I'll set to work.

I might not think I can help you, whether it's a matter of time commitments or the nature of the manuscript, so please don't be offended if I decline. If it's a work of franchise/fan fiction, for example, I can't help you make it legally publishable, so craft is a moot point. If it's a work of literary genius, I won't take your money--not if all I'd have to say about it is this rocks. And while I'm comfortable critiquing a whole range of approaches, from the most high-flown and experimental pomo to the most commercial category fiction, if I don't think the idiom fits my skillset, I'd rather someone else had a satisfied customer than leave you feeling disgruntled.

How much will it cost?

The fee is £50 per 10K words, to be paid in advance by Paypal, so we're talking about £500 for a novel of the average 100K words. It's not cheap, I know, but there's a substantial amount of time and work goes into these reports; I'd say that's a fair rate.

For more information, if you have any questions or concerns regarding what's entailed, feel free to drop me a line at hal@halduncan.com.

THE.... Five Rules of Writing!!

Did I say rules? I meant imperatives, divine imperatives, imperious decrees, holy writ handed down from on high. I meant DO NOT DEFY MY CORRECTITUDE. If you defy my correctitude, your writing will fail. You will fail. Not just as a writer, but as a human being. Little children will point and laugh at you when you walk down the street. Your name will become a verb meaning to fail. Generations hence, entire civilisations will abhor you as a mythical being who faceplanks into the hearts of men, women and innocent ickle children, and causes them to FAIL. So obey me. For I am the Great and Wise Author. And you, my humble supplicants, come to me seeking writing advice. You crawl on your bellies, abasing yourselves before me, beseeching me to dispense my wisdom, justice and (maybe, hopefully,) mercy. You ask me how to write?

Hear then! Hear the commandments of THE.... Sodomite Hal Duncan!! (sic)

1. Every passage in four panels!
2. Every panel in X hundred word chunks!
3. No moving on till you know it's correct!
4. No inverted commas!
5. No fucking Latinate words!

What? You think these rules are harsh and arbitrary? These are the very Laws of Fiction! Writing works if and only if you follow these edicts to the letter. This is a scientifically proven factoid. These are epistemic, alethic, deontic and boulomaic absolutes. Not just truths, but Troths. There is no questioning them. There is no wiggle room. Because they are writ into the very fabric of reality--not the fabric of society, which is wrought of socionormative contingencies and subjectivities, and an ugly plaid, not even a nice subtle tartan, but a hideous lurid golf plaid, and therefore deserves to be destroyed... no, not the fabric of society, but the very fabric of the spacetime continuum itself. These are How Writing Works.

You doubt me? Very well then. Let me set forth the wisdom of the rules, that you may weep in awe at their correctitude, and know in your hearts that lest you follow them to the letter you will fail.

1. Every passage in four panels!

Every story is a story, correct? Tautologically correct, indeed, yes? Well, every chapter is a story too. Every scene is a story. Every passage is a story. That's right. There are structures in writing of finer granularity than a scene. You know this. You use the word passage when talking about a chunk of writing shorter than a scene, the sort of chunk one might pick out for a reading, going from A to B, and expecting your audience to appreciate that it's a self-contained chunk, not just some fucking random snippet of narrative, starting where your eye happens to hit the page and ending whenever your attention is distracted into barking at the sudden sight of a squirrel. At some point in life, if you consider yourself a writer, of whatever level, you will have sat and read aloud, or listened to someone read aloud, a passage. And you will have known it for the passage it is, reaching the end with a satisfying feeling of endiness. That is because a passage is a story.

As such it comes in four parts: initiation; engagement; resolution. Wait, I hear you say, isn't that three parts? Hah! How little you understand! The engagement phase of story is, obviously, where the meat of the story is. Beginning connects only to middle. Ending connects only middle. Middle connects both to beginning and to ending. It looks both ways, as a Janus-headed deity, a double-faced god. Therefore it comes in two parts: the part that connects to the beginning; and the part that connects to the end. If this is not self-evident to you, you are a fool, and you will fail.

So you must look to your writing for its passages, and you must look to those passages for the four panels of prose that are its structural components. You must isolate them out in order to work on them in isolation, make them function smoothly as the components that they are, just as you would a discrete method to be called in a piece of software. Setting them on the page in isolation, you may justify your scissioning of the text to doubters by reference to the classic Hollywood Three Act Structure also referred to as Syd Field's Paradigm, or to the quatrains of poetry, or to the formal constraints of Oulipo, depending on the standards of literary propriety (ptui!) held by those middle-brow mediocrities questioning your approach, or simply depending on your whim--because their doubts do not matter a fucking jot. Because in structuring your passage this way you have achieved correctitiude.

2. Every panel in X hundred word chunks!

Do you think you can just make those panels of any old length, this one five words long, that one five MILLION? Why are you even trying to write, you lazy ignorant halfwitted narcissist? There is a reason sequences in a movie are all of the same twenty minute stint, a reason the lines in a quatrain of iambic pentameter are all of the same ten syllable length. That reason is called rhythm in music; in fiction it is called pacing. In narrative too, just as in music, the tempo is set, and pounded into the audience's very heart, by these things we call beats. That is why, unless you are a child, a laggard, an ignoramus, an imbecile and/or an egotist bereft of experience and/or the capacity to incorporate it, you should have heard the term narrative beats. What did you think this was referring to, if not the parsing of linear narrative into regularly spaced impacts of categorically greater force upon the audience's attentive nous?

We all know that every word and phrase and sentence is impacting on the reader's nous, striking the chord of its import in their imagination. Obviously, some will have greater impact than others. Obviously, some will have such greater impact that they stand out as discrete blows among the taps and tickles. Obviously, in order to achieve a steady pace you must apply these to, figuratively speaking, punch the reader in the face at regular intervals and thereby maintain their interest. Every time you do so, that is a narrative beat. Perhaps you thought of these narrative beats as occurring only at the larger scale of story, in the crunch moment at the end of each act, or at the end of each episode (which is to say, chapter,) or at the end of each incident (which is to say, scene.) Did I not tell you that a passage is a story? That each of the four panels functions as an act of that story--Act 1, Act 2a, Act 2b, Act 3? It is self-evident then that the panels must be of regular length in order that they maintain a steady rhythm with their crunch moments, with that word or phrase or sentence within them whereby they punch the reader in the face.

There is, of course, a degree of flexibility here. Different stories call for different paces, and therefore panel length may vary. It may be one hundred words, two hundred words, or many hundred words... in short, X hundred words. See? How can you call this rigid and unreasonable when you have all the freedom you need to select whatever length is suitable? Why, you ask, must it be in multiples of one hundred? Why can each panel not be ninety-nine words, or one hundred and one, or any random prime number from the series? BECAUSE YOU ARE WEAK. Because you are not Hemingway to write a story in six words, only a callow novitiate whose skill may at best stretch to the accomplishment of a mediocre drabble. Because in order to hone your skills you must master that most basic story-form, exercising the ruthless concision required to flense the fat from your one hundred and thirteen word bloated travesty of a drabble, applying the savage incision necessary to slice into your feeble seventy nine word abortion of so-called flash fiction, splay it wide open and release the unfurling angel-winged full glory of raw narrative power lying latent in that withered husk. Because if you do not do this, you will FAIL.

3. No moving on till you know it's correct!

Drafts?! What is this talk of drafts?! This folly of slovenly slapdash skimwriting, this willful negligence as an intentional strategy in hurriedly vomiting your words onto the page, running ever onward, hurling and spewing before (under! behind!) you, so fast you can't even see your own botches and blunders to be ashamed of them, eyes only on the finish line, where you think you can return to the start, and settle into editing mode, to perfect this crude and cursory hackwork, fix this trail of puke you are pretending to be actual narrative... this is to have already failed. You will edit this atrocity and it will remain an atrocity. It may be less of an atrocity, but it will still reek of the puking failure it was wrought from. You can try as hard as you will, but you will never purge the stench exuded from the very substance of it. You will achieve at best that risible mediocrity that is commonly referred to as good enough. You will excuse your failure with platitudes that one must know when to let go of the story, when to step back, so as not to overwork it. And you will give up, you craven cuntfucking quitter.

