Posts by Kathryn Craft
photo adapted / Horia Varlan
Backstory: when do you include it? Waiting until a question has been raised to which only an earlier scene can provide an answer is a sound way of maintaining psychological tension while dipping away from your ongoing story. In the fifth chapter of his bestselling and Pulitzer-winning novel, The Sympathizer, Viet Thanh Nguyen uses plenty of backstory that addresses no burning questions. He clearly built this chapter for emotional impact alone. Let’s look at it together and learn what we can from his mad skills.
Although the chapter continues fluidly, with only three line breaks, I will divide it eight ways, analyzing its contents with the admittedly nontechnical word “chunk” to show you how it stacks up.
Chunk 1: Suspicion
Perhaps James Bond could slumber peacefully on the bed of nails that was a spy’s life, but I could not.
The South Vietnamese General who has long confided in the Captain (our narrator, a communist sleeper agent) is about to open a liquor store in mid-1970s America, where he and the Captain are refugees after the fall of Saigon. The General summons the Captain to attend the opening, and a friend explains it’s because the General suspects an informer in the ranks. This understandably sets the Captain—and the reader, who is in the know about his dual loyalties—on edge.
Chunk 2: Lust
Although I would not have asked for this favor in September, by April our relationship had taken an unexpected turn.
To attend the opening, the Captain must ask off work from his boss, Ms. Mori. The Captain then takes a couple of sexually charged pages to show how he and Ms. Mori got to the point of the “sweaty, condomless intercourse” in which they are now regularly engaged.
Chunk 3: Hilarity
Ever since my fevered adolescence I had enjoyed myself with athletic diligence, using the same hand with which I crossed myself in mock prayer.
We do not need backstory to understand the Captain’s lust for Ms. Mori. Lust simply is. Yet what comes next, gaining the whiff of shame against his Catholic upbringing, is a detailed depiction of the thirteen-year-old Captain-to-be’s first sexual experience—with a dead squid. With phrases like “my maniacal manhood leaped to attention,” “my cephalopodic bride,” and “from then on no squid was safe from me,” the Captain evokes the universal, urgent hilarity in discovering one’s sexuality, and what lengths he took to cover his tracks knowing that his impoverished mother had carefully counted the squid for dinner.
Chunk 4: Horror
Some will undoubtedly find this episode obscene. Not I! Massacre is obscene. Torture is obscene. Three million dead is obscene. Masturbation, even with an admittedly nonconsensual squid? Not so much.
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photo adapted / Horia Varlan
Virginia Woolf left behind many pithy quotes about writing, but this is one of my favorites. I keep it taped to my computer to remind me of the writer’s greatest challenge: to engage and entertain the reader through words alone.
Each sentence must have, at its heart, a little spark of fire, and this, whatever the risk, the novelist must pluck with his own hands from the blaze. — Virginia Woolf
Imagine how a little spark of fire in every sentence could ignite your storytelling.
There are so many ways to pull that off, many of them on display in Leif Enger’s So Brave, Young, and Handsome. The story follows Monte Becket’s 1915 journey to regain purpose after the astounding success of his debut novel sucks the life from him. Monte latches onto Glendon Hale, a character with a shady past whose goal is clear: in a hand-built boat, he will set out from Minnesota toward Mexico seeking Blue, the wife he abandoned, so he can make amends. Monte pulls double duty as narrator and protagonist.
The tale is like the river the two men initially head down: while not always a whitewater thrill fest, its inexorable current continually beckons the reader. The astute writer reading this book will recognize that this downstream pull is due in no small part to the way Enger sparks his sentences.
Let’s look at some of the ways he does so and see if we could borrow some of them for our own work.
1. Raise a reader question by making the usual unusual:
The fourth day of rain I entered the President’s Tavern to find Glendon uneasily drinking coffee with José Barrera.
2. Grabbing the reader’s attention through thought-provoking word groupings and/or unusual events:
[José] was at least sixty yet still managed, through a sanguine outlook on pain, to startle crowds by riding at full gallop standing on his head in the saddle.
3. Offering the narrator’s humorous commentary on another character’s dialogue:
Yes, it’s true,” Glendon replied, gloomily realizing I was no shield against direct speech.
4. Making up words to suit an interesting word picture:
Like many veteran riders he walked hitchingly as though unused to his own feet.
5. Using an evocative verb in an otherwise banal dialogue beat:
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photo adapted / Horia Varlan
Many writers say that while they’re drafting, they see their story unspool in their minds like a movie. Unless that film is scratch-n-sniff, this suggests the setting will be rooted only in the visual: see the sky, see the pond, see the sheep. To counter this, and further engage the reader, we learn to write with all the senses: the cerulean sky, the decaying scent of the pond, the coarse coats of the sheep.
But you can do even more.
