 I did it again. I said I’d talk about significant concrete detail this week, and now I’m talking about something else. That’s because as soon as I started trying to talk about significant concrete detail, I realized that I first needed to address a different topic: the difference between scene and summary. You may have heard the advice, “Show. Don’t tell.” I suspect it’s intended to mean: use description and action to write an immersive scene, rather than explaining to the reader what’s going on and what’s at stake, as if you were a lecturer rather than a storyteller. But ultimately, this is one of my least favorite pieces of writing advice, because it ends up being so reductive. “Show. Don’t tell.” means you get long paragraphs of description about, what, a room? A person’s clothes? An action sequence? These things can be compelling, of course, but strict adherents of “Show. Don’t tell.” tend to linger on these inconsequential details, making them seem drawn out and even boring, rather than getting a move on with the story. That said, what I find more useful than “Show. Don’t tell.” is a discussion of scene and summary. You might be able to recognize these as soon as you see them. Scene is where it feels like you’re actually there with the characters. The writer includes descriptions, dialogue, actions, and even if the passage written in the past verb tense, it still kind of feels like it’s all unfolding or happening as you read it. (You could say it’s “showing,” but like I said, I’m trying to get away from that paradigm.) Summary, on the other hand, is where big pieces are quickly (relatively, anyway) skimmed over. These passages can feel like a montage, or a jump in time, or a recap of something that’s already happened somewhere else. It feels like a recounting of an event, rather than the event actually happening in real time. Do you remember those scenes in Ant-Man where Michael Peña’s character, Luis, tells Ant-Man a quick-ish anecdote? That’s summary. (You could also say this is “telling,” but you know how I feel about that.) I’d say that in general, the bulk of a story is often made up of scenes (although pieces like "Brokeback Mountain" by Annie Proulx use summary in breathtaking ways, covering years of information in a few sentences or a paragraph). Scenes, in general, keep the reader in the story, if that makes sense, while summary is used to give readers information they need, but that they don’t need to see happen before their very eyes. Someone’s great uncle keeled over at dinner one night, so the main character has inherited a vast sum and now needs to figure out how she’s going to live the rest of her life? Great opportunity for summary. We don’t need to see the uncle’s death if the story isn’t about the uncle or his death but about what the main character is going to do with the money now. The characters go to bed? Great. We don’t need to see their extensive night time rituals. We can just be told, “Occupied by their separate thoughts, the family retired to their separate bedrooms for a restless night of sleep,” and move on to the next scene. What I love about scene and summary (as opposed to “Show. Don’t tell.”) is that they both have their places, and their places are almost never totally separate. Writers flip back and forth between scene and summary all the time. For example, let’s look at this passage from A Shadow Bright and Burning, the first book in a rollicking good read of a YA fantasy series by Jessica Cluess: The sorcerer guided Sarah to a chair while I remained by the wall, invisible as always. Schoolteachers don’t stand out naturally, and I was far too thin and dark-haired to make much of an impact. Granted, I didn’t want to stand out to Agrippa today, not if he’d come about the fires. I exhaled, praying that my heartbeat would slow. Please say that he had come for some other reason. The scenery, the terrible April weather, anything. I love how Cluess jumps effortlessly back and forth between scene and summary here, weaving them seamlessly to keep us in the present storyline while also providing background information necessary to our understanding of the story and characters. SCENE: It’s as if we’re watching these actions unfold: the sorcerer and Sarah in movement; the main character, Henrietta, standing still, unnoticed: The sorcerer guided Sarah to a chair while I remained by the wall, invisible as always SUMMARY: Then the narration switches to exposition, revealing, I think, how Henrietta conceives of herself at the beginning of the novel, before the start of her adventure: Schoolteachers don’t stand out naturally, and I was far too thin and dark-haired to make much of an impact. SCENE: And just as quickly, Cluess pops us back into the room with Henrietta, the sorcerer, and Sarah. The narration remains in her head, but it’s concerned with what’s happening right now, emphasized by Henrietta’s focus on her breath and heartbeat: Granted, I didn’t want to stand out to Agrippa today, not if he’d come about the fires. I exhaled, praying that my heartbeat would slow. Please say that he had come for some other reason. The scenery, the terrible April weather, anything. If a fervent believer of “Show. Don’t tell.” were writing this story, they might belabor Henrietta’s inconspicuousness, going into excruciating detail about exactly how and why she fades into the background of this scene. But summary, coupled with the very voice-driven statement “invisible as always” (which in itself might be considered a form of “telling,” I suppose, but the “as always” has such wonderful hints of both resentment and resignation to it, “showing” that while Henrietta may consider herself “invisible,” she isn’t necessarily content with it, thus creating tension between who she considers herself now, who she wants to become, and how she navigates the path between them), achieves the same effect in a more efficient way. Both scene and summary (or “showing” and “telling”) are such great tools for a storyteller, and they serve different purposes (although, of course, I advocate trying to use them for totally different purposes, too, just to see if you can). I don’t see any point in ignoring one of the tools in your toolbox when you could, instead, try everything. Get comfortable with ways to incorporate both scene and summary into your work, and then, if you’re so inclined, get bold. These are your tools, after all. How else can you use them to tell a good story? Next week: SIGNIFICANT CONCRETE DETAIL. No, really! Next Sunday at tracichee.com and/or post your own responses with the hashtag #workandprocess. It’s already been written, I promise! <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 know I was going to talk about significant concrete detail this week (and I will, next time!), but last week’s discussion of experience and creative instinct got me thinking about the ways we conceive of artistry and how, I think, that’s linked to the ways we conceive of artists.