There is no place for this mediocrity in art. Good enough is not good enough. Good enough is not correctitude. To achieve correctitude, you must ensure that each unit of narrative is correct as and when it is finalised, for it is only when it is correct that it automatically, by the airtight logic of narrative, ramifies to engender in latent ideal, established in the fabric of reality--even though you will not yet know it--the correct articulation that the subsequent unit of narrative must realise in order to follow it in correctitude. You must realise the first sentence in correctitude before the correctitude of the next even exists for you to discover in the ferocious devotion of experimentation doggedly persisting until you get it correct. You must realise the first paragraph before there even is a next paragraph to be written. You must finish the first panel before moving on to the next, finish the first passage before moving on to the next, and so on. Or you will FAIL. You will have failed at the first sentence to be incorrect and in all subsequent sentences, which will each, one after the other, have been constructed in a misguided attempt to realise the increasingly false ideals engendered by predecessors snowballing in their wrongosity.

Again, there is some flexibility. The base unit of narrative is not the word or phrase, but the sentence, and so you are not constrained to finding the correct first word for the sentence before moving on to the second, and in finding the correct second word before moving on to the third, and so on. But this is the limit of your liberty. Do not think that if the fifth word in your sentence is incorrect, it is nonetheless close enough to engender the correct ideal that the subsequent sentences must realise. There are no synonyms, There is no content, only import, the denotation of a word--that dictionary definition--only a pitifully myopic gesture into a an ocean of connotations, a pretence that there is an island at the centre of it. There is a centre, but there is no island, only the ocean of import, so it is an arrant folly to pretend that, by ignoring the realities of two oceans, one can map the imaginary island at the centre of one to the imaginary island at the centre of another, that these two words having identical dictionary definitions have identical import. There are no synonyms. So if you have the wrong word in place, with the wrong ocean of import, the best you can hope for is that the daimon of your liminal sapience savvies the wrongness that your fuckwit nous is obliviating, that it nudges you to accidentally stumble on the correct subsequent sentence for what your sentence should be. In this way, you may be fortunate enough to get a paragraph correct, when its second sentence is wrong, by stumbling back onto the path of correctitude with the third and fourth sentences, the fuller realisation of correctitude across the paragraph illuminating the sentence that is wrong and the word within it, as you reread the paragraph to ensure correctitude before moving on to the next. The limit of this capacity is the panel. If you do not get the paragraphs correct within the panel, and the sentences within the paragraphs, you will fail.

4. No inverted commas!

What sort of incompetent are you that you must rely on this arrant artifice to signal when a character is speaking? When you tell an anecdote to your comrades, as you recount a conversation between yourself and some mush-brained overgrown infant or adolescent who insulted the art of narrative by applying the vacuous content metaphor, casting it as mere means to an end, as a mere mechanism to communicate the pseudo-substance of plot or insight as an amphora might convey wine--as if words were not the only substance, as if the import realised in the action of that substance, the dynamics of the articulation conjuring story, word by word, in the reader's mind, were not the end in and of itself--as you mock these callow philistines and philosophers who understand nothing of narrative, do you use air quotes to mark out each and every speech act you recount, twitching two fingers in the air like a cuntfuckingly smarmy cretin with every commencement or completion of every utterance, for the benefit of the hard of understanding? Would you not find one who treated you thus to be insufferable in his assumption that you can't follow his narrative of the back and forth simply by the tags any such narrator employs to specify what they said and what I said? How then shall you be judged if you treat the reader with such patronising presumption?

Or are you just so incompetent in the art of narrative that you fear your own botchings will leave the assignations of speech acts and/or their distinction from the surrounding action impenetrable despite the paragraph breaks before each utterance, the dialogue tags affixed to them, the characteristic speech patterns of different characters, the blatantly discrete functional dynamics of each act within an exchange that should mark it as self-evidently a to or fro in the back-and-forth initiated by one character's serve? If you cannot construct a dialogue exchange that a reader can follow on the basis of these natural features and these alone, then what will you do when tasked to read aloud a passage from your narrative to an audience that has only your oral recitation to go by? Will you use air quotes then? How do you imagine that will go down? No, if you know yourself to be so woefully inept in narrative that you can't make a simple dialogue exchange comprehensible without, as James Joyce called them, perverted commas, then all the more reason to abjure them, discard these crutches and force yourself to develop the strength and control to walk with legs that you are only allowing to atrophy in your wretched indulgence of the delusion that it's too difficult, waa waa waa.

5. No fucking Latinate words!

We are to assume that you desire your prose to conjure a story vividly for the reader, yes? It is established, is it not, that what you are doing is presenting the reader with an articulation the substance of which is a series of words? That each word acts upon the reader's nous so as to strike a chord of import, to facepunch into their noggin (or at least tap, or tickle) the sounds and sights and scents and affects and all other such connotatively-integrated impressions of sense that are the sense of that word? That narrative is the music made of these chords of import, story the experience of it unfolding, import by import, sense by sense, sentence building upon sentence, paragraph upon paragraph, panel upon panel, passage upon passage, and so on? This is a self-evident fact of written and oral fiction. This is How Writing Works.

So then your words must be fit to the task. They each must be the correct word that will strike the correct chord of import. A wrong note in that chord will render it discordant and jarring. In a botched, off-pitch, out-of-key attempt at simply communicating the melody, it will be obvious to the reader that you are consistently using the wrong words. As with a singer's voice, so too will the voice of your narrative be insufferably, unforgiveably flat. If you would seek to conjure a story in a way that is not an obliviously amateurish spectacle of gobsmackingly bum note after bum note, worthy only to be ridiculed as some freakshow wannabe in a TV talent show, then you must avoid the scourge of the good English tongue, that inbred porphyria-ridden dynasty of haughty atonality: the Latinate.

The privileging of Latin over centuries of artificed propriety renders words sourced from that language a peril for the unwitting fool who uses them without forethought. With the use of Latin among the educated elites, that is to say, as a common language binding the upper echelons of this nation or that, as a language of academia, and therefore as a language of authority, over time words rooted in that language have achieved the status of a higher register, a greater propriety. From the incestuous bastards of Norman nobility to the chinless attic-children of Etonian boors, it has been imbued with a tone of authority, and from medieval scholasticism, through Enlightenment science, to the present day, it has accrued an illusory veneer of intellectual rigour and objectivity, been made a stylistic mechanism for the projection of one's status as being elevated out of the mire of vulgarity that is, for the Proper, (ptui!) the mob. This tone of authority and objectivity... this is what damns these Latinate words. Pompous and ploddingly depositional, how can the narrative employing them not become a godawful morass of one flat note after another?

These words are not wrong, let it be clear, because they are fancy, because they are pretentious, because they are ten-cent words. They are wrong because their impact has been silenced in part, muted of all the most visceral import that the non-Latin option might strike. They have been stripped of all affective connotations in the attempt of the proper to convince themselves, deludedly, of a superiority in which they are just in their hauteur, impartial in their rationalisations, free of the base passions of sensationalist subjectivity. These words are loaded, in fact, with an active connotation of distanced, objective, authoritative dispassion. They connote the elimination of connotative complexity, the erasure of affective resonance. They are tools honed to achieve the exact opposite function than that which you are striving for as a writer. If you would not fail, expunge them, switching Latinate for Germanic terms, fantastical for weird, infrequent for seldom, fashioned with wrought, and so on

Unless you are specifically seeking to conjure some voice of tedious propriety, social or intellectual--as perhaps the cruelly clinical hauteur of the literary vivisectionist executing a merciless analysis which, in its imperious claim of objective truth, should of course be seen as profoundly untrustworthy--unless the connotation of the elimination of connotative complexity, of the erasure of affective resonance, is precisely what you need in that word in that sentence, if you use these abominations when an analogue is available, then in your flatness of import your sentence will not have achieved correctitude. It will be wrong. And you will have failed.

These truths are the Laws of Writing, and let no man, or woman, or child dispute them. These are the commandments of THE.... Sodomite Hal Duncan!! (sic) the Five Rules of Writing to end all Five Rules of Writing. If anyone would be a writer, and would scour the internet in search of writing advice, and would think to adhere with all devotion to the decrees of their elders, let them abjure all wrongosity, disavow the follies rendered obsolete by this revelation, and follow these True Troths into the path of correctitude.

So mote it be.

