INFORMATION

Exercise Your InkTank
INFORMATION Glut

The trouble with INFORMATION is that its transmission often raises issues of credibility, believability, and trust. INFORMATION is heavy, angular, and conspicuous. It can be very difficult to manage as INFORMATION. Here’s what can happen when INFORMATION does not rise out the story organically:

“What’s going on here Susan? It seems like there are millions of Americans here on the shores of Lake Michigan,” said Mike. He folded his blue hat in his hands.
“It’s the World’s Fair, silly, an incredibly popular and immensely influential social and cultural event,” said Susan. She straightened her old-looking dress at the waist.
“We’re lucky to be here,” he said. He touched her arm—a little forward for the times.
“We sure are. The year of 1893 is turning out to be a good one.”

Here are some concerns I’ve often heard from group members, students, teachers, mentors, and colleagues alike:

I want to deliver the kind of INFORMATION that convinces my readers of my credibility as a writer and/or convinces my readers of my character’s credibility without seeming like that’s what I’m doing; there’s nothing less convincing than a writer who’s obviously trying to convince you.

I want to get technical INFORMATION into my story without turning away readers who may not be familiar with the terminology or seeming opaque.

I want to get INFORMATION about technology, geography, politics, history, into my story that my readers will need to understand in order to follow my story, but I don’t want that INFORMATION to bog down my storytelling.

I want to get INFORMATION into my story in order to entertain and hold the interest of my readers.

I want to get INFORMATION into my story seamlessly—I don’t want it to seem like INFORMATION.

Behind these concerns are very particular larger issues—issues we should talk about as writers. Right now. But the problem with INFORMATION is that it isn’t STORYTELLING. It’s INFORMATION. Working INFORMATION into a story is always going to be a challenge for that reason.

Here goes:
I’m going to distribute little piles of INFORMATION around the room. Choose any pile you like and investigate it. Next, write a segment (of a poem, a story, an essay, a scene or something in-between) that engages some of the ideas present in your pile. If your experiment is successful, your readers should not be able to sense the presence of the INFORMATION in your segment—they’ll be engaged in your storytelling, engaged in the continuous dream that is the world of your story. Even if INFORMATION isn’t a problem for you, this exercise will give you a chance to come into your writing at a different angle.

Political Poems Now

FORSYTHIA WINTER
by Melissa Tuckey

First snap and daffodils nod off
they always look
so surprised

while here in D.C.
everything wants to bloom
at once a profusion
of highway exits
and war

I want off this crazy
interchange forward and back
illegal turns and still
the land refuses

Go ahead open your hand
what emptiness
will you offer

that wild impulse the rain



THE GENESIS OF TORTURE
by E. Ethelbert Miller

In the beginning
we will all wear black hoods

Our faces will be hidden from history and
someone will tie a cruel footnote to our genitals

