 Writing to deadlines is such a strange thing, I think because a deadline is one of those intersections between art and business. Art (often) requires time to step back, to reflect, to discover, to make one thing only to realize you were making an entirely different thing the whole time and only now do you see how to really make the thing you wanted to make from the beginning. Business (often) requires things to happen a lot faster. When it comes to revision, for example, I prefer to read something over, to revise it, to let it sit, to think about it, to forget the old versions of it from previous drafts, to see it again as what it is, with all the new flaws that have appeared in its most recent edits, with brand new things to change and polish. But, for better or for worse (and I think there’s a bit of both here), my creative process is not the boss of me. There are publishing deadlines to be met, editorial and sales and printing schedules to adhere to, other people who are depending on me to get this book done so we can put it out there into the world.
Which makes the meeting of a deadline a particularly strange thing. I recently turned in a revision of my Secret Project, so I’m still feeling the momentum of deadline work (that compulsion to amass word counts or knock down chapters or hammer out character arcs), but the project is no longer in front of me, and that compulsion to keep working has nowhere to go. There’s technically more I could do to improve this manuscript: a couple details to include here and there, a bit of nuance to add to a character, continuity and consistency to iron out. I could absolutely spend more time cutting and editing and adjusting… Or I could not. There are more revisions to come on this project, and they, too, are going to take place in a limited timeframe, which means that there are only a limited number of times I can read and reread the manuscript in a set amount of days or weeks before I am so deep in the bramble of my own words (old and new, revised and re-revised) that I lose sight of the story entirely, the original drafts muddled with the latest, the things I cut or added all mixed up in one incoherent jumble. Given an unlimited amount of time, I could take a month between revisions to get out of the tangle of the project, to see the shape of it from a distance, to understand what I’m really looking at. But when deadlines are involved, I need to find ways to shortcut this process. Hence this week’s topic, not-doing. Or I guess, more accurately, not-thinking. Or not-looking, maybe? To give myself the kind of time/space/distance I need to come back to my project again with fresh eyes and a rejuvenated mind, I do my best not to work on it, not to till it or weed it or even look directly at it. I don’t let myself dwell on the story. I don’t allow myself to think about how to fix its imperfections. I try not to actively think about the book at all, like there’s this distance I want to create, or maybe a space I want to protect. Maybe it’s that I want my creativity to lie fallow for a while, so that when I come back to it, it’ll flourish again. Is it odd to think of the not-doing as a sort of work? I’m not actively thinking about my project, but it feels like I’m thinking around it, if that makes sense. I’m reading for research. I’m reading things that inspire me to be a better writer. I’m going on research trips and gardening and taking the dogs for hikes and considering the sensation of walking over different kinds of earth. I’m jotting down revision notes as they come to me (if they come to me), but not trying to figure out how to execute them or what ripples they’ll cause later. And all of these things, while not exactly the frenetic, driving, forward momentum of being on deadline, are things, I hope, that will not only make this project better when I return to it again but will expedite my naturally leisurely creative process so when art and business come together at my next deadline, maybe the intersection will be a little less fraught. Next week: CREATIVE HOBBIES. Until a few years ago, I would accidentally kill every plant I brought into my home. Then I discovered orchids, whose regular watering needs really suited me, and I started to collect a few different varieties, then expanded into a spearmint plant, some bonsai (well, they’re hopefully going to be bonsai eventually), air plants, and twenty-four basil seedlings that I’m starting this year. Somehow, I’ve gone from a plant-killer to (dare I say it?) a gardener. And I actually think that has to do with publishing, in a weird, roundabout sort of way. Hobby it up with me next Sunday at tracichee.com and/or post your own responses with the hashtag #workandprocess. Love and kindness. <3 Work and Process is a year-long journey of exploring and reflecting on the artistic process, craft, and working in a creative field. Each Sunday, I’ll post some thoughts, wonderings, explanations, and explorations on writing and creativity, and by the end of it, I hope to have 52 musings, examinations, meanderings, discoveries, bits of joy or inquisitiveness or knowledge to share. In each post, I’ll also include a topic for the following week, so if you happen to be inspired to question/wonder at/consider your own work and process, you’re welcome to join me. We’ll be using the #workandprocess hashtag across all social media platforms, and I hope we find each other to learn and connect and transform on our creative wanderings.  I listen to a daily five-minute podcast called The Slow Down, in which U.S. Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith talks about and reads a poem. (That’s it. That’s the podcast.) It’s a lovely little drink of poetry each day, and if you’re a podcast and/or a poetry person, I highly recommend checking it out. I don’t love all of the poems, and to be honest, because I don’t retain and process information auditorily as well as I do visually, usually couldn’t tell you what poem Smith read that day or what it was about, but there was this poem featured all the way back in January that I absolutely cannot stop thinking about. That poem is “Swatting Flies” by Austin Smith. Tracy K. Smith introduces this poem by saying, it “begins with the memory of swatting flies, but it covers ground quickly, darkening and shifting scales, so that by the time it’s over, it’s hard for me to go on thinking of any violence as small.” I love this introduction because it stuck with me, that mention of “shifting scales,” because it’s the exact same feeling I had when I first listened to the poem. That dizzying sense of size and perspective changing all of a sudden, kind of how I imagine Alice would have felt, eating or drinking in Wonderland. Over the past couple months, I’ve thought about the poem over and over, how (I feel, at least) it’s so successful, so efficient in delivering that gut-punch at the end, and I’d love to kind of feel my way into it today, with you. First, I think “Swatting Flies” is kind of brilliant in its building of images. Most writers do it, to some extent or another; we use words to create imagery, that is, descriptive sensory or figurative language, sometimes by including details that invoke the five senses (touch, sound, smell, sight, taste) or tools like metaphor, simile, alliteration, personification, hyperbole, or most often a combination of both. Again and again, Smith creates these images of fly-swatting: “light and nimble” (words that, in their suppleness, the quickness with which they flow off the tongue, demonstrate another way to use diction, as we talked about in the past three weeks, because the words themselves kind of feel swishy, if that makes sense, like the action of the fly-swatter itself), or “a square / Of blue plastic mesh, stippled / To let the air pass through” (a more concrete description of the fly-swatter). I especially like this chain of images: You even swatted your own bare calf, There’s the sensory description of the “red welt”, the simile (a comparison between two different things using “like” or “as”) likening the slow disappearance of the welt to the slow disappearance of a condensation ring left by a cold drink. These images are, to use a narrative term, low-stakes. The mistake of swatting himself doesn’t have any real or lasting repercussions. There’s no harm done. Look, the mark is disappearing already, as if it never happened. But this no-consequence scenario is almost immediately followed by the personification (the giving of human traits to non-human things) of the flies. These flies “who wrung their hands among / The breadcrumbs in the kitchen, / Begging you for mercy”, these flies “Making love on the windowsills / In the upstairs bedrooms / Where they had believed / Themselves safe.” These flies who are not human but who are engaged in relatable (some might say universal) human pursuits--prayer, sex. And so, I think, this combination of imagery, simile, and personification prepares us for the ending. The image and the turn. The last we see of the boy swatting flies is the fly-swatter itself, “clogged with the dead,” and the flies, feeling the movement of the air, fleeing. But with a metaphor (or more specifically, a simile, but they're both comparisons), the image shifts, spirals from this tiny summer scene of the boy and the flies and the fly-swatter, growing and growing huge, almost out of proportion, until they are not just flies but “Like people who flee a house / Moments before the drone strike.” Damn. I mean, what a wallop. What a blow. What a way to end a poem. And although I love this turn, the way the single word “like” separates the flies from the people, the swatter from the drone strike, I think part of what makes it so powerful is the way Smith has stacked these low-stakes images one on top of another throughout the poem, the boy with the swatter, the cold drink, the leisurely summer reading, until we get to the personified flies, the ones who are just trying to go about their lives the way we would, don’t you see?, and then it turns. Then the twist. Then the reveal. Then this meaning, these huge implications, these things to consider about ourselves and our violence. Next week: NOT-DOING. I once had a theory that there are four types of people in this world: people who define themselves by what they have, people who define themselves by what and whom they love, people who define themselves by who they are, and people who define themselves by what they do. At this point, it’s probably no surprise to you that I am a do-er. I love doing things. Accomplishing stuff. But I’m in a bit of a weird spot with my Secret Project, and it’s gotten me thinking about the value of not-doing, of sitting back, not even to reflect, just to… even avoid? And I’d like to explore that a bit more with you. Let’s not-do this thing next Sunday at tracichee.com and/or post your own responses with the hashtag #workandprocess. Make it so. <3 Work and Process is a year-long journey of exploring and reflecting on the artistic process, craft, and working in a creative field. Each Sunday, I’ll post some thoughts, wonderings, explanations, and explorations on writing and creativity, and by the end of it, I hope to have 52 musings, examinations, meanderings, discoveries, bits of joy or inquisitiveness or knowledge to share. In each post, I’ll also include a topic for the following week, so if you happen to be inspired to question/wonder at/consider your own work and process, you’re welcome to join me. We’ll be using the #workandprocess hashtag across all social media platforms, and I hope we find each other to learn and connect and transform on our creative wanderings.  