Critique Groups: Open/Closed

Got an email the other day from a writer who's aiming to set up something similar to the GSFWC in their own town and wanted to pick my brains. He'd noticed it was an open workshop, run along Milford lines, but some of the people he's got interested in setting up a critique group are, it seems, a bit worried at the prospect of being swamped in dross--shoddy copyism and outright fanfic. So, he wanted to ask how we at the GSFWC handle new members. I wrote him back, basically as follows. Thought it was worth posting for the interest of others who might have similar questions. So...

*

Dear X,

You might want to drop Neil Williamson a line too, as he's sort of fallen into the role of official organiser--first contact for new members, intermediary with the venue and whatnot--but I'm happy to blather a bit about the workings meself.

So, the GSFWC is kind of an anarchist collective. Yeah, it's run along the Milford lines: the story is posted on a Yahoo Group in advance for everyone to download and read; on the night, we go round the circle one by one, each member giving their critique; the critiquee has to stay schtum unless asked a direct question; at the end, they get to rebut; then we go to the pub, where they get a pint to make up for the ordeal, and we all blether away.

And yep, it's an open door policy. Nobody really being in charge (no secretary or treasurer or bollocks like that) is aimed at no internal politicking, and that rules out controls on entry. If we had to debate who got in, who didn't, that's where I think there's a risk of it all going pear-shaped, becoming about the irrelevant social status stuff you get with any such group, rather than the writing above all else. All we really have is Neil Williamson acting as pointman, and a few long-standing members like myself who'll make an effort to ensure that at least one of us is along if another can't make it, in the event of a new member. Someone to explain how it operates and such.

Neil tends to be the first line of contact, as most new members find us via the website and drop him an email. The advice is usually to come along and sit in on a session, see how it works. We meet in a room in a church--pubs being too noisy, we've found--which costs £2 a head, but for new members there's a "first time is free" policy. New members should see from the session itself that it's no-nonsense... chatty beforehand, but then sleeves up and down to business. We're not wholly inflexible about the conch-style "X is speaking, so everyone else STFU" structure, but if it gets a bit feisty, you want someone ready to tactfully remind people that they've had their turn (or will have it shortly.) "We can discuss that after in the pub," is a useful tactic.

In practice, we've evolved a sort of principle that once a speaker has finished, if you've already spoken but something that person said sparks a realisation, a polite "Oh, I meant to say that too," or "Can I just add something quick?" is not verboten. But it has to be pithy as fuck. Us senior members try and lead by example more than anything. (Though I'm probably one of the most fail-y when it comes to "Oh, I just thought of something else!")

We generally stress that there's no pressure to submit something immediately; indeed, we encourage new members not to be too keen, to come back for a few sessions and get a good sense of what they're in for. If someone immediately wants to submit a work, that's maybe even a warning sign, I'd say, that they're looking for validation rather than feedback. Like, if it was the latter they'd want to gauge the quality of feedback they'll get. Or they'd be more reticent about whether their work was of a standard. Not sure why, but it just seems like the ones who sit in on a session and immediately want to put something in... they tend to be the ones least likely to fit in.

To be honest, we've had our share of hobbyists and cranks like that over the years, but they tend not to stick around. I don't think we've ever had anyone want to submit actual fanfic, but if that were to happen, it would be outwith the remit: the aim of the GSFWC is explicitly to try and push stories up to a professionally publishable standard, and fanfic is automatically not professionally publishable by dint of copyright issues. It's worth being upfront about that aim then. As I say though, I can't think of any time we've had to veto a story on those grounds.

Otherwise, if new members are looking for the empty back-slapping of a mutual masturbation society, they're in for a rude awakening. The ones who bring in hobbyist drivel or therapeutic wank, they're not really aspiring to create sellable work. They're not aspiring to create work readable by anyone other than themself. They don't really want the Circle to help improve their work in that respect. They just want to show their handful of poop and be told what a clever boy they are. The simple way to deal with them: just critique the work as you would any other.

You may need to talk around the fact that clearly the writer is a fucking mentalist, but a Mary Sue is a Mary Sue and bad fiction for that reason. A personal symbology that's utterly inaccessible to another reader cause it's based on the can of worms inside the writer's head... that will make a story a failure, plain and simple. You can be tactful if you want, but sometimes you just have to bite the bullet, be blunt with stuff that's embarrassingly revelatory of a writer's nutjobbery, and say, "Sorry, this reads as therapeutic writing. It reads like it's processing personal stuff as an end in itself, not to engage with an audience via narrative." A useful tack: "I don't see what market there is for this." Again, it pays to be clear about the aim of professional publication.

Ultimately, if someone brings in some crazy ass godawful derivative BDSM Mary Sue which is unwittingly putting their personal dysfunction on display, if you just tell them exactly how bad it is and why... you're giving them the opposite of the validation they want. So they don't stick around. The hobbyists and cranks are actively averse to honest no-nonsense critique, and the worst are relying on the social inhibitions of others, on people's natural reticence to say something that might be hurtful.

For that reason: don't pussyfoot around it. If a work is so bad that you're automatically a bit loathe to be completely honest in case you hurt the writer's feelings, that's exactly when you want to be merciless. No suger-coating or they'll use that as a get-out clause. Hell, if they want validation, that's all they'll hear. So you don't give them it. You're not there to coddle their ego, accommodate their insecurity. If you give em no quarter, they'll quickly get the message and fuck off.

Actually, I'd say as long as you have one member ready to play the Bad Man, that can be all it takes. "Hi, I'm Al, and I'm afraid I'll be the Bad Man this evening." Others will cleave to a notion of constructive critique, and actually I think it's best for that to be the default. You might even go easy on a first-timer to see from their rebuttal whether they're a lost cause. But if you really don't think they have anything to contribute, someone just has to man up and give them the no-holds-barred critique they so don't want to hear. Never personal. Never empty dismissals like "shit." But if a writer is the type of writer you don't want, the plain truth about their writing will drive them away.

To be brutally ruthless about it, in fact, a few hobbyists and cranks coming in now and then can actually be useful. A bunch of roughly competent writers won't see the flaws in their own writing; that's why they're only roughly competent and that's why you want a workshop in the first place. But they may not be able to nail down the same flaws in each other's writing either, because at a roughly competent level the wrongness may be too subtle. With hobbyists and cranks, those flaws are so blatant you can't miss them. So you learn from them what the missteps are, and once you're attuned to them, you start to see them in other writers at your own level, and then you start to see them in your own work. The true benefit of a critique group, I've often argued, is not the feedback you get but the feedback you give. Truth is, the stories you fix on the basis of feedback may be improved, but the stories you write once you've sharpened your own critical skills will be a quantum leap better.

So if someone wants to bring their dreck to your workshop looking for validation, I say let em. Chew them up and spit them out. Slice those stories apart in an autopsy, without an iota of compunction, and learn the anatomy of fiction as you do so. Let it be an object lesson to each other as to what to expect. Be ready to take it as you dish it out. Think of it this way: if you're loathe to be totally honest with the dreck, are you sure you're not going to be pulling punches with each other? If you can cut the crap, ditch the "supportive" cock-fluffing with someone so oblivious of their incompetence that you feel like you're kicking a puppy... well, then it's a piece of piss to do that with your mate. It's a piece of piss for your mate to do that with you. Which is what you should want.

An important point: some of those who bring dreck will not be just looking for validation. They will be real writers who just don't know it yet. They'll be cranks who're still looking at it as a hobby, but who have a spark in them, a seed of something more. They'll be bugfuck mentalists whose work is utterly impenetrable, who don't really expect it to be published, but who somehow still think it's awesome, can't see why it's shite. Where those looking for validation will just slink away after a blunt critique, never to be seen again, these ones will be galvanised into rethinking their entire approach: who am I writing for? what am I writing for? how do I show these fuckers the awesomeness of what I'm trying to do? Put them through the same crucible of brutally honest critique and they might well be transformed.

Everybody is shite when they start. I'd say my own early stuff when I started at the GSFWC was epically abysmal, failing on far more levels than any number of new members we've seen over the years. First story I ever submitted Bill King described as "bad Doctor Who fanfic." It wasn't intended as such (I hated Who) but he was spot-on to nail it to the wall like that. And if Bill hadn't put that bullet in the forehead of my precious hobbyist ego, I daresay I'd have never got my shit together.