First, I think it might be helpful to define some terms. Personally, I believe that creative work comes from two places: talent and skill. Talent, I think, is something you’re born with. Some of us get more of it than others. Some of us get it in certain areas. That’s fine, I suppose, but I don’t think that it’s actually that important. For example, I was talking with a couple of poets the other day, and the subject of meter (a fancy and more structured way of talking about rhythm, I think) came up. You may remember meter from your English courses, practicing scansion, isolating trochees, spondees, and iambs, counting stressed and unstressed syllables: da DA da DA da DA… I remember my instructors warning the class that our study of meter was coming up. It’s going to be hard, they said. It’s going to be tedious, they said. It’ll be on the midterm, though, so you’d better learn it now. But I... loved... it. Without thinking too hard about it, I could “hear” (or maybe the correct word is “feel”) the different beats in a word or combination of words. I thought it was marvelous--so powerful and, at the same time, almost undetectable. I’d always assumed that my training in music (piano, flute, guitar, choir) made scansion easier for me, but one of the poets I was talking to said she had a musical background, too, and still didn’t feel like scansion came easily to her. I’ve never really considered myself talented--in the past, I’ve said that I only feel naturally good at one thing when it comes to writing, and that’s coming up with a cool idea (although lately I’ve even begun questioning that)--but for a second I did have that thought: Whoa, maybe I do have talent. Quickly followed by, So what? Maybe talent can make you more sensitive to certain aspects of art or make certain things (like scansion) a little easier, at least at the outset. But I think the impact of talent is generally negligible when compared to skill. I believe skill is something you work at. Something you practice. Something you get better at only with time, effort, and (often) guidance. It doesn’t matter, for example, if I can hear the rhythm in a line of poetry if I don’t have the skills to use that in my own work. I mentioned back in Week 4 that one of my two universal pieces of writing advice is to always keep learning, and I’m absolutely talking about skill. (Related, Kameron Hurley, author of The Mirror Empire and The Geek-Feminist Revolution, has a fantastic post on persistence and how learning and increasing your skills and not giving up is more important than talent in a career in the arts.) Skill, I think, is what really matters, not only because it means you’re not born with a finite amount of artistry in you and once you hit your limit, too bad, but also because it means there’s hope. Sometimes I look at my peers, whom I respect and whose work I admire, and think they make the work look so easy. It comes so naturally to them. They produce beautiful, thought-provoking art as effortlessly as I would turn on a faucet, and I sit here trying to wring out just one artful word from this dumb, dried-up brain of mine. It’s discouraging, feeling like you’ll never measure up to your contemporaries because they’re just so much more talented than you are. But here’s what I try to remind myself: Art that looks effortless is often the product of years of work. Last week, for example, when I was talking about creative instinct, I didn’t mean instincts we were born with--I meant instincts we develop through experience, practice, and work. If I know, without consciously thinking about it, that a scene isn’t working, it’s not because I have a superhuman gift with scene writing. It’s because I’ve written so many scenes now, I know how it should feel when they’re good, and if it doesn’t feel like that, then it’s time to approach it from a different angle. I recently watched Mary Shelley, a film about the woman who wrote Frankenstein, what some call the first science fiction novel, and there’s a scene where all of the little inspirations that have been peppered throughout the movie (she likes to tell horror stories, she saw a demonstration of galvanism on the corpse of a frog) suddenly come together in this frenetic act of artistry. She takes up the pen, and in one quick montage, she scribbles out this seminal work of 19th century fiction! What genius! I think we like to believe that some artists are just born. “True genius” is a more romantic narrative than “I worked hard at this for decades so I wouldn’t suck at it.” And I’ll willingly admit that Mary Shelley may not be the best example, because she was a teenager when she wrote Frankenstein, and because it reportedly did have its origins in a single weekend of telling scary stories. But I feel like I’ve seen this portrayal of the artist before: the prodigy, the virtuoso, the rare person born with so much talent, it was practically inevitable that they make a masterpiece. At least, I’ve seen this portrayal often enough for it be harmful to the rest of us, because if we believe that some things just come more easily to some people, that some people just get to be artistic geniuses, well, then, why should the rest of us even bother trying? No, thank you. Give me the art that’s difficult. Give me the creators that struggle. Give me the understanding that making something really great takes time and