It might be a neighbor disguised as God



TAR
by C. K. Williams

The first morning of Three Mile Island: those first disquieting, uncertain, mystifying hours.
All morning a crew of workmen have been tearing the old decrepit roof off our building,
and all morning, trying to distract myself, I've been wandering out to watch them
as they hack away the leaden layers of asbestos paper and disassemble the disintegrating drains.
After half a night of listening to the news, wondering how to know a hundred miles downwind
if and when to make a run for it and where, then a coming bolt awake at seven
when the roofers we've been waiting for since winter sent their ladders shrieking up our wall,
we still know less than nothing: the utility company continues making little of the accident,
the slick federal spokesmen still have their evasions in some semblance of order.
Surely we suspect now we're being lied to, but in the meantime, there are the roofers,
setting winch-frames, sledging rounds of tar apart, and there I am, on the curb across, gawking.
I never realized what brutal work it is, how matter-of-factly and harrowingly dangerous.
The ladders flex and quiver, things skid from the edge, the materials are bulky and recalcitrant.
When the rusty, antique nails are levered out, their heads pull off; the underroofing crumbles.
Even the battered little furnace, roaring along as patient as a donkey, chokes and clogs,
a dense, malignant smoke shoots up, and someone has to fiddle with a cock, then hammer it,
before the gush and stench will deintensify, the dark, Dantean broth wearily subside.
In its crucible, the stuff looks bland, like licorice, spill it, though, on your boots or coveralls,
it sears, and everything is permeated with it, the furnace gunked with burst and half-burst bubbles,
the men themselves so completely slashed and mucked they seem almost from another realm, like trolls.
When they take their break, they leave their brooms standing at attention in the asphalt pails,
work gloves clinging like Br'er Rabbit to the bitten shafts, and they slouch along the precipitous lip,
the enormous sky behind them, the heavy noontime air alive with shimmers and mirages.
Sometime in the afternoon I had to go inside: the advent of our vigil was upon us.
However much we didn't want to, however little we would do about it, we'd understood:
we were going to perish of all this, if not now, then soon, if not soon, then someday.
Someday, some final generation, hysterically aswarm beneath an atmosphere as unrelenting as rock,
would rue us all, anathematize our earthly comforts, curse our surfeits and submissions.
I think I know, though I might rather not, why my roofers stay so clear to me and why the rest,
the terror of that time, the reflexive disbelief and distancing, all we should hold on to, dims so.
I remember the president in his absurd protective booties, looking absolutely unafraid, the fool.
I remember a woman on the front page glaring across the misty Susquehanna at those looming stacks.
But, more vividly, the men, silvered with glitter from the shingles, clinging like starlings beneath the eaves.
Even the leftover carats of tar in the gutter, so black they seemed to suck the light out of the air.
By nightfall kids had come across them: every sidewalk on the block was scribbled with obscenities and hearts.

It's Politic

"The Colonel" by Carolyn Forche

What you have heard is true. I was in his house.
His wife carried a tray of coffee and sugar. His
daughter filed her nails, his son went out for the
night. There were daily papers, pet dogs, a pistol
on the cushion beside him. The moon swung bare on
its black cord over the house. On the television
was a cop show. It was in English. Broken bottles
were embedded in the walls around the house to
scoop the kneecaps from a man's legs or cut his
hands to lace. On the windows there were gratings
like those in liquor stores. We had dinner, rack of
lamb, good wine, a gold bell was on the table for
calling the maid. The maid brought green mangoes,
salt, a type of bread. I was asked how I enjoyed
the country. There was a brief commercial in
Spanish. His wife took everything away. There was
some talk of how difficult it had become to govern.
The parrot said hello on the terrace. The colonel
told it to shut up, and pushed himself from the
table. My friend said to me with his eyes: say
nothing. The colonel returned with a sack used to
bring groceries home. He spilled many human ears on
the table. They were like dried peach halves. There
is no other way to say this. He took one of them in
his hands, shook it in our faces, dropped it into a
water glass. It came alive there. I am tired of
fooling around he said. As for the rights of anyone,
tell your people they can go f--- themselves. He
swept the ears to the floor with his arm and held
the last of his wine in the air. Something for your
poetry, no? he said. Some of the ears on the floor
caught this scrap of his voice. Some of the ears on
the floor were pressed to the ground.

False Start Re-Starts by Salon Members

The Writing Group Speaks
by Dick Mashburn

What follows is original but not spontaneous or unprovoked. It’s a
response to one of the interventions of our moderator/chief instigator.
The idea for this game is that she gave us a bunch of scraps of writing
she found on or in the vicinity of her desk. There’s no telling if it
was part of a significant work or just words that somehow came to rest
on that shred of paper.

What’s not in doubt, however, is that being dutiful writing groupers,
we vied for the privilege of putting these would-be gems into a
context, that like a jewelers finest setting can unlock the complete
and true beauty that now lies passively as in a humble …

The President, for Christ sake, is up there in a helicopter, surveying.
“Our worst fears,” he says, “are heading South.”

“It was those bastard Democrats,” he continued (alteration from
original). “They roiled around making such a stink that that jerk
Señior Fox got the Mexican legislature to create a whole package of
benefits for Mexican workers. Now, instead of flooding into this
country to take jobs nobody else wants, and behave like angels because
they know that if they FU, we’ll send ‘em home in a heartbeat, they
shoot down the tubes back to good old Mexico.

