Finding the Turn

Exercise Your InkTank
What A Character

The language we use to talk about character often has to do with movement and shape. We like characters to be dynamic rather than static and round instead of flat. We also talk about development, complexity, and psychological believability, but those might just be different ways of talking about the same thing. Some argue that plot is merely a way of talking about character. If we look at it through that lens, the character has to move in order to be. And if the character lacks depth, the events of the plot seem like facts narrated by newscasters. Put another way, the vertical elements of the story (character) and the horizontal elements of the story (plot) combine to create a believable being. But making an interesting shape that moves isn’t quite enough, is it? In order to be compelling, the character/plot has to take us somewhere, from one point to another; it has to take us to (or through) the turn. Understanding the turn is one big step. Executing it is another. Let’s start with one and see if we can talk our way to the other.

Does this story have a turn?

“Housewife” from Tumble Home by Amy Hempel

She would always sleep with her husband and with another man in the course of the same day, and then the rest of the day, for whatever was left to her of that day, she would exploit by incanting, “French film, French film.”

How about this one?

“A Man from her Past” from Varieties of Disturbance by Lydia Davis

I think Mother is flirting with a man from her past who is not Father. I say to myself: Mother ought not to have improper relations with this man “Franz”! “Franz” is a European. I say she should not see this man improperly while Father is away! But I am confusing an old reality with a new reality: Father will not be returning home. He will be staying on at Vernon Hall. As for Mother, she is ninety-four years old. How can there be improper relations with a woman of ninety-four? Yet my confusion must be this: though her body is old, her capacity for betrayal is still young and fresh.

This one?

Untitled by Ernest Hemingway

For sale: baby shoes, never worn.

Turn
Try to take us from one point (vertically and horizontally) to another point with just a few words. Hemingway gave it a shot at six words. But he was a badass. Shoot for a few stanzas or a few paragraphs or a short scene. Take us to a turn.

LOVE LOVE LOVE

Untitled
by Lynda Crane

We sat together on the stone wall we'd passed nearly daily those years-out-of-mind, quietly, without words, and knew that our lives had moved now onto rare earth.


A Valentine For Al
by Lynda Crane

Friends have told you
How I feel
Their impressions
Their projections
They are sure they know

This, my attempt to speak for myself, is for you:

Warm summer days
Suffused with energy and light
We are on the bike
The wind in our faces
A river, a park, sitting on curbs

Pretty words, a gentle touch
someone close, someone near
Ideas, disappointments
Bodies and music
Sharing—a beautiful word

The feeling of OHM when the chanter
Is one with the Universe
Our karma moves on
Ceaselessly—inevitably
Other places, other lovers, other dreams
My Soul is richer, my world is brighter.
Your's has been shared with me.


Irish Coffee and Sex on Valentine's Day
submitted by Kalman Kivkovich

An Irish woman of advanced age visited her physician before Valentine's Day, to ask his help in reviving her husband's libido.
"What about trying Viagra?" the doctor said.
"Not a chance, he won't even take an aspirin."
"Not a problem, give him an Irish Viagra."
"Irish Viagra . . . ?"
"Yes. Put it in his coffee. There is no scent and it's flavorless."
"But---"
"Give it a try . . . call me and let me know how things went."

A week after Valentine's Day the woman was back to see her physician. " 'T'was horrid. Just plain awful, doctor!"
"Really? What happened?"
"Well . . . I did as you advised . . . I slipped it in his coffee---the effect was instant. He jumped straight up---a twinkle in his eye . . ."
"Yes, go on . . ."
"His pants . . ."
"Yes . . ."
"They were bulging! Then . . . with one swoop he sent the cups and tablecloth flying. He ripped my clothes to tatters and took me right then and there . . ."
"And . . ." The doctor was amused.
"He made wild, passionate love to me on the tabletop! It was a nightmare, I tell you, an absolute nightmare!"
"Why so terrible? The sex wasn't good?"
"Oh, no, Doctor, the sex was great! 'Twas the best I've had in thirty years! The problem is that I'll never be able to show my face in Starbucks again!"

The Salon Reading Series Begins with A Bang

Join as we welcome our first writer in our Salon reading series on final Friday (2/23) at InkTank headquarters:

Raised in Export, PA, Eric Schwerer attended The University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. After working as a carpenter in Southeastern Kentucky, Louisiana, and Ohio, he earned a PhD in Creative Writing from Ohio University. He has taught poetry to people recovering from mental illness and now teaches in the Creative Writing department at Johnstown's University of Pittsburgh. He is the author of two books of poetry, Whittling Lessons (a chapbook, Finishing Line Press) and The Saint of Withdrawal (CustomWords, 2006). His poems have been published in numerous literary journals."Eric Schwerer is a young poet with a great ear (oh so rare!), an intense 'thought-felt' intelligence, and the ability to make his poems' mysteries lucid (oh rarer still!). /The Saint of Withdrawal/ is a stunning debut." _Thomas Lux

The Saint of Withdrawal
by Eric Schwerer

It bats four times, soars,
changes course—scrapes black on the milkish air
joined by three more.