Ultimately, I can appreciate where closed critique groups are coming from, and each to their own, but for my money, an open door policy is a good thing. The occassional hobbyist crank is a feature, not a bug. If nothing else, to be an icehearted motherfucker about it, they're good practice, grist for the mill, and once in a while you actually end up with a better writer than you might get if you were admitting only those already roughly competent. Competence is about conforming to standards, after all, some of which are conventional, some of which could do with being challenged. With a closed door policy, you could be imposing conformity, mediocrity. Fuck that shit.

So yeah, that's my tuppence worth. If you do have problems getting your group off the ground, or if you just want to pop through for a look-see, by all means come on through. I'm sure no one would mind you sitting in on a session, and you'd be welcome to join us in the pub, chat with other members. I am, as you can probably tell, one of the more opinionated members on this stuff, with more of a "fuck em if they can't take it" attitude. It's probably worth sounding out others to get their alternative perspectives.

Cheers,

Hal Duncan

Rule 7 for New Writers

Image and Import

If I can say anything important to writers who are still learning the craft of fiction, it's this: imagery does not occur on the writer's page; it occurs in the reader's mind.

-- Steven King

So the other day I came across a Steven King article on description, with the above quote, which rather echoes my own contention that narrative is not a static object but a dynamic effect. Or as I'd put it, that it's about conjuring rather than communication: the goal in narrative is not for the words on the page to communicate the image that's in your mind, but rather for them to conjure it in the reader's mind.

Communication and the fucking content metaphor -- as if your job is simply to inform the reader of what they are to imagine. Into a block of description, sure, you could simply spew out the pseudo-facts for the reader, so they can lift the book and pour them over their head, dumping the requisite details on themselves, item by item, in any order; this is no guarantee it will get inside their skull, no guarantee they will imagine it. If you want them to actually picture your image -- a setting, say -- you need to understand (intuitively if not consciously) that with each word you are not vomiting thought into an inky vessel for the reader to decant. No, you are setting a charge that will blow up on reading. You are using the words as tools to act indirectly upon the reader's imagination.

King points to where an attempt to do so may fail, in the inadequacy of a description that communicates without conjuring:

An example: A beginning writer may put down, "It was a spooky old house," and let it go at that, knowing it doesn't convey any real punch or immediacy, but not knowing what to do about it. The writer has a sense that "It was a spooky old house" is somehow wrong, but he or she doesn't quite... know why. It's like that maddening itch in the middle of your back that you just can't scratch. Well, I'll tell you what's wrong with "It was a spooky old house." It isn't an image; it's an idea.

To be clear: it's not the lack of detail that's the problem here, but rather the failure of the words to act upon the reader's imagination with any verve. As a notional communication ("an idea"), it lacks impact ("punch or immediacy.") It fails to really conjure any house at all, let alone a spooky old one. To understand why "spooky old house" fails to invoke a visual import though is to understand that in truth we could strip away the few details there are in that phrase, slice off the adjectives, and set ourselves up a process of conjuring in which it would have twice the impact, if not more, all on its lonesome ownsome.

How so? In narrative, every word, every phrase, every clause is an operation in and upon the reader's imagination, a word like "house" invoking an import, triggering a notion in their noggin. But each operation is always already taking the reader's imagination as its most crucial variable, the precise flavour of the import invoked dependent on the sum of all notions currently in play. This bears repeating: the full meaning of the word at the moment of use is profoundly reliant upon the state of the reader's imagination as set by the narrative so far. I recall Delany somewhere saying that there are no synonyms, that no two words have the exact same meaning. This does not go far enough. Even the one word does not have the same meaning twice.

Like the word, "house," say.

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A House and a House

From the first word on, narrative is working on an imagination that is not empty, and the impact of the word fired into that shifting substrate is always already the reaction of that substrate to the impact. Not an essential meaning sealed into the inky vessel, as decreed in the dictionary, forever and ever, so mote it be. No, the reaction being a product of the narrative heretofore -- because the reader's imagination is still reacting to what it has read to date -- the import of "the house" will be quite different if it comes after "Through the gates and up the long gravel driveway..." or "About halfway along a Victorian terrace..." Even a single word -- "suburban" or "beachfront" -- may prime the reader this way or that, such that the word "house" has one action on the reader's imagination here, another action on it there.

Here is one "house":

I opened the car door to the smell of salt in the air, the sound of surf and gulls. Californian sunlight on the white gravel of the driveway. With its beachfront location, the house...

Here is another:

As his mum took the usual five minutes trying to get the car parked straight -- squeezing into the parking bay between a builder's van and a hatchback with one of those Baby on Board stickers in the window -- David sulked in the passenger seat, glowering out the windscreen at the suburban bollocks of it all. The house...

With the first example, there's not enough to prime you so that the house automatically has the same white clean-lined modernity for you that it has for me, but I'm certainly sending you in the direction of a more expensive property with the phrase "beachfront location," with smells and sounds of nature that, in the absence of the noxious and the noisy, should connote seclusion. To mention California, paint the sunlight on white gravel, is to further set the context and tone, and so set the action of the word "house."

With the second, there's not enough to ensure you imagine the pebble-dashed semi-detached on a UK housing estate, but the word "suburban" should have sent you that way. Note though that the import of "suburban" is itself dependent on the British detailing of the windscreen (rather than windshield,) the parking bay, the builder's van and hatchback, "his mum" (the only reason it's not a less sexist "women are bad drivers" stereotype "dad.") American detailing would conjure an entirely different "suburban" and so an entirely different "house" -- a detached house with its own driveway perhaps.

In both examples, the point is, the conjuring of the house begins before it's even mentioned. In my Rule #7 for New Writers, I say that action makes setting. I might almost say it does so in the sense that setting is manufactured in the reader's imagination by the action of the words upon the reader's imagination. That as soon as the words begin ("his mum" not "his mom") that action which conjures setting has begun. That's not actually what I mean by that rule though. I say all this only to highlight the principle, establish as underpinning this notion of narrative as cumulative conjuring.

But wait, I hear you say, don't the words "spooky" and "old" do much the same as "beachfront" and "suburban"? Well, yes, they do actually prime the reader's imagination such that "house" invokes a certain visual import, but they're generic and as such ineffective. That import is a cliché long past parody; the "house" that comes after "spooky old" is doomed by the operation of those adjectives to be no more than a trope, a trite cursory cartoon of an image, a silhouette in black cardboard of a haunted house from Scooby Doo or The Addams Family, decor for a children's Halloween party. The addition of the adjectives, the addition of the detail, actually makes that house less vivid than either of the other two which haven't been described in the slightest, not yet. Where the house is archetypal, an evermade symbol of the self (as Danielewski's House of Leaves so effectively explores,) the word in and of itself comes charged with a mystery and horror that "spooky" can only banalise.

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Setting and Stasis


But there's another problem I want to pick out in that example of King's, another operation that's being performed in the narrative before we reach the word "house" and that contributes in no small part to the failure of the conjuring. The problem starts even before the adjectives, in the first three words: "It was a..."

Stasis is the problem here, the fact that "It was a..." slams the brakes on narrative, bringing action to a grinding halt to give us instead the inherently inert (and therefore deadening, therefore depositional) communication (not conjuring, not with that vague placemark "it,") of state. A description of state is static. This should be so blindingly self-evident it doesn't need to be said. But for many writers it seems it does; the moment any object comes into play, a halt is called to play itself in order to describe that object. Characters are introduced with profiles cribbed straight from notes as workaday as a police all-points bulletin. Objects are detailed flatly feature by feature as in some mail-order catalogue. And setting, of course... well, it's merely the theatre of action, the fixed context for stuff happening, so how could it not be described in static terms?

This is where we do start to get into the idea that action in the narrative sense -- stuff actually happening in the narrative -- can be crucial in the construction of setting. In previous entries, I talked about how character makes action, how the Actuality-Exposition structure can be corrosive of this, how descriptive detail that isn't woven properly into action can undermine it as mere activity and explication. In the paid critiques I do, writers often need to be told that they could be revealing the qualities of this or that object in passing, as the viewpoint character interacts with it. That rather than itemising what X is wearing, they might have him shove his hands in the pockets of his Y, brush lint off his Z, and so on. When it comes to setting, even to look at is to interact with, and as long as the description is taking place via such interactions, the narrative is not pausing. Which is, yanno, less boring.