It’s funny, I knew as soon as I started writing my first post on diction that I eventually wanted to talk about how diction affects theme. But over the past few weeks, as I’ve discussed and pondered and discussed diction and character and diction, atmosphere, and tension, in the back of my mind I’ve always been struggling with how to approach diction and theme. How do I talk about this? What books or poems or themes could I discuss? Why can’t I remember for the life of me one single theme that’s evoked with word choice? I guess it’s because theme (what I used to describe to my students as “what a piece of art has to say about a topic”) is so huge, usually spanning an entire novel instead of just one easily isolated excerpt, and also, personally, unless I’m really specifically trying to pull out a theme for consideration or discussion, it also often goes so unsaid? Weirder still, I even had a hard time picking out a theme from my own work (and I knew I must have had many) that I could talk about with any clarity. Ultimately, though, I landed on a theme from The Reader Trilogy, something I think those books had to say about history and personal agency and hope. Although I don’t think this theme is explicated solely through diction, I remember using word choice pretty deliberately and pretty early on in order to build its foundations. Some spoilers ahead! To start, I think it’s important to talk about the magic system in The Reader Trilogy. It’s based on something called “the Illuminated world,” a shifting golden overlay that a magic user can perceive simultaneously with the physical world. Here, it’s described in The Reader: “the trajectory of the sword was outlined in rippling eddies of light. She could see them more clearly this time: each current was made up of thousands of tiny specks, all drifting and swirling” (p. 73) There are two layers to a magic user’s perception: the “real” physical world and this golden world of Illumination, which is composed of millions upon millions of ever-shifting motes. Note, though, the diction used to describe this world: “rippling,” “eddies,” “current,” “swirling.” These word choices evoke fluidity, liquidity. I’m describing magic here, something entirely made up, so it makes sense to provide readers with an analogy for how the magic looks, feels, and operates. But, and you’ll notice I do this sometimes, I could have used another metaphor entirely: a woven tapestry, a murmuration of swallows, dust in sunlight. Overwhelmingly, however, the Illuminated world is like water. And not just any water, but big water: “Sefia grasped for answers, her vision flooding into the darkest corners of his past, invading his history. She saw too many things to name; sights, sounds, smells washed over her again and again like cruel gold waves” (The Reader p. 182) Again and again, these water-words come up: “flooding,” “washed,” “waves.” The Illuminated world is overwhelming, even violent, as any large body of water can be. By this point, Sefia and the reader have discovered that the Illuminated world is something like time. In it, magic users can see the past, alter the present, and catch glimpses of the future. Like time, the Illuminated world is infinite, always moving, but time, in the world of The Reader Trilogy, does not move in one direction, forward and backward, but is always surrounding us, like an ocean: “Every second, it’s changing, the way the sea changes with rain or glacier runoff or the passage of a minnow” (The Storyteller p. 168-169). By the time we get to The Storyteller, Sefia and the reader have learned that time is not static, but a shifting thing. Time may be huge, and its movements nearly unfathomable, like a “sea”, and people may be small as drops of water, or “minnows,” but it’s still these seemingly infinitely small creatures, with their infinitely small actions, that have the power to make great changes in the currents of history. So even though Sefia is facing down this enormous, epic battle for the fate of the world, even though it seems like there isn’t much chance that she can make a difference, there is still this hope, which Galadriel so beautifully articulates in The Fellowship of the Ring (film edition): “Even the smallest person can change the course of the future.” This theme is built up over the course of three books, and diction is only one part of it, but I think it’s there, in the word choice, from the beginning, in the water imagery, the metaphor of the ocean. History is vast, and we are small, but we are the ones that create history. We are the ones that can still make a difference. Next week: IMAGERY & METAPHOR. I’ve been listening to The Slow Down podcast with U.S. Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith, where each weekday, Smith talks about and reads a poem. It’s lovely and only five minutes per episode, and if you haven’t yet, I highly recommend taking a listen. Even though we’re halfway through April, though, and the show is on its 100th poem, I can’t stop thinking about this poem I heard all the way back in January, how striking it was, how much of a gut punch, how it turned so fast on imagery and metaphor, and I just want to share it and talk about it because it’s masterfully done. Slow down with me next Sunday at tracichee.com and/or post your own responses with the hashtag #workandprocess. Welcome! Everything is fine. <3 Work and Process is a year-long journey of exploring and reflecting on the artistic process, craft, and working in a creative field. Each Sunday, I’ll post some thoughts, wonderings, explanations, and explorations on writing and creativity, and by the end of it, I hope to have 52 musings, examinations, meanderings, discoveries, bits of joy or inquisitiveness or knowledge to share. In each post, I’ll also include a topic for the following week, so if you happen to be inspired to question/wonder at/consider your own work and process, you’re welcome to join me. We’ll be using the #workandprocess hashtag across all social media platforms, and I hope we find each other to learn and connect and transform on our creative wanderings.  