The Dreamer

Craft & Skills Narrative Voice Reading 1 Comment

A guest post by Brenda Sawatzky.

When I think of my most memorable dreams, I remember those that had me ruminating for the entire day. Possibly even for days after. They’re the kind of dreams you can’t wait to share with someone and have them respond, open-mouthed, “Wow. That’s fantastical, creepy, outlandish…”

I love waking on those mornings with a story fabricated from my subconscious. At least the stories that don’t have a sharp macabre edge to them, causing me to spend my day vanquishing the monster that lurks even after I’ve subjected my skin to a series of firm pinches.

I love discussing the varied nature of dreams, too. Do we dream in Technicolor or black and white? Are they multisensory? Where do these preposterous expressions of our imagination originate, and do they have some underlying meaning?

One thing I know for certain: if my brain is capable of concocting sensational stories in my sleep, then there is a way to tap into that vein while conscious, too. Some authors seem to be extraordinarily good at that. The truth is, I’m not particularly partial to fantasy novels or sci-fi. That’s not the kind of sensational I’m drawn to. Rather, it’s the prose that creates a dream-like landscape; a vivid, multisensory experience that takes normal to a different level. Like a being on a psychedelic LSD trip at a 3D movie with surround sound.

One such author I’ve recently discovered is Thomas Trofimuk in his novel Waiting for Columbus. It is a tale of a man, discovered lost on the streets of Spain and committed to a mental institution, who believes he is Christopher Columbus. He regales Nurse Consuela with fantastic stories of ships, conquests, and fifteenth-century adventures. The mystery of his true identity and the wonder of his perceived one holds Consuela captive as she’s swept away in his storytelling.

Trofimuk is a dreamscape artist. From the very first page, he attempts to lift the lackluster veil through which we witness the everyday. For a moment you believe that the moon speaks and you wonder if you just haven’t been listening. He writes, “There is only the sound of distant thunder, a barking dog and the sound of the moon behind the clouds reflected in a puddle.”

Inanimate objects come to life. “There’s some sort of Celtic symbol tattooed on her thigh. One of the lines of this tattooed design has come loose and wrapped itself around her entire thigh.”

His world is wrapped in “yellow-cracked clouds,” “a moon inescapably trapped in the branches of a tree,” and ships whose movements are “but a tickle on the skin, a brush of a finger along the lower back of the ocean.”

Another such poetic author, for me, is Ann-Marie MacDonald. In her beautiful and poignant novel Fall on Your Knees, Ann takes her reader willingly into the early nineteenth century’s exotic Empire Theatre:

“…the silver screen flickered, and down in the orchestra pit so did the piano. Trills and triplets seemed a natural counterpart to the frenetic dance of light and shadow above. A man in evening clothes has cornered a young woman in slinky nightgown halfway up a clock tower. No narrative preamble required, the shadows lurk, the tower lists, the music creeps the winding stair, the villain spies a grace-note of silken hem and he’s on the chase in six-eight time up to where our heroine clings to a snatch of girlish melody, teetering on the precipice of high E, overlooking the street eight octaves below. Villain struggles with virgin in a macabre waltz, Straus turned Faust, until, just when it seems she’ll plummet, dash her brains on the bass clef and die entangled in the web of the lower stave, a vision in tenor crescendo on to save the day in resolving chords.”

Trofimuk and MacDonald have a keen grasp on multisensory prose. Like a dream, they make the fantastical normal and lift the reader to a place of wonder and gratitude for introducing us to a world that is so much more interesting than the one in which we walk daily.

I strive to learn from these masters. To weave into my craft the kind of surrealism that would otherwise belong to dreams. To become a dreamer while I’m yet awake.

 

Brenda PicGuest Writer Bio:
Brenda Sawatzky is a relatively new, unpublished writer hailing from the wide-open prairie spaces of southeast Manitoba. She and her husband of thirty-one years are self-employed and parents to five kids (two ushered in by marriage). She is presently working toward fiction and non-fiction writing for magazines and manages a personal blog.

Not What I Signed Up For

The Writing Life 1 Comment

(Trigger warning for discussion of sexual abuse and rape in the following article.)

A friend of mine is a big fan of romance novels.  These aren’t my usual choice of reading material, but I accepted her offer to try a few.  I wanted to understand my friend’s interest, to figure out why these books had so much appeal, and, I’ll admit, I was curious.

The first three books entertained me easily enough.  I could see the selling points of these modern-day Cinderella stories.  Usually, a hardworking but not particularly well-off young woman would catch the eye of a rich single bachelor.  He’d sweep her off her feet into a whirlwind of luxury and excitement (I laugh at the lavish descriptions of houses and hotel rooms, gowns, and meals; the upper-class lifestyle is as much a selling point as the man himself) and there would be hot sex.  Then a misunderstanding would split the couple apart, until the end when true love conquered all.