More: if the description is taking place via the character's interaction, if the setting is being conjured via the character's experience of setting, it is likely to be far more vivid because of that. The chain formed by Rules 5 to 7 -- Voice Makes Character Makes Action Makes Setting -- is actually an argument that the character's voice can be a mode of narration the writer slips into, the character almost an alter ego, as some autonomous personality construct hosted in the unconscious which then surfaces in the text far richer than if it were consciously fabricated; that such a character's synthetic agency generates valid action automatically and organically; that everything they interact with, setting included, will necessarily be more fully conjured because it is, in fact, secretly part of that construct, part of the character: their experience. With a first person or third person limited PoV, this is to say, we need to invert our understanding of which contains the other. In these, the setting is not the frame that the character acts within, but rather the character is the frame for the setting; the only setting that exists in the narrative is the little ever-shifting model of the world the character is carrying around inside their head.

As noted in those entries though, there is a caveat: of course there is the descriptive passage in its own right, where nothing is meant to be happening. Whether it's an omniscient narrator setting up the scene or simply a viewpoint character paused to fully take in a sight worthy of a little lyricism, taking it into their nous as an object requiring assimilation in terms of what it is, not what it is doing or what is being done to it, there are times when you simply can't carry out all the description as an inline function. Not all narratives are headlong action/adventure, and even in such narratives the odd still point may be exactly what is called for in the conjuring. So we might want, might need, a conjuring of a house as tableau.

And yet, the reason I'm getting my teeth into King's "It was a spooky old house," example in the first place is that the counter-example he provides in that article caught my eye as a passage that surely fits that mold, but which is actually a rather neat demonstration, I think, of how action still makes setting even in such cases. How even in a tableau, the stasis of "It was a..." is not the aim of the game in conjuring setting.

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The Action of the Inanimate

Here's King again then, giving an example from Salem's Lot of how one might actually conjure that sort of a "house."

The house itself looked toward town. It was huge and rambling and sagging, its windows haphazardly boarded shut, giving it that sinister look of all old houses that have been empty for a long time. The paint had been weathered away, giving the house a uniform gray look. Windstorms had ripped many of the shingles off, and a heavy snowfall had punched in the west corner of the main roof, giving it a thumped, hunched look. A tattered no trespassing sign was nailed to the right-hand newel post.

So far, so static, right? Wrong. You think he's just painting an inert picture of the house, encapsulating its appearance as in a good, solidly-detailed photograph? No, he's not. There's no character looking up at it, not even a crow taking off from that collapsing roof or landing on that newel post, but even in the absence of beings to interact with it, there's actually a fair bit of action sneakily woven through that setting.

Here's a rewrite diminishing that action in order to demonstrate:

The house itself was facing toward town. It was huge and labyrinthine and saggy, with boards higgledy-piggledy on its windows, so it had that sinister look of all old houses that have been empty for a long time. With its worn paint, the house had a uniform gray look. Many of the shingles were missing, and the west corner of the main roof was completely caved-in, so it had a thumped, hunched look. On the right-hand newel post, there was a tattered no trespassing sign.

The past continuous "was facing" instead of the simple past of "looked" turns action into ongoing action and thereby state. Switching the past continuous verbs "rambling" and "sagging" for the adjectives "labyrinthine" and "saggy" removes even the echo of action. The windows have no longer had an action perpetrated on them; the boards are just there. Where the original traces that action's impact, sets it as a follow-on action -- "giving it that sinister look" -- now the narrative explains that being in the state described therefore it has this other quality too. And so it goes, the action upon the paint, the action of the windstorms, the action of the snowfall all stripped from the passage.

Which should highlight just how much action there was actually going on there. But just to drive the point home, let me draw out the action of the inanimate by bolding the verbs that tell of action performed by or upon the house, actions that conjure its appearance as a product of events, that conjure the setting as a result of its own narrative in fact, the detailing of the image becoming a detailing of backstory.

The house itself looked toward town. It was huge and rambling and sagging, its windows haphazardly boarded shut, giving it that sinister look of all old houses that have been empty for a long time. The paint had been weathered away, giving the house a uniform gray look. Windstorms had ripped many of the shingles off, and a heavy snowfall had punched in the west corner of the main roof, giving it a thumped, hunched look. A tattered no trespassing sign was nailed to the right-hand newel post.

Is it proper to say that any of this is action though, in my stricter definition of action versus activity? If action is activity rendered significant, activity happening to or because of an agency, how can any of the stuff going on here qualify? Well, it might well be a cheat, but I made my stricter definition, so I can stretch the boundaries if I want: I say that's action because sneakily, surreptitiously, whether intentionally or not, King is kinda sorta casting the house as an agency.

Note the distinction in the first sentence between his version and mine. In his, the house "looked." Where it could be simply oriented in a certain direction, with its facade aligned thattaway -- "facing"  -- it's performing the action of a sentient agency. It's gazing, watching. So, this is figurative -- so what? All narrative is figurative. Remember what I've said above: narrative is not communication but conjuring; it's the invoking of import with the words. Here the words conjure windows as eyes, imbue the inanimate with awareness, with intent. The echo of "self" in "itself" might even come into play here. And I might add that such a strategy of projecting agency into setting is hardly unfamiliar in horror or fantasy, that both idioms indeed often concretise that conceit, literalise the metaphor.

Whatever. What matters is that my rewrite, you should agree, is patently worse, less vivid, and not just because it's pairing "labyrinthine" and "saggy" or using the risibly off-tone "higgledy-piggledy." If King just about manages to get away with the repetition of "giving... look," (it's... debatable,) my variant manages to lose one of the three inadvertently and still, I reckon, sound more trudgingly depositional.

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Action Makes Setting

Just to wrap things up by bringing the whole post full circle, while I'm butchering King's passage to demonstrate this subtler application of Rule #7, I thought I'd finish off with another rewrite. Something to show that, as King says, the image occurs in the reader's mind; that, as I say, it's about conjuring, not communication. That you can't simply spew out the pseudo-facts for the reader into a block of description, can't just expect them to lift the book and pour them over their head. That you can't just dump the requisite details on them, item by item, in any order. Here's King's passage with not just the action of the inanimate ripped out, but with any sense of words as action destroyed:

On the right-hand newel post of the house, there was a tattered no trespassing sign. The house itself was facing toward town. Many of the shingles of the main roof were missing, and the west corner was completely caved-in, so the house a had thumped, hunched look. With its worn paint, it had a uniform gray look. It was huge and labyrinthine and saggy, with boards on its windows, so it had it that sinister look of all old houses that have been empty for a long time.

This, you should be crying with every fibre of your writerly soul, is not the conjuring of a setting.

This is just shite.

The Actuality-Exposition Structure

As an addendum to the last post, I thought I'd give you another variation on that passage as a demo of a particular fault I often see in manuscripts I critique, a problem with the writing of action that I've come to think of as the Actuality-Exposition Structure. What does that mean? Well, here's the example redone:

Tal took a casual gander through his spyglass. Below him, over hoof prints scoured by the shifting sands of time, a desert rat was scampering. It was busy with the day-to-day shenanigans of his dismal life. The little critter was scurrying across a crust of earth parched and cracked by a pitiless noon sun, on the edge of a weather-beaten trail that wound through arid scrub. They were the sort of barren wastes all too bloody common in the Norgolian Empire. The rat stopped, sniffed the air and... quick-as-a-flash scarpered for safety, because dust swirled up in blinding clouds at the hooves of three mounts galloping, whirling, rearing. On those horses, three riders were engaged in a good old two-against-one.

Well now, thought Tal. High on his rocky ledge of cliff, he lowered the spyglass, unslung the longbow from his shoulder, reached for an arrow. But stopped because a hand gripped his wrist. Black Raq Skarrion -- who was the king of thieves, notorious in all Norgolia -- rose up from a crouch behind him, arched an eyebrow at Tal's impetuosity. Tal gave him his best mock-innocent shrug. He was a rogue, after all.

Now let's mark that up with what each clause is doing in narrative terms:

Tal took a casual gander through his spyglass [action]. Below him, over hoof prints scoured by the shifting sands of time, a desert rat was scampering [action/activity]. It was busy with the day-to-day shenanigans of his dismal life [exposition]. The little critter was scurrying across a crust of earth parched and cracked by a pitiless noon sun, on the edge of a weather-beaten trail that wound through arid scrub [activity/exposition]. They were the sort of barren wastes all too bloody common in the Norgolian Empire [exposition]. The rat stopped, sniffed the air and... quick-as-a-flash scarpered for safety [activity], because dust swirled up in blinding clouds at the hooves of three mounts galloping, whirling, rearing [exposition]. On those horses, three riders were engaged in a good old two-against-one [activity].