effort and probably failure, big and small. Give me a community where we’re all in this together, and maybe someone’s got an ear for rhythm or someone’s got an instinct for plot, but we’re all struggling in our own ways, and we’re all trying to get better. If I haven’t made it clear enough, I want to dispel the illusion that creative work is something divinely inspired, something inherent, something you have to be a one-in-a-million talent to do. Rather, please allow me to draw back the curtain, to rewrite the story: creative work is work. It takes skill more than it takes talent. It takes years. It takes study. It takes practice. It takes patience, determination, and persistence. If you are having a hard time with your project, if you are building up your skill set, if you are developing your instincts, you are not alone. We are all with you. Next week: SIGNIFICANT CONCRETE DETAIL. For real this time, next Sunday at tracichee.com and/or post your own responses with the hashtag #workandprocess. Time to get back on track. <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.  If you read last week’s post on creative hobbies, you know I’ve started gardening more as a creative outlet. You also know I used to be an accidental plant-murderer. There are a number of ways to kill plants (not enough water, not enough light, too much light, too much food, not enough food, pests, disease, pruning, etc.), but my primary offense has always been overwatering. I’d see my plants struggling and think, Oh no! They need more water! when in fact, almost always, the plants were actually telling me, Less water, please! before drowning in my frantic and ignorant zeal.
The thing is, I had such limited knowledge and experience that I had only one way to address my plants’ needs: more water. But the more plants I’ve kept alive (and also killed, to be honest), the more I’ve learned to understand what they like: more water, less water, more light, less light, some fertilizer (but not too much), repotting, thinning, pinching, different soil… Now, when I see them struggling, I test the top inch of soil for moisture or feel the heaviness of the pot before watering. When encouraging my herbs to grow a certain way, I cut them at the right spot. I now have a lot of ways to approach gardening, a lot of tools in my toolkit, so to speak, and the experience and understanding to help me use those tools effectively. Which brings me around to my point for this week, because learning how to garden has gotten me thinking about the relationships between experience, instinct, and skill. It wasn’t too long ago, with regards to writing, I used to say that my main method of problem solving was “throw more words at it.” Stuck on a plot point? Throw more words at it. Can’t figure out this character’s motivation? Throw more words at it. Don’t know where to end a scene? Throw more words at it. As with my plants, I had a limited understanding of the problems my stories were having and a limited number of ways to address them, which often resulted in long (and/or many) drafts with lots of unusable words and ultimately a lot of stories that went nowhere or simply weren’t very good. But as I’ve written more stories, done this for more years, I’ve gained more experience with and understanding of my own work and process, which has ultimately translated into what I think we’d call instinct. Now, I can be working on a project, run into a problem, and understand within a page or two what’s wrong. Maybe I’m starting the scene too early. Maybe I don’t understand the main character’s motivations well enough. Maybe I don’t have a handle on the narrative voice. Maybe there needs to be more action/more funny/more angst. Maybe I need to slow down and stop pressuring myself so much. These instincts mean that I don’t often have to write huge chunks of manuscript before I realize they’re not working, saving me in both time and frustration, and my years of classes and craft books and writing exercises mean that I can usually find a good tool (a map, a brainstorm, a list of 10 things, etc.) to address the particular problem I’m having at any given moment. What’s cool is that experience and instinct work not just for the day-to-day practice of writing but for understanding my creative process as well. In the past year or so, I’ve noticed that it’s getting easier to listen to what my process is telling me. Now is the time to absorb rather than produce. Now is the time to plan. Now is the time to listen to music and take walks and jot down scattered notes that don’t connect right now but are in fact formative building blocks for the story I’ll later create. Now is the time to write the first words. Now is the time to read and revise. This understanding means that I don’t dive into a project before it’s ready to be written, or I let a book percolate for long enough that by the time I start on it, it’s dying to be written, or I collect enough research material that I’m not stymied by my own lack of world-building a quarter of the way into the novel. And these instincts, I think, will only get better the more experience I get. I found out the other day that if you cut a sprig of mint at a certain point and leave it in water (because perhaps you’re not ready to use it), it will send out roots, and you’ll be able to plant it again! It’s so exciting, because I feel like there are so