Ascending over the trees the other side of Monro Muffler Brake,
hurled claws,
sooty tissues tossed in the dirty white.

These are not
those birds you’ve seen in the moving distance
inside a daydream, slightly rising left to right,

inspiring your real eye with real flight. No. These
four have been in the dark, wet woods all night
perched in a rotten pine, standing on needles,

wings outstretched, lifted like
stooped old men in overcoats who frighten
pigeons from the park. In the weak light

two tiny dots slide on the ice of the western sky
while down on the floor these guys begin to walk,
sway and stalk, throwing forth one claw, criminal,

yoked, lurching in the quiet cold to gawk
or cock a head, moving where nothing else does
in the fog.

When Waste Management’s fleet shudders
over the township blacktop, one takes flight.
It takes it

like the sick take time, taking all the air it can
each flap, coasting until it needs again, making
dashes, strikes on the sky, hooks,

burnt matches, whatever can’t be taken back.




To learn more about the writer and to read more of his poems, visit these websites:
http://www.pitt.edu/~schwerer/Poetry.htm
http://www.custom-words.com/Schwerer.html

I Heart You

Exercise Your InkTank
Against Sentiment

In some literary traditions, emotional effusiveness and a big emphasis on the essential goodness of humanity are celebrated. In ours, they’re largely considered schmaltz. Sentimentalism is viewed with suspicion (and often derision) because its objectives are tainted: It aspires to sway our tender hearts by aiming low. We resist sentimentalism because we’re sensitive people, who are protective of our soft parts; because our taste in literature is just more complex; and because we simply don’t want to be told how to feel. We having no trouble telling you why our stomachs turn and our eyes roll when yet another heart starts soaring like an eagle on the wings of love. The problem arises when we begin actively struggling against sentimentalism in our writing. It can create an acrid psychology that infects our storytelling and inhibits our treatment of emotionally intense moments.

The struggle against writing scenes like this:
As the sun tilted over the horizon like a heart spilling its love-light in the valley, he leaned to her and whispered in her tiny ear. “I always knew I would marry you,” he said. “But I wasn’t always sure you would have me.”
“Forever, Charlie,” she said. “Forever and ever and ever.”
“I know,” he said. “I know.”
They went into an embrace that assured all those who witnessed it that there would always be love in the world and it would always be there for the taking. The trick was knowing when to fight for it.

May result in scenes like this:
He moved his hand across the table, near hers but not touching.
“Charlie,” she said.
They looked at the sun on the wall.

The language in our first scene over-directs. It talks about emotional bigness without actually delivering. The language in the second scene is subtle to the point of opacity. It’s impossible for us to know what is passing between these characters. We can guess, but we can’t know. Frank Conroy used to say this: “Good narrative puts the reader and writer in a position of equality. The text forms a bridge between two imaginations.” As writers struggling against sentimentalism, how do we control the language of emotion without strangling it? How do we build bridges between imaginations? Let’s begin with a conversation about words.

I Heart Love Stories:
We’ll generate a list of effusive words and phrases that circle around one emotion: Love. As many as we can. Half of us will write a passage using as many of these words as possible. The other half will write a passage that communicates love without usually any of the words or expressions generally associated with that word. Then (as though we’ll have time!) we’ll share our work and talk about the differences we see between our passages. With any luck, the pitfalls of each approach will become abundantly clear and we’ll catch a glimpse of a way across to our readers.

Salon Writers Revise

Revision
by Jason Gallagher

Seven years ago things were different. At least to Maria. He had wrapped his existence up in her and all she wanted to do was fly. She wanted nothing to do with his Euclidian geometric musings, his symbolism, and his love of “nature’s own mysteruim.” Those were his words, not hers. She had lost her words. For all his talk of essence and truth she had lost her agency. When she was set adrift of her own will she felt like dandelion pollen, mushroom spores or some other mold caught listlessly in the wind. Caught in a wind but in reality not actually moving. This was his doing. It had only been three, four dates if you counted the day trip to Santa Monica pier, yet her answering machine light would still blink three times weekly. She remembered the gulls cawing at the sewage in the Venice canals as they walked toward the pier. She dare not touch his hand. He had been talking pop philosophy with a soothsayer near one the granite seahorses. Even the surfers couldn’t understand a word. The fortuneteller would roll her eyes, sigh, and murmur something about him being a Gemini. It was the look of the surfers that solidified their failure.