Well now, thought Tal [action]. High on his rocky ledge of cliff, he lowered the spyglass, unslung the longbow from his shoulder, reached for an arrow [action]. But stopped [action] because a hand gripped his wrist [exposition]. Black Raq Skarrion -- who was the king of thieves, notorious in all Norgolia [exposition] -- rose up from a crouch behind him, arched an eyebrow at Tal's impetuosity [action]. Tal gave him his best mock-innocent shrug [action]. He was a rogue, after all [exposition].

It all starts fine, with the first sentence perfectly functional as action. With the second sentence however, action starts to get shaky, as it becomes a little ambiguous as to whether "below him" refers to where Tal's looking or at his feet. We've got an actuality, but is it one that Tal's even knows about let alone cares about? If it's taking place at his feet, that rat's scampering is activity, not action. We're not sure, but it's pushed toward activity also by the past progressive tense, which makes it a description of state as much as a narration of a deed: the rat did not do X; it was in the state of doing X. Things are already not looking so good.

It's with the third sentence that things really go off the rails though. Here, the continuity of action is broken completely, the narrative put on hold as we have exposition in place of actuality, an explanation of what the rat was up to that it should be in such a state of scampering. Because of that exposition, the fourth sentence almost certainly reads as activity; even if we do think Tal is watching the rat, the sense of omniscient distance to the exposition has deflated any sense of import to that. And again past progressive tense makes this a description of the rat's state: it didn't act in that sentence either; again, it was in the state of carrying out a particular activity. (Which we already know, so this is going to read as redundancy too. Awesome.) Worse, we can even read this inconsequential activity as exposition too, an elucidation of where specifically it was doing its scurrying. And with sentence five we get another clear-cut exposition sentence. The free indirect thought here doesn't even work now; it reads more like editorialising than Tal's attitude, feels like it's missing a "Tal considered" or somesuch between "barren wastes" and "all too common" in order to specify that it's Tal's opinion.

The deadening effect is also, like much in narrative, cumulative; once we start to feel like every other statement is not stuff-happening but rather an explication of the what or why, the where and when or how, all it can take is a "because" to ruin a perfectly good bit of action, turn it into a tedious explanation of action. Fall into a pattern of repetition, and you have the deadly, dreary Actuality-Exposition Structure that will suck your reader's will to live: X did Y; Y was a Z; A did B; B was C. He opened the door. He needed his glasses. He entered the room. It was a big room. Blah blah fucking blah. (C.f. the repeated subject-fronting mentioned in How to Write a Paragraph. The two often go together in the type of writing I label deposition.)

It doesn't really matter how you dress it up, the Actuality-Exposition Structure smashes the sense of action by halting the flow every other sentence or clause. It doesn't even matter if it's not strictly speaking every other sentence, if you do actually have a good few action sentences in a row here and there -- as with the start of paragraph two in this example. You need to get the action rolling, build up speed, achieve lift-off, and sustain flight from there on. In that second paragraph, we're not even really in the air before the exposition clause brings us crashing down. Result? None of that passage ever truly achieves the status of effective action. Action is, one might well say, not written in the sentences at all but rather conjured by them. If the conjuring is not sustained, the action is no more there than the melody when a would-be guitarist plays a couple of chords, pauses to adjust their fingers, plays another couple of chords, pauses to adjust their fingers, and so on.

Description can be a sneaky bastard to watch out for here, it's worth noting. As I said in the previous post, description isn't bad in and of itself but it isn't action. And it can all too easily serve as the expository part of an ongoing Actuality-Exposition Structure, as the writer tells us e.g. of a character entering a scene, then what they look like or what the setting looks like, then how they pick up an object, then how that object feels, and so on, in a repeating pattern of dynamic and static lines that will make me want to gouge my eyes out with a spork at its infernal fucking halting effect.

Sure, I'll happily sit back as you pause the action for a rich descriptive passage, a visual tableaux of accomplished conjuring, but if it's a passage of action, you want to be asking yourself if your descriptive detailing can be done inline, within an action sentence -- e.g. describing that character as they enter, weaving the qualities of the object through the narrative of their handling it. Every example that's not inline, every sentence or two here or there which is and only is a flat description... you want to be interrogating that ruthlessly, asking yourself if this is a failure of agility, an inability to carry description in one hand, action in the other, an inability to juggle them so they soar over and under each other throughout.

If you're making two trips to get the character into the scene -- one to walk him in the door, then another to bring in the description of him -- you need to be asking yourself if that's good enough. It probably isn't; it's all too likely deflating your conjuring. That character description? Likely as not, it's going to read as expositional character profile, regurgitated straight from your notes and dead on the page. The actuality will be less vividly conjured too with the descriptive detailing off in its own little box. At worst, you'll have a passage in which half the sentences are crammed with stuff happening, half are filled to the gunnels with descriptive detail, and none of it is remotely functional as narrative because that Actuality-Exposition Structure turns it all into leaden deposition.

Remember: prose is about communication but narrative prose is about conjuring; if it doesn't conjure, it ain't narrative.

Rule 6 for New Writers

In looking for some resources to help thrash out my own ideas of the dynamics of scene structure, I came across this post on "Writing the Perfect Scene", based off Dwight Swain's Techniques of the Selling Writer. What it says about scene structure on the higher level I'll likely tackle at a later date, but it actually sent me off on a tangent with what it says about scene structure on a low level, Swain's idea of the Motivation-Reaction Unit -- which got me thinking instead about action.

It's interesting stuff, worth reading, for all that I'm going to take a different angle on it here, argue with it a little. Cause it might seem a little formulaic at first glance -- which is one part of why I'd argue with it -- but when you dig down into it I reckon it's less formula for structure than description of dynamics -- which is the other part of why I'd argue with it, try and push it a little further. Specifically I'm going to argue that this is really about character dynamics, that this is where Rule #6 of my Ten Rules for a New Writer is coming from: character makes action.


Actuality, Activity, Action

As I say in that summary post, "action is only action if it matters to a character; otherwise it’s just stuff happening. It’s the character’s attitude to peril that makes it peril. And the conflict of a narrative — the agon — depends on your characters having agency; without that you just have tin soldiers being smashed against each other." Where I add a caveat to Rule #5 -- that "voice makes character" is not the same as "character requires voice" -- I'm not so sure a comparable caveat applies here. I don't like to be absolutist, cause my own contrarian nature automatically kicks in, insisting that there must be exceptions, but you could look at it as simply a narrowed definition of action versus activity. That's to say, you can recount actualities in a narrative -- stuff happening -- but that is and only is activity until/unless it has significance to an agent within that activity.

It's really a definition of terms then. There are actualities, the stuff happening, but such stuff can be material or immaterial. Activity is stuff happening that is immaterial. Only when stuff is happening to or because of an agent, only then does it become material, only then does it become action, which is always already action upon an agent or action by an agent. Hell, even the involvement of an agent isn't enough in and of itself; if what's happening to your character or what they're doing isn't a step ahead in plot terms, it isn't action.

It should be noted, a step ahead can be as minute as, say, a buzzing fly elevating a character's irk as they wait in some tense scenario, but the point is that, inversely, a whole scene -- a journey to the shops and back to get a packet of teabags, to make a cup of tea, to sit down with it and watch some TV -- could be simply activity, not action. Rule #8 is essentially about the mistake writers make in filling pages and pages with activity in place of action.

It should also be noted, however, that in certain modes of fiction, if one reader sees complete irrelevance in such a tea-making scene this may just be their obliviousness to a significant step in a slow and subtle internal conflict. And in my experience, the more the fiction is driven by the spectacular and sensationalist, the more likely it is to suffer from that obliviousness extended to a complete disregard of materiality, of relevance. I loathe the limp banality of much quotidian realism (I'm looking at you, James Kelman's A Disaffection,) but by far the worst perpetrators I've seen have been novels aimed at the commercial strange fiction genres which mistake combat for conflict, the sensational for the significant, in which whole Hollywood set pieces of SFX spectacle have been meaningless activity. There is no such thing as a novel in which "nothing happens." But there are plenty where a whole lot happens and only a fucking fraction of it is really action.