Today I want to look at how you can revise so the details you sprinkle in—that sky, that pond, and those sheep—can contribute to the emotional world of your story. Consider this excerpt, found on page two of Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior:
Whoever was in charge of weather had put a recall on blue and nailed up this mess of dirty white sky like a lousy drywall job. The pasture pond seemed to reflect more light off its surface than the sky itself had to offer. The sheep huddled close around its shine as if they too had given up on the sun and settled for second best.
These setting details not only ground the story with a sense of place, but reinforce the emotional state of her protagonist, who is coming to grips with the slow death of her marriage.
Kingsolver demonstrates mad setting skills throughout this novel. The Appalachian mountain on which Dellarobia and her family lives plays a central role as scientists arrive in this backwater town to study the way climate change has altered the migration of monarch butterflies, which are wintering over in Tennessee instead of continuing, as always, to Mexico.
Setting should be meaningful in every story, one could argue, but the way this story ties ecological to domestic change offers up so many passages worthy of study that it’s hard, looking back through, to choose one to analyze for this post. I’ll trust my original instinct and share these potent lines from p. 49 that I underlined my first time through.
Dellarobia couldn’t remember a sadder looking November.[1] The trees had lost their leaves early in the unrelenting rain.[2] After a brief fling with coloration they dropped their tresses in clumps like a chemo patient losing her hair.[3] A few maroon bouquets of blackberry leaves still hung on, but the blue asters had gone to white fluff and the world seemed drained.[4] The leafless pear trees in Hester’s yard had lately started trying to bloom again, bizarrely, little pimply outbursts of blossom breaking out on the faces of the trees.[5] Summer’s heat had never really arrived, nor the cold in its turn, and everything living now seemed to yearn for sun with the anguish of the unloved.[6] The world of sensible seasons had come undone.[7]
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photo adapted / Horia Varlan
Therese butting in for a second to officially welcome Kathryn Craft to Writer Unboxed as a regular contributor. Kathryn has mad skills, which she’s shared with us as a guest of WU, and I couldn’t be happier that she’ll bring them to us now through her new column, Mad Skills. Welcome, Kathryn!
Most experienced writers know the syndrome: once you are a student of craft, it gets harder and harder to lose yourself in the work you read. Since being an editor of any sort exacerbates the problem, people sometimes ask if I can switch off my inner prose analyst long enough to suspend belief and get swept away.
The answer is yes, I can, but it takes some mad authorial skills. Passages from works that exemplify these skills will become the grist for this new Writer Unboxed column in the hope that we can all benefit from studying them.
It’s January 1, though, and you may be hung over, so I’m going to keep this first installment simple.
Trust your nouns and verbs.
Wait—can this really count as a mad skill? It’s grammar school stuff. My first grade reader, Tip and Mitten by Paul McKee, detailed the hijinks of a little terrier and a black kitten in such language:
My ball is not in the box.
Here is a little can.
My ball may be in it.
I have to find my ball.
Set aside for a moment the repetition needed to help children translate written shapes into the sounds of language. A story is developing here—by god, people, a ball is missing and the search is on! Okay, a publisher of adult stories would want you to raise the stakes, but if you think no one cares about this little drama, you’re wrong—two copies of the first 1949 edition of Tip and Mitten are available on Amazon for $80.00 a piece. Many of us are nostalgic about the words that first made us fall in love with reading.
How can nostalgia help me now?
The more you study novel writing the more overwhelmingly complex it can seem. But when you strip a story to its essence, you’ll find nouns and verbs fueling it: Something (noun) happens to (verb) a character (noun) that threatens (verb) her world (noun), so she sets (verb) a goal. A whole lotta nouns and verbs set up complications, which her backstory motivation (noun) and desire (noun) inspire her to surmount (verb). This is the cause and effect language characteristic of active voice, and it will keep your story moving forward.
Let’s take a look at an example from Falling Under by Danielle Younge-Ullman. After a short opening from the protagonist’s perspective as a child, the second chapter opens the current story action in her adult point of view:
When all else fails I go to Erik. Tonight, all else has failed.
He answers the door, eyes bloodshot, unsurprised. And then the hitch in my breathing that comes, that always comes with Erik.
“Can’t sleep?” he says.
“No.”
He steps aside to let me in, shuts the door behind me, slides the bolts, and chains the locks.
This spare prose is not all that different from Tip and Mitten: “My ball is not in the box”/”When all else fails I go to Erik.” But oh, the layers of meaning hidden […]
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Our guest today is Kathryn Craft, the author of two novels from Sourcebooks: The Art of Falling and The Far End of Happy. Her work as a freelance developmental editor at Writing-Partner.com follows a nineteen-year career as a dance critic. Long a leader in the southeastern Pennsylvania writing scene, she hosts lakeside writing retreats for women in northern New York State, leads writing workshops, and is a member of the Tall Poppy Writers.
