(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Write On! On the Level [1] ['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.'] Date: 2024-10-03 Good evening, writers, and welcome. One thing I have been thinking a lot about is how a good story can work on multiple levels. I don’t just mean that there are many layers to the onion or different aspects of the story that can be good, but that its goodness, its quality, is fractal in nature. And a story can be good, bad, or mediocre to differing degrees on these levels. A story can miss, or at least fail to shine, on some levels, and still be good if it shines on others. I suppose a truly great piece of writing would be one that excels on every level. I’m not sure what all these levels are. I do know some of them, and I want to explore them tonight. The lowest level is the mechanics of writing, word choice, subject-verb agreement, speeelinge… But not just about getting it right—getting it right for your story. It’s as much about turning off the grammar checker when it tries to tell you “ain’t” and “ayuh” are incorrect, when that’s actually how your main character talks. It’s about knowing when to say “whatsis” instead of “thingummy.” It’s about running that assembly line that puts words into sentences and sentences into paragraphs, and making that puppy hum. The next level is making those sentences sing. When F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since. “Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone,” he told me, “just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.” He didn’t say any more, but we’ve always been unusually communicative in a reserved way, and I understood that he meant a great deal more than that. I don’t want to quote at too great a length since we’re still only on level two, but I just have to include what he says is the consequence of the concomitant habit of reserving all judgement, ...and so it came about in college that I was unjustly accused of being a politician, because I was privy to the secret griefs of wild, unknown men. Did you just experience a frisson, a sudden chill that ran down the length of your spine? I sure did. Anyone can write, “John walked down the street to the store,” but “privy to the secret griefs of wild, unknown men” goes way beyond merely stringing words together, one after another. But if you keep stringing them together, eventually, you’ll make a scene. And a scene is something SenSho wrote about on here more than once. A scene is separate from what comes before and after, there’s a reason for the scene to break where it does, you’ll want to have some Scene Question hanging over things and driving the reader, maybe not to find out whodunnit because that doesn’t come until the end, but just whether the MC can find a parking space or the words to break it to their parent that it’s time to put them in assisted living. Level three. If that’s level three then level four must be connecting scenes into an entire character arc where we learn about a character, what they want, what they need, what ails them, and where they become real to us, not just words on a page but someone we feel like we know, someone we care about. And, ultimately, the arc of character bends towards some resolution of their flaws and goals. And that brings us to level five. Do I just have five? I guess so, but I’m pretty sure you can slice this thing in other ways. Still, here I am, so let’s say level five is the Whole Story, the argument of the book, when all the scenes and character arcs come together into a complete piece of literature or at least a complete genre pot-boiler. Now, here’s something I’ve noticed. Not all good writers do every part of this well. Some of them write wonderful plots but the characters are a little wooden and unreal. I don’t quite see them as fully realized individuals. Others write the most beautiful prose, truly artistic, but maybe the story isn’t so great. I love the prose in The Great Gatsby but Gatz is a tragic, pathetic figure and when you boil the story down to its bare essentials, it’s all a bit grotty. Tawdry. I don’t know, maybe my 9th grade English teacher would be mad at me, or maybe he’d say that was the point? (Eff Scott Fitzgerald, amirite?) There’s a very popular YA series by a certain author and I will say this about it. It’s a rollicking good yarn. But while the shape of the story is good, I found the actual prose to be quite workmanlike. There aren’t phrases that ring out. It’s somewhat plodding, but if you keep plodding in the same direction, eventually you get somewhere. I suppose a truly great piece of literature would be one that did everything well; where the mechanics of the writing were solid, the phraseology artistic, the scenes gripping with just the right amount of get-in-late and get-out-early and scene questions that grab you and force you to turn the page, three-dee characters with compelling arcs, and a great overall shape of the story. But who the hell can deliver all that? The thing that troubles me is, I feel like when I’m writing, if I’m focusing on the arcs then the sentences get dry, flat, and declarative. (If I try to make the prose sing then I get lost in the trees and I can’t see the forest anymore. Luckily I think I absorbed enough grammar and spelling between school and voracious reading that I can at least handle the mechanics without devoting attention to them and away from the rest.) Do you ever feel that way? What’s your take on this and, do you have any tips for getting things working at multiple levels? Is it more important to focus on some parts while writing, and leave others to worry about and fix during editing, and if so, which ones are which? Tonight’s Challenge: Write a scene of two hundred words or so and really try to make the prose sing, or make us care about a character. Perhaps both? Try to engage at least three senses. Or: write a scene involving the words grief, secret, and tawdry. READERS & BOOK LOVERS SERIES SCHEDULE [END] --- [1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2024/10/3/2274474/-Write-On-On-the-Level?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=latest_community&pm_medium=web Published and (C) by Daily Kos Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/