So how, practically speaking, in the writing of it, do you make sure it is action?


Action as Experience

If action is always already upon and/or by an agent, that means that consciously or unconsciously, directly or indirectly, it's part of their experience. Experience is a gnarly term here though. The character who the stuff happening matters to, the agent perpetrating stuff because it matters to them, is automatically the focus character of that action as it's happening and therefore the focus character of the narrative at that point. But that doesn't automatically mean they're a/the third person limited (3PL) PoV character, such that the narrative here is wholly their direct experience. Even to say they're the viewpoint character could be wrong. With an omniscient narrator, the PoV is distinct, and the narrative can therefore go well beyond the stuff happening that registers on a focus character consciously (or, at very least, quasi-consciously.)

But I think it's worthwhile allowing for indirect experience here, to accommodate actualities that impact on the focus character even though they're not aware of them. Maybe hidden experience is a better label. Either way, the idea is just to cast experience as something potentially richer, with hidden depths, the A that causes B that causes C, with C being the directly experienced surface of the stuff happening to the focus character, but A and B being just as relevant, just as important (which is to say, having just as much import, only indirectly, via C.) So, the entire chain of actualities, A-B-C, is action-as-experience. A and B don't cease to be proper action just because they happen during an omniscient narrator's scene-setting, before the focus character enters to be confronted with C.

This takes us beyond a limitation of Swain's model, I'd say, which assumes that the focus character is also the viewpoint character. Arguably indeed -- albeit I'm going by the second-hand accounts -- Swain's model looks to be assuming that they're the current 3PL PoV character. Given that he's talking of techniques of the selling writer, that narrowing of focus is not surprising. In most cases, the immersed immediacy of a 3PL PoV is too powerful not be the obvious choice for a writer with what's commercial in mind. And the limitation is fair enough; with that title it's not like he's touting the model as all-encompassing. Still, it is a limitation, so I'm interested in opening up his approach, using it as a springboard to something more flexible.

So, OK, action-as-experience is our start point. Or a better way to put it is that it's our goal. How do we make it so?


Experience as Engagement

Let's start by focusing in, with Swain, on the simpler set-up where focus character and viewpoint character are one and the same, where viewpoint is wholly embedded in the focus character indeed, in a 3PL PoV. What Swain posits here is a simple structure he dubs the Motivation-Reaction Unit (MRU.) An MRU has an external and objective Motivation followed by a character's internal and subjective Reaction. So there's a stuff-happening in the environment, an action upon the agent, and there's a stuff-happening in the character, an action by the agent. The latter he breaks down into three potential stages, at least one of which must be present -- Feeling, Reflex and Rational Action/Speech.

The example given in the article linked is of a tiger jumping out of bushes (Motivation,) the character experiencing the adrenalin rush (Feeling,) instinctively pulling his rifle up (Reflex,) then taking aim and firing (Rational Action/Speech.) The Motivation, it's noted, can be complex; in the subsequent MRU, you could have the bullet wounding the tiger, blood spraying from the wound, the tiger roaring, recoiling, then springing into an attack in response, all of which would be the Motivation for the next Reaction. The point is that, in this structural formula, action is a series of MRUs; we should be alternating between Motivations and Reactions, not getting two or more in a row of one or the other. Motivations should always be external and objective. And the stages of Reactions should always be in that sequence, Feeling before Reflex before Rational Action/Speech.

I don't think it's hard to see how this is setting action as experience -- the Motivation as an external, objective experience and Reaction as an internal, subjective experience. Crucially though, in the detail, it's also casting that experience as engagement. Where Swain calls that external, objective stuff-happening a Motivation, he's highlighting the fact that it's the import that matters in stuff-happening. And the reason I use the word import here is the same -- because its Latin roots of "im-" and "port", i.e. "in" and "carry," cast meaning as impact, as the internal, subjective knock-on effect. Where Swain details the structure of the Reaction, he's abstracting the process of agency whereby that import slingshots through the agent's nous and comes flying back out, transformed into a deed, a stuff-happening, with its own knock-on effect on the agent's environment.

At heart, this structural formula is simply a statement of how environment and agent engage: [environment impacts agent impacts]... [environment impacts agent impacts]... [environment impacts agent impacts]... and so on.


The Process of Engagement

But some revision is in order here, I reckon.

Feeling is an ambiguous term, could be read as referring specifically to affect -- the feeling of horror at some dreadful sight -- or as referring generally to any sort of sensory experience -- the feeling of sunlight warm on the back of your neck. The latter is a more useful, more flexible way of looking at the impact of external activity on an agent, so here I want to recast feeling as sensation.

A reflex can be internal, an automatic impetus to respond by screaming, puking, lashing out, but internal location means the external expression can be restrained. That character whipping his gun up on sight of the tiger is not undergoing a reflex in the biological sense. When we're talking about a figurative knee-jerk response, actually this is distinct from a literal knee-jerk response in that we can suppress it. So in place of reflex, I'm going to suggest impulse.

To cast the action/speech as rational is to say that it's reasoned. To say that it's deliberate is to say that deliberation is taking place in the process of taking action -- strictly speaking as the lead-up to taking action. Actually, I'd argue that there's every possibility it hasn't. For one character, the aiming and firing might involve a whole lot more deliberation than it would for another character to whom it's nigh automatic, a skill integrated to the point where the evaluation entailed is liminal at best. So I want to separate out that stage of the process between impulse and execution, that stage of evaluation.

Since a speech act is by definition an act, there's also no need to complicate the subsequent stage with a distinction equivalent to that between mammal and dog. And a physical gesture can be as much an act of communication as a verbal expression, so I'm not convinced there's even much utility in the dichotomy. What follows evaluation can simply be considered action then. Or it could be if it wasn't rather more sensible to avoid applying the term action to an element of the action we're trying to describe. So, I'm going to take a similar approach to Swain's use of motivation to cast stuff-happening in the world as inherently meaningful, reflect the import there with purpose here. That meaning-loaded deed I'm going to suggest we consider a gambit.

Since sensation, impulse, evaluation and gambit are saturated with the implication of import and purpose indeed, I'm going to let the agent's part of this model carry the notion of meaning entirely. I like that Swain's naming of the Motivation highlights the importance of import, but this is a horrendous overload of a word in common use for any character's general objectives within a narrative, including the most vague pre-defined characteristics of attitude. In locating the driving impetus of meaning here, we're also casting engagement as reactive, and I want to turn that on its head. Agency is pro-active, not reactive. If we're alternating between Motivation and Reaction, we can just as easily parse the flow into Reaction-Motivation units, focus on the external, objective stuff-happening that results from the internal, subjective stuff-happening rather than that which instigates it, recasting motivation as effect.

In place of Swain's MRUs then, we end up with a SIEGE Unit: sensation; impulse; evaluation; gambit; effect. You see what I did there, right? The label is not just a neat acronym for a nice mnemonic effect that makes me feel all clever and shit; it's making a point that action is composed of sieges on an abstract level, that the nature of the engagement is between agent and environment, between that which is surrounded on all sides and that which surrounds it, between the besieged and the besieging forces.


An Example

Taking this as a model of how action works, how it's made by character, rather than a formulaic structure to write within, we should be able to apply it to an example that isn't, like the tiger attack, written to order. So let's take the product of the last Writing 101 entry and see how it fits.

Tal took a casual gander through his spyglass at the scene below. Over hoof prints scoured by the shifting sands of time, a desert rat scampered, busy with the day-to-day shenanigans of his dismal life. The little critter scurried across a crust of earth parched and cracked by a pitiless noon sun, on the edge of a weather-beaten trail that wound through arid scrub -- through the sort of barren wastes all too bloody common in the Norgolian Empire. The rat stopped, sniffed the air and... quick-as-a-flash scarpered for safety as dust swirled up in blinding clouds at the hooves of three mounts galloping, whirling, rearing. And on those horses... three riders engaged in a good old two-against-one.