Then came the fourth book.

In this book, a woman agreed to a prearranged marriage.  Bizarre wills, marrying for desperately needed money and familial obligations are common plot devices to force contact between heros and heroines who initially don’t like each other beyond their sexual attraction to one another, so I thought nothing of it.  Until the wedding night scene.

Usually, this scene is one of seduction, in which the woman indulges her secret sexual attraction.  In this case, the wedding night read to me as a sexual assault.  I couldn’t believe what I was reading.  The heroine didn’t want the encounter, didn’t enjoy the encounter, and was deeply upset afterwards.  Shocked, I flipped to the end of the book.  She was going to get the creep thrown in jail and marry the butler, right?

Nope.  At the end of the book, the heroine was head over heels in love with her rapist.

This wasn’t an old book, either, reflecting the social values of 1900…or even 1999.  It had been written the same year I’d read it.

Now, a caveat.  I don’t have a problem with dark fiction or dark themes in stories.  I know several real-life abuse survivors who’ve told me they like to read and/or write fiction with themes of assault because fiction gives them a safe arena in which to explore, understand, and come to terms with their emotions.  Fiction is a place where no real people are harmed in the creation of imaginary stories, and people can enjoy certain acts occurring in fiction–including war, murder, natural disasters, etc–that they would never want to have happen in real life.

What bothered me was not that there was rape in a story, but that there was rape between the lead characters of a story that had been presented to me, the reader, as a sweeping romance.  Following the happily-ever-after convention of these novels, I was expected to believe that in the second half of the book, the heroine would forgive and fall in love with her rapist, who would love her in return.

I don’t usually stop reading books halfway through, but this one, I did.   I did not want the writer to convince me to believe in this “romance”.  My idea of a happy ending, at that point, was to see the “hero” locked up behind bars.  A rape scene, and a woman falling in love with her rapist, were not what I had signed up for when I picked up what I thought would be a light and fluffy love story with a side of sex.

On the other side, I’ve read a murder mystery story that also broadsided me, in a good way.  I’m not going to identify the book, for fear of spoilers, but it is the first of a trilogy.

The premise is that the hero, a young man whose nature puts him at a high risk for becoming a serial killer, finds that murders are being committed in his neighborhood.  He’s both fascinated and repelled that someone is doing the very thing he’s struggling so hard not to do.  He both appreciates the killer’s work, and understands that his family and schoolmates are at risk, and that is a Bad Thing.

Halfway through the novel, it’s revealed that the killer is a supernatural being.

Up until that point, the reader had expected to enjoy a book in the vein of “Dexter”…a serial killer murder mystery set in the real world.  At the moment of revelation, though, the reader realizes s/he is reading an urban fantasy or magic realism novel instead–a story set in a world where a certain form of supernatural being truly exists.

As a speculative fiction reader and writer, I was all on board for supernatural beings!  The realistic start to the book made the supernatural villain seem more real and more frightening.  The shock I felt paralleled the main character’s surprise when he discovered that creatures he’d thought mythical were actually real.  The supernatural angle also enhanced the story.  Now there was a logical reason for this disturbed teenager to investigate murders…because he’d seen the monster, while the police weren’t even considering the possibility of a supernatural killer because they did not believe in such things.

I’ve seen mixed reviews of the book.  Some readers felt disappointed by the supernatural angle.  These people had signed up for a realistic serial-killer story and received monsters instead, and they wanted nothing to do with a supernatural story.  A lot of other readers, though, were really impressed at the risk the author took, and the way it paid off, giving them the first genuine shock they’d had in years of reading mysteries.

Whether readers loved or hated the book seemed to depend to a large deal on how open-minded those readers were, and how willingly they’d accept the existence of a supernatural being in an otherwise realistic story.

In rare cases, the risk run by confounding expectations can pay off.  In most cases, though, it’s a bad idea to mislead your readers about what kind of story you are telling.  Even the abovementioned serial killer murder mystery still had a serial killer, a mystery, an investigation, and a crime spree that needed to be ended–all the classic elements of a murder mystery.  Readers still got what they signed up for, just with a little supernatural flavour thrown in.

Readers trust authors and publishers to satisfy their desire for a certain type of story.  Whether that be fantasy, action, romance, or mystery, readers pick up books because they’re hoping for a certain type of experience.  Giving readers a story that satisfies that need will encourage them to come back in the future for more.

 

 

 

 

Lee Child vs The Boring

Author's Perspective Clancy Metzger POV 3 Comments

I’m not a big fan of first person fiction despite ascertains that it gives me the most internal and personal perspective. Mostly, I don’t find that to be true. I don’t care for first person point of view because I find myself so conscious of it that I am pulled out of and distanced from the story instead.  Lee Child writes his Jack Reacher novels in both first and third person, yet even when he writes in first, I hardly notice. For me that is gold. If I can get to page three and forget the story is being told in first person, I’ll read the book. If not, I’ll give up on it. It’s very few authors who pass this test.