After publishing two novels in two years, it may look like novel ideas spring forth like mint in my garden. They don’t. For one thing, both of those novels were the result of many years of thought and development. Secondly, my homeowner’s association doesn’t even approve of rapidly spreading plants. As I fumbled through seed packets looking for a way to grow my next novel, I wrote this post to remind myself of what worked for me in the past.”
Connect with Kathryn on her blog, on Facebook, and on Twitter.
Increase Creativity with Random Elements
A car mechanic, a midwife, and a 13-year-old Girl Scout walk into a bar…
No, really. What are they doing there? Did they arrive together, and if so, why? If they met in the bar, why did they interact? What if they all spoke different languages? What if, while wrapped in their own concerns, each of them had been powerfully drawn to this place—what might each of them say or reveal?
[pullquote]Three unrelated elements created the alchemy that spawned both of my published novels.[/pullquote]
Such jokes always include a setting, a situation, and three disparate people whose reactions allow for just enough repetition to set up the final punch line. But tossing together similar random ingredients can also create fertile soil from which to grow a novel.
Three unrelated elements created the alchemy that spawned both of my published novels.
The Art of Falling was inspired by two situations and a trend:
The Far End of Happy took shape from a memory, a novel structure, and a complicated relationship:
Our guest today is Kathryn Craft, the author of two novels from Sourcebooks: The Art of Falling and The Far End of Happy. Her work as a freelance developmental editor at Writing-Partner.com follows a nineteen-year career as a dance critic. Long a leader in the southeastern Pennsylvania writing scene, she hosts lakeside writing retreats for women in northern New York State, leads writing workshops, and is a member of the Tall Poppy Writers.
For more than a decade I sorted through the chaos of my first husband’s suicide, seeking order through short narrative arcs. I assumed I’d one day write a memoir—that life would serve story—but instead grew to appreciate more fully the way story can serve life. The day I realized that the best way to show how the standoff had seared our lives would be to constrain the story to its twelve hours, I was well on my way toward novelizing. This post reflects some of my learning about the process.
Connect with Kathryn on her blog, on Facebook, and on Twitter.
Tips for Novelizing True Events
We writers draw inspiration from our own experience all the time. We can’t help it—the events of our lives, how they made us feel, and what we’ve learned from them have created the very perspective from which we write.
[pullquote]Story is a series of carefully constructed, thematic, and escalating pressures brought to bear on a character in pursuit of a goal. Life isn’t. [/pullquote]That real-life influence can be oblique, as when I wrote The Art of Falling. I didn’t need to suffer Penelope Sparrow’s crippling sense of body image to understand the way our bodies can betray us; my body had miscarried two deeply desired pregnancies.
In my novel releasing this week, The Far End of Happy, the real life inspiration is more straightforward. From my work as a freelance editor, I knew that predictable pitfalls abound when novelizing true events. Here’s how to steer clear of them, should you decide to give it a go.
Our guest today is Kathryn Craft. Kathryn is the author of two novels from Sourcebooks: The Art of Falling (book trailer) and The Far End of Happy, due May 2015. Her work as a developmental editor at Writing-Partner.com, specializing in storytelling structure and writing craft, follows a nineteen-year career as a dance critic. Long a leader in the southeastern Pennsylvania writing scene, she now serves as book club liaison for the Women’s Fiction Writers Association. She hosts lakeside writing retreats for women in northern New York State, leads workshops, and speaks often about writing. Kathryn says, “I come to writing from a multi-arts perspective and appreciate the way that specifics from one creative endeavor can spark new awarenesses within another.”
Kathryn lives with her husband in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. Connect with her on her website, on Twitter, and on Facebook.
5 Writing Lessons from a Vocal Coach
During the years I was first learning fiction craft, my son was studying to be a classical vocalist. Since I came to my writing through dance I was already attuned to a multi-arts perspective, so as I sat in on years of his lessons—no doubt looking to his teachers like I was hard at work on a novel—I scribbled notes that allowed me to see my writing anew. Here I share some of the comments overheard from his vocal coaches and my favorite writing takeaways.
At the time I first heard this I was trying to wow the reader by cramming too many great ideas into the opening of my practice novel. This quote suggested I feed out my story with greater patience, keeping some in reserve. Your reader isn’t looking to understand your whole story in its opening pages. She only wants to gain orientation to the story world and its main character while discovering a story question on which to hang her curiosity. Many backstory scenes, reversals, and emotional turning points are better saved until your reader knows your protagonist better.
[pullquote] I come to writing from a multi-arts perspective and appreciate the way that specifics from one creative endeavor can spark new awarenesses within another.”[/pullquote]
Added fun: The musicality in this quote is a wonderful example of how to use sentence structure to support meaning. The quick breaths built into the first sentence, the deeper breath needed to get through the second, and the push and pull of the third all help underscore the coach’s point.
This continues a useful metaphor about raising story questions. A question is like a vacuum that pulls the reader in. So rather than stuffing your story with events that may or may not […]
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