Well now, thought Tal. High on his rocky ledge of cliff, he lowered the spyglass, unslung the longbow from his shoulder, reached for an arrow only to feel a hand grip his wrist. Black Raq Skarrion -- the king of thieves himself, notorious in all Norgolia -- rose up from a crouch behind him, arched an eyebrow at Tal's... well, call it impetuosity. Tal gave him his best mock-innocent shrug. What? He was a rogue, wasn't he?

What we see here is something a whole lot less formulaic than a pat series of MRUs. That the opening line is a gambit -- "Tal took a casual gander through his spyglass at the scene below" -- that it seems quite natural for it to be a gambit, rather makes the case for setting the agent first in the chain, I'd say. But how does what follows constitute an effect? "Over hoof prints scoured by the shifting sands of time, a desert rat scampered, busy with the day-to-day shenanigans of his dismal life." That's not a product of Tal's gander. There are however two events going on here, the scampering of the desert rat and the observation of that scampering. The immediate effect of that gambit is sensation. One could simply add an "He watched as" and punctuate the whole sequence a little differently to make it explicitly so:

He watched as: over hoof prints scoured by the shifting sands of time, a desert rat scampered, busy with the day-to-day shenanigans of his dismal life; the little critter scurried across a crust of earth parched and cracked by a pitiless noon sun, on the edge of a weather-beaten trail that wound through arid scrub -- through the sort of barren wastes all too bloody common in the Norgolian Empire; the rat stopped, sniffed the air and... quick-as-a-flash scarpered for safety as dust swirled up in blinding clouds at the hooves of three mounts galloping, whirling, rearing; and on those horses... three riders engaged in a good old two-against-one.

It's going a bit poncy, and weirdly so given the idiom, to itemise the observations like that, but it's not changing the narrative in any way other than to make the frame obvious, make it blatant that the external, objective stuff-happening is actually not just the actuality bounded by the physical horizon of the setting, but the actuality bounded by the rim of the spyglass -- the actuality bounded by the edge of Tal's nous indeed. What Swain would class as external, objective Motivation is here, I'd argue, in this 3PL PoV, always already experience, internalised, subjectivised. The stuff-happening is sensation.

We should note the interjected evaluation, the free indirect thought in "through the sort of barren wastes all too bloody common in the Norgolian Empire." If the effect that follows the gambit is sensation, again contrary to Swain, it seems perfectly legitimate, I'd say, for evaluation to be kicking off as that sensation carries on, for the sensation to be coloured with evaluation as it takes place. There's no impulse leading into it, no gambit produced by it, but the evaluation there isn't collapsing our action by breaching a rigid structural model of the process. What it's doing is establishing exactly why the scampering of a rat, as inconsequential as such an action might be, is nonetheless action rather than mere activity.

That evaluative "all too bloody common" is explicating an implicit judgement woven through everything that precedes it, in the words themselves: wastes; barren; arid; pitiless; cracked; parched; crust; scurried; little; dismal; shenanigans; scampered; time; sands; shifting; scoured. The scampering of the rat is action, it's saying, because it has import to Tal: it signifies the relationship of this type of agent to this environment; it's figurative of his own condition, the human condition. This little thing's hurried, daily, nonsensical scrabble to survive in a hostile world that will erase even the marks of its passing... that's Tal's existential struggle too. We might glean that from the narrative without the evaluation, but that import might be too liminal, so the evaluation is there just to make the point clear, properly articulated.

And with that done, without breaking its stride, the narrative continues with the sensation that will be the equivalent of the tiger jumping out of the bushes: "The rat stopped, sniffed the air and... quick-as-a-flash scarpered for safety as dust swirled up in blinding clouds at the hooves of three mounts galloping, whirling, rearing. And on those horses... three riders engaged in a good old two-against-one." No impulse -- not explicitly, at least -- but again there's an evaluation, in the "good old" attached to "two-against-one" -- a cynically, ironically, wryly appreciative evaluation. It's made explicit -- sort of -- in the direct thought that follows: "Well now, thought Tal." But the exact import, the affective sensation, is as absent as the impulse.

Actually, both are being withheld, hinted at but left opaque, so as to be resolved (or almost resolved?) in the gambit: "High on his rocky ledge of cliff, he lowered the spyglass, unslung the longbow from his shoulder, reached for an arrow..." so that it's here we realise (or reckon we do?) that what's good about those unfair odds is the opportunity and advantage they represent. The unspoken affective sensation is pleasure, anticipation. The unspoken impulse is to exploit, to take advantage.

So the evaluation leads to a gambit -- or the beginning of one, a gambit interrupted, begun, "only to feel a hand grip his wrist." Again we get effect framed within sensation. Again it's coloured with evaluation: "Black Raq Skarrion -- the king of thieves himself, notorious in all Norgolia -- rose up from a crouch behind him, arched an eyebrow at Tal's... well, call it impetuosity." The interjection on Black Raq's status is so passingly evaluative, it's really just an annotation, but the "call it impetuosity" is evaluation deliberately obscuring sensation, euphemising the object of Black Raq's eyebrow-arching -- which is, of course, the exact same thing opaqued earlier: Tal's keenness to seize the opportunity. There's another impulse being rendered here then, between the lines, an impulse to deny that very opportunism.

But Black Raq's gesture isn't just an effect-framed-in-sensation which has import the way the scampering rat does, the way the unfair odds do. It's an expression with deliberate import, a silent but clear message specifically addressing what this narrative in Tal's 3PL PoV is eliding, evading. The impulse can kick in even as that message is being received so as to obfuscate the sensation of it, but it requires a response, a gambit: "Tal gave him his best mock-innocent shrug. What? He was a rogue, wasn't he?"


Activity as Dressing

So, as nice as it would be if effective action could be boiled down to the repetition of a simple formulaic structure, Swain's MRU seems a somewhat crude reductionist take on the reality. Even recasting it to the SIEGE unit is inadequate, I think, if we're still imagining the process as a repeating pattern of discrete pieces. But if the point is to ask what makes action work, I do think that structural approach can be unpacked to a subtler dynamics. What I'm seeking to draw out of that example is a more complex interplay of sensation, impulse, evaluation, gambit and effect, but it can still be parsed in those terms. Effect may be framed within sensation where action is rigidly cast as experience by a 3PL PoV approach. Evaluation may be woven through that sensation. Impulse may be implicit. But this is only to say that a mechanistic model of building blocks is a bit crude when it comes to describing how we really conjure the engagement of agent and environment.

Thing is the key aim here isn't to provide a painting-by-numbers technique for creating basic functional action. It's to explicate the nitty gritty, as I see it, of how action is only going to be action in your narrative if it is approached as engagement, of how it is made action by the import that is only there if an agent is, if there's a focus character being impacted by their environment or having an impact upon it. Strip out that character, and you have activity and/or description and/or exposition. You have water-treading, tea-making scene-setting like this, which is essentially static even where there's stuff happening:

The weather-beaten trail wound ahead through the arid wastes. This was a barren land which dominated large portions of the Norgolian Empire. The tireless noon sun cast its parching rays upon the cracked crust of earth. Desert rats scampered among hoof prints scoured by the shifting sands of time. They were occupying themselves in the daily accomplishments of their dismal lives. Dust swirled in blinding clouds around three mounts. They reared under the burdens of their battling riders.

None of this is action. By sentence, in order, it's: description; exposition; description; activity; exposition; activity; activity. It has no import because there's no focus character in it, no agent for it to be imbued with import to. Activity is just part of the description of the setting. What we have here in place of action is activity as dressing. Not that this is a bad thing in and of itself. If you're Mervyn Peake, of course, you can make a purely descriptive passage a pleasure in and of itself, and one of the most effective uses of activity to that end is, as I recall, the use of a spider's activity to conjure scale by contrast as focus then moves to a long corridor down which Titus is riding into the scene. Just because something isn't action doesn't mean it has no place in your narrative. But this isn't Mervyn Peake, and this post isn't about descriptive passages.

What it's about is, I think, a fairly simple principle -- that action is dependent on character. It's a principle that is, of course, taking a rather narrow view of action, setting up a distinction some might consider contentious. But it's a useful distinction, I think. As much as I hate the sort of prescriptivism that sets up pseudo-objective standards for what constitutes the "proper" execution of this or that aspect of narrative, I do tend to a view that narrative is a natural process with its own dynamics, that it's worthwhile using action in a slightly harder-edged sense to refer specifically to the low-level substantiation of that dynamics, to say that without that dynamics you just don't have action at all.