Welcome back, fellow creators, to our second week of posts about diction a.k.a. word choice. If you’re just arriving, please feel free to check out last Sunday’s discussion of diction and character, although you can also just forge ahead into today’s topic as well: diction, atmosphere, and tension. To start, I’d love to talk about two diction-related concepts: denotation and connotation. Generally, I think of denotation as the actual dictionary definition of a word, precise, and important for conveying your primary meaning. For example, the word “dog” denotes a four-legged mammal of the genus Canis, domesticated by humans over tens of thousands of years. Denotation tends to be important and effective in its to-the-point-ness, but also, for our storytelling purposes, a little uninteresting. It’s connotation, I think, where things get fun. Connotation is the collection of the numerous other meanings, feelings, and associations that a word can evoke. I picture these meanings like a cloud, all hovering around the actual definition, all conjured every time you use the word. The word “dog,” therefore, can connote loyalty, or obedience, or unpleasantness. A character can be dogged in her pursuits if she’s particularly persistent. A character can dog a person’s heels if they’re following them closely. In storytelling, if you choose your words carefully, you can use their connotations to create both atmosphere and tension in your narrative in an efficient way. Diction to Build Atmosphere When I was teaching English, I had my students define atmosphere as “mood,” and I’d like to expand on that a bit here. I think of atmosphere as the feeling a reader gets from a passage (eerie, exuberant, foreboding, menacing, relaxed, etc.) the same way you’d get a feeling from walking into any real life setting (a crumbling house, a sun-dappled glen, a field beneath the fireworks on Fourth of July). While you can absolutely spend paragraphs or even pages creating the atmosphere of a particular setting (with denotation), it’s often more expedient and effective to build it in a single sentence. As an example, let’s take this sentence from Roshani Chokshi’s YA fantasy, The Star-Touched Queen: “The archives were cut like honeycombs and golden light clung to them, dousing every tome, painting, treatise and poem the soft gold of ghee freshly skimmed from boiling butter” (p. 11). On the one hand, this is a description of hexagonal-shaped, sunlit rooms filled with books and paintings. That’s denotation. On the other, each of these words evokes a certain mood in addition to illustrating the archives and their contents. “Clung,” “dousing,” and “skimmed” are all words that connote a certain closeness, a certain feeling of contact with the skin. “Honey” has a similar tactile stickiness, and “butter” gives you that oily, coating sort of feeling. This is the connotation. The archives, then, are a warm and opulent (“golden,” “soft gold”) place, but close, too, almost oppressive, almost too much, almost cloying in their richness. With a few well-chosen words, Chokshi builds an atmosphere you can almost feel. Diction to Build Tension As with character and atmosphere, diction can also create tension. In a chapter of the Secret Project I was working on yesterday, a character uses the word “carmine” to describe another character’s traits: “his carmine eyes always darting back and forth between us.” This word choice gave me pause--it’s a curious word, I think, not a word I’d use myself, generally, and not a word I hear every day, and so it kind of calls attention to itself. Often, I want the language in my books to serve the story, to be invisible, in a way, noticeable only in how effective the story is, so “carmine” was, for me at least, an odd choice. But it’s also the one that fit. In definition, “carmine” is a fancy way of saying “red.” As per last week’s post on fancy vs. plain language, it follows that this character, who’s pretty well-read, would use a highfalutin word here, although there are a number of other words he could have used instead: garnet (evoking jewels, sharpness, sparkle), mahogany (evoking a more brownish hue, wood, richness), cinnamon (evoking spice, warmth), etc. “Carmine,” however, evokes something nastier. Carmine is a pigment made from grinding insects into powder, so it’s related to 1) death, 2) the act of crushing and pulverizing, and 3) creepy crawlies. (It’s also the name of a Batman villain, Carmine Falcone.) These associations all help to build tension between my point-of-view character and this man with the reddish-brown eyes. Although we’re just getting introduced to this guy, from this word alone, we can intuit that there’s something off about him, something unsettling and perhaps even dangerous. That’s why I love connotation. I think if it’s used well, then your diction can do double-duty: tell your reader’s what’s happening in the scene and build background elements like atmosphere and tension that are more felt than said, but are nonetheless integral to the telling of a good story. Next week: DICTION & THEME. Okay, one more week of word choice to go, and it’s about how word choice can build theme! Make a scene next Sunday at tracichee.com and/or post your own responses with the hashtag #workandprocess. Huzzah! <3 Work and Process is a year-long journey of exploring and reflecting on the artistic process, craft, and working in a creative field. Each Sunday, I’ll post some thoughts, wonderings, explanations, and explorations on writing and creativity, and by the end of it, I hope to have 52 musings, examinations, meanderings, discoveries, bits of joy or inquisitiveness or knowledge to share. In each post, I’ll also include a topic for the following week, so if you happen to be inspired to question/wonder at/consider your own work and process, you’re welcome to join me. We’ll be using the #workandprocess hashtag across all social media platforms, and I hope we find each other to learn and connect and transform on our creative wanderings. |
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