When I read a Jack Reacher novel I am immediately in it. I am inside Reacher’s head and understanding why he does everything he does, no matter the point of view. I am along for the ride and embracing his ethics which are not particularly the norm. That’s huge. That’s the real deal for me. If Lee Child can put me so far into Reacher’s mentality as well as the moment and empathy of the story that I am with Reacher for every action – every violent action, then that’s great writing to my mind.

I love the precision of his staccato-like dialogue. I love the imagery he shows me. I love the detail of weapons, trajectories, behaviors, thoughts, etc… that he explains to me. I love the way Reacher puts himself into the heads of others to reason out what they are doing and why. I would be hard pressed to find something I didn’t find great in any of his books. As a writer, I find so much I want to emulate in my own writing. I believe good/great writing comes from avid reading of good/great books. Lee Child and the Reacher novels are that for me.

On the other hand, there are books I find so bad. Boring. Frustrating. Bad.

I shan’t name names because this example is by a ‘legendary’ writer. It was a science fiction and truly I could not tell you what that book was about. My best friend played a guilt card to make me read it because it was “one of the best” for her. So, I read it. Every boring, pointless page (mostly – I admit I started skimming towards the end because I really couldn’t take it any more).

Why was it so bad for me? There were several factors and they apply to all writing I find bad, but generally they aren’t all in one book so predominantly. First, if there was a plot, I’m sure I don’t know what it was. That’s pretty sad when the meandering prose loses me to the point that I have no clue what the author’s point might have been. As a writer, I wondered throughout why did he write this? What story is he trying to tell? Why am I reading this? Why am I bored out of my gourd? Because there was nothing to latch on to. No inciting incident that changed things and got me curious. No beginning, middle, end. No purpose that I could find. It was sci-fi. Genre writing. I really thought it should have a plot. Plots are a good thing.

Second, there weren’t any characters I could root for or invest in. I don’t remember liking any of them or disliking them either. I was completely ambivalent about them, their lives, their problems. Nothing. Nada. Had no connection whatsoever. If I don’t have at least one character I can despise or love or care about or finding interesting, then how am I supposed to relate to the story (presupposing there is a story)? How am I supposed to connect? I don’t necessarily need to love the main character, but I do need to have some reaction besides indifference. And if not the main character, then give me a secondary character to feel something about. Anything. Antipathy for every character is bad, bad, bad.

Third – and this was specifically my friend’s reason for loving the book – the author just went on and on and on about the weather, a sunrise, the sea, the landscape, the main character’s memories of the weather, a sunrise, the sea, the landscape… blah, blah, blah.  It was chapter long meanders of description that served no point that I could see except for the author to wax poetic (and not in a good way). Every other chapter seemed to be one of these strange unrelated rambles that had little or nothing to do with anything.  I have no problem with loads of description and detail if, and this is a big if, it serves a purpose other than the author’s ego and romance with his own words. Lee Child gives a lot of description yet every word feels necessary and keeps me attentive.

I wish all writing could take me where Lee Child’s writing takes me and I desperately hope that I can achieve a similar quality and depth in my writing. I use the other book as a reminder of what not to do.

Writing By Example – Or Not

Ace Jordyn Craft & Skills No Comments

Welcome to November!

With November being National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), many are writing furiously, getting those awesome stories on paper as quickly as possible. That’s great!

But how do we know how to tell a story? How did we learn to tell a story? By example of course! We know from reading them, what we like, what inspires us and what leaves us yearning for more. So we write!

What is that we have gleaned from the literature that inspires us or from that which we don’t like? That’s the big question because that forms the basis of how we tell our stories. We can take writing classes on composition, critical analysis and grammar but it’s what we subconsciously learn that prevails.

So for this month, we’ll be sharing what we think are some of the best and worst pieces we’ve read. This is done in the spirit of learning, making us better writers, as we examine what works and doesn’t work for each of us. In a previous post, Stillness – How Shall I Write Thee?, I asked how one could write about stillness and reflection in a way that was engaging because our characters may need to take time to reflect on a situation. I explored how Wordsworth captured contemplation in his poetry because the English Romantic writers so successfully captured ordinary moments and imbued their writing with deep meaning. It is in this spirit that we write this month’s posts.

Whether we read stories and literature form either current or by-gone eras, we are subconsciously considering what we like, what we think works and what kind of story we’d like to tell – or not.

So, sit back and partake of what we’ve gleaned from the stories we’ve read. And this month, look for a special post about Superstars Writing Seminar’s scholarship.

May your writing (and reading) be productive!