many more things to learn and experience, both in gardening and in writing, and I’m so looking forward to discovering them. Next week: SIGNIFICANT CONCRETE DETAIL. I’m a descriptive writer by nature--I think because I as a writer have to understand exactly what a scene looks or smells or sounds like if I’m going to write about it. Otherwise I feel like I’m writing into nothing, trying to fill a void with a story rather than figure out the story that’s already going on in a particular environment. One of the first things I ever learned about craft, and indeed had practically drilled into my head while I was at UC Santa Cruz, was the importance of significant, concrete detail. Let’s rehash my college glory days next Sunday at tracichee.com and/or post your own responses with the hashtag #workandprocess. Oh frabjous day! <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.  Spring is here. The little crabapple tree I’m trying to turn into a bonsai is leafing out. After I finally figured out that I needed to fertilize it, the spearmint that’s been struggling on my windowsill for two years is finally thriving. I’m starting forty-eight basil plants from seed in hopes that enough will survive so I can achieve my lifelong (okay, decades-long) dream of being able to periodically harvest my own basil for fresh pesto. All of a sudden, after a lifetime track record of killing every plant that’s ever had the misfortune of being under my care, I’ve somehow become a gardener.
This transformation didn’t happen overnight, of course. It started maybe six or seven years ago when I was given my first moth orchid, which, contrary to popular belief, has a care routine so regular and predictable that even I could keep it alive. (If you’re curious, see the end of the post for details!) Slowly, I acquired more orchids, then branched out into air plants, bonsai (or what will become bonsai in like 10-20 years, I hope), and indoor herbs. I like the creativity of gardening, particularly with the bonsai, which I’m trying to figure out how to train as well as grow, and I get to be a problem-solver, learning if it’s sun or water or fertilizer the plants need more or less of, trying to determine why the leaves are wilting like that, what the proper soil mixture is, where the plants are happiest during what times of the year. But I’ve had a lot of creative hobbies over the years (drawing, music, book-making, egg-painting), and while I still turn to them occasionally, it’s gardening that’s taken up more and more of my creative free time. And I think that it has to do with my career. Everyone’s experiences are different, of course, but for me, a strange thing happened when I started writing novels professionally. Writing, which had always been a fun creative outlet, a hobby, something I pursued not because it was my job but because I loved it, suddenly became the thing I did because I had to. Without a doubt, I still loved it (and still do), but it had also become an obligation, a responsibility, something I did not because I was inspired, necessarily, but because I wanted to get paid. Which was fine. I welcomed it. I had always wanted to do this work, and I was so grateful and fulfilled because I was actually getting to do it. What I didn’t expect and have been struggling with for a few years, though, was that becoming a professional author not only changed my relationship to my writing, but it also changed my relationship to all my other creative hobbies. For me, becoming a professional author didn’t just mean getting paid to write the books, but it also meant promoting the books, and that’s where things started to get weird for me. Perhaps the most difficult part of this job for me has been navigating social media. I’m naturally a private, introverted person, most comfortable talking one-on-one with someone and kind of super terrified of trying to engage with a lot of people at once, so figuring out how to be in public online has been a huge challenge for me. Of course, I think professional authors do this in various ways--some are brilliant at joining communities or engaging with their readers or building their brands and platforms, some are hardly on social media at all--but for me, who was a new author in 2015-2016 and who often feels like a new author today, I felt (and still feel) this huge pressure to do better with my online platforms. There’s always this low-key buzz of anxiety in the back of my brain, sometimes even when I’m doing the bulk of my job, which is writing the books. How can I get more followers? How can I attract more readers? How can I get more likes/retweets/comments/replies? What am I going to post on Instagram? Will anyone pay attention? Should I be on Twitter more? How do I increase my engagement? Am I failing? Why does it always feel like I’m failing? And in this strange and stressful whirlwind of insecurities, it feels like everything I do should be performative in some way. If I come across some wildflowers, Instagram. If I have a funny thought about a TV show, Twitter. If I do my hair and makeup that day, selfie (or because I’m terrible at selfies, make someone else take a flattering photo of me, which almost invariably ends up being both time-consuming and an exercise in self-criticism). If I’m painting eggs, I can do designs inspired by book covers! If I’m baking, I can post cookies, cupcakes, muffins! We can bond over our shared love of baked goods, can’t we? If I’m drawing, I can post photos of my sketches! Look, everyone, I’m artistic! That’s a brand, right? Am I cool on the internet yet? In this weird, stressed-out brain of mine, not only had writing turned into a job, but so had all of the other fun, creative hobbies that I’d ever pursued, and that made them not fun anymore, not relaxing, not creative outlets that I wanted to keep doing but chores that I had to do because if I didn’t do them, I wasn’t doing the promotional part of my job, I was letting opportunities slide past, I was failing. And then I started gardening more. The trick, I found, is not being very good at it. I’m not a great photographer, and my plants are pretty ugly (because I’m not a great gardener either), so I’m never really tempted to share them or use them as social media content. My plants aren’t photo opportunities. They’re just my plants. This hobby isn’t an avenue for promotion. It’s just a hobby. And for me, at least, that’s been so freeing. My brain has something to chew on when it’s not actively working on a story. I can do something creative that I don’t feel the pressure to incorporate into my act. I don’t know if I’m the only one who feels this way, but for me, it’s nice to have a creative space where I don’t have to worry about reviews, judgments, comparisons, or competitions. I just work on it, and some plants live and some plants die and some plants flourish and some plants struggle, but I’m not stressed out over whether or not I’m failing or falling behind. I just keep doing it, and it’s relaxing and challenging and makes me content. This is something I’ve realized lately that I need. I love writing books and getting paid to do it, but I also think I need a protected creative space away from being the business of being an artist. Don’t get me wrong, the anxious churn of doubts and insecurities about my online presence (or lack thereof) is still there, and still frightening, and still distracting--having a creative hobby doesn’t help that. But having a creative hobby where I don’t feel the pressure to perform or to sell is nourishing to my creative spirit, which I need if I want to keep doing the main part of the job, writing. It will, I think (I hope), make this career more sustainable mentally and emotionally and artistically, so I can keep doing this thing that I love. Next week: KNOWING YOUR PROCESS. Next week I’d like to talk about artistic instincts--how we get them, how we can use them, what they tell us about our creative endeavors, how to listen to them. Join the party next Sunday at tracichee.com and/or post your own responses with the hashtag #workandprocess. BYO cheer. <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. How I Keep Moth (Phalaenopsis) Orchids Alive Light: I’ve kept my orchid in a west-facing alley window and an east-facing one, in northern California where the sun wasn’t super intense at either time of the day, but was still pretty consistent. Light’s never really been that big of an issue for my orchids, though. Mostly, I feel like they should be getting some light but not the kind that will fry them. You know that feeling like when you go outside in the afternoon and you’re just getting cooked? They don’t like that. If they’re getting enough light, their leaves will be a nice bright green (somewhere between the green crayon and the light green crayon colors). If the leaves start to turn more yellow or have brown spots, they’re getting too much light. If the leaves start to turn dark green, they’re not getting enough. Start by putting them somewhere with some light (near a window, for example) and they’ll tell you whether it’s too much, not enough, or just right. Water: Watering is a little trickier, but not much. It depends on what your orchid is potted in. A lot of orchids from the grocery store come packed with a bunch of sphagnum moss, which holds a lot of water. People will tell you to put an ice cube on the moss (never touching the plant) once a week, and I’ve kept orchids alive this way. (The thing is, orchids are tropical plants and don’t super like cold, so this isn’t my preferred method of watering them.) Usually, after the flowers fall off and the spike (stem) turns brown, I cut the spike at the base, then repot the orchid in bark and a plastic pot with quite a few drainage holes (I used Google to teach me how to repot). The orchid bark holds some water, which is good, but doesn’t keep the roots soaking, which is bad and can drown/kill the plant. With my orchids potted in bark, I soak them for 10 minutes once a week, let them drain in the sink, and then put them back near the window. The bark should dry out over the course of the week, but if the pot feels heavy, like it still has a bunch of water still in it, I skip the soak that week and wait until the pot feels lighter the next time. I know that’s a huge paragraph, but basically, it’s pot in bark, soak 10 minutes once a week and drain. That’s it! Temperature: Temperature should probably be considered, but I’ve never had a problem with it. I think whatever we’d generally consider comfortable temperatures is what these orchids like, somewhere around 60-70 degrees Fahrenheit, although dipping a little above or below every so often hasn’t hurt my plants yet! |
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