“Of course somebody’s got to pay for this, and that bastard Fox got the
legislators to put huge taxes, it’s like Nucular War on all American
companies. By the time Ford adjusts for the new taxes, they have to
jack the price of a “nicely equipped” Focus to $32,000. That puts their
workers in this country out of work and they go scurrying off to North
Carolina to work in the textile mills. Raleigh-Durham is beginning to
look a third world country, and those S.O.B.s over there in Tsunami
Land don’t even appreciate us sending them shirts. Said they need
machines to make shirts, like they used to, not shirts, or worse yet,
us exporting shirts all over the world.

“Thanks a lot World. Thanks for the gratitude.”


Cicadas On Us
by Kalman Kivkovich

2004 was the most recent emerging time of Cincinnati-17-year cicadas. I was here, waiting in anticipation. I remember my father talking to me about those fascinating insects, more than fifty years ago. I recall him claiming to have captured fifty cicadas in some glass jars, just to free them later unharmed. "I can't kill anything," he had said.
Since my early childhood, those goldish-looking bugs had visited at least three times. But in 2004, they came in-force, never seen before. My heavenly-kingdom grounds were not spared. They came a little late, but they came-trillions and trillions of them. And their symphonic non-stop opus, MAN! They say it is exclusively-male stuff. They must know their stuff! The intense, high-pitched humming can harm your eardrums; it can be as loud as a 747 Delta Jet flying over Clifton; it surely fends off birds, sometimes.
I was brave, my wife wouldn't dare to come within a foot and even then I had to hold her hand. I collected a few specimens, housing them in an empty glass pickle jar. Yes, I did pierce the tin cover for breathing air---like my dad, I didn't want to kill them. I waited for them to sing, but they were not in the mood, I guess. All they did was crawl on top of each other. After a few days, there were fewer that still crawled . . . and then came the stench . . . and then came the second empty glass jar---this time it was from mayonnaise, just in case the new cicadas liked it better.
I observed my prisoners closely; my nose was touching the glass. I didn't bother to feed them; they say that cicadas don't eat anything, and that they have already stuffed themselves of tree sap underground. So I just looked at them carefully, I looked at their huge red eyes, one on each side of the head and at the other three little shiny eyes on top of their head. With their wings, they resembled common giant houseflies. The wings were fascinating---glassy and transparent wax-paper-like held by an elaborate vein structure---reflecting sunlight in shimmering rays. My eye traveled to their legs, And legs they have---three pairs of them.
After a two-day clinic, I decided to let my jailbirds go free. Only two were still moving, the rest were stock-still; a few sparkly wings littered the bottom of the jar. I had read that cicadas don't bite; they didn't harm me thus far, although they were everywhere: covering my trees, shrubs, grass, walls and even the windshield of my car. In most cases they simply took off and flew when approached.
I stepped out to the porch. "Okay, little fellows," I said, "your days are numbered anyway. Go find yourself a mate, have fun and die." I took the lid off and shook the jar. No takers. I tapped on the glass. "Go, go you . . ."
And off they went. I wouldn't know if it was a hop or a natural take off. The two creatures flew straight into my thick curly hair. I was startled; I jumped backward, my hands reached up, searching to grab the unforeseen attackers. "Sons of bitches!" I yelled, "Get off me, you bastards!" I ran back into the house and jigged my way to the dinning room.
Locks of hair dropped to the floor. The cicadas kept clinging to my scalp, burying their claws in my now rapidly disappearing hair. The place looked a lot like a barbershop, not a dining room. My screaming and jumping were in vain. By the time I managed to rid myself of those Devils, I was petrified to glance at a mirror; the floor spoke volumes. The two cicadas were still alive, still clenching to some strands of my past glory. In my anger I raised my foot to crush them . . . and then again I remembered my father. "Damn it, I can't!" I scooped the mess into a paper beg and emptied its contents in the woods behind my deck. When I returned, I barely gathered the nerve to peek at my image in the bathroom mirror. "My God, what will Sandi say?" I said to myself. I looked so much different. Heartbroken, I left the bathroom. I took off my sandals and headed to the bedroom. My right foot hit the doorjamb. "Fuck! Oh God . . ." In an instant, all my grief of loosing my hair had vanished---I was dancing, kicking my legs up and high. . . .

It has been a couple of years since my encounter with those terrestrial flying vermin. I still have some hair left, but not much to brag about. The important thing is that my wife likes it as it is, so she says. And one more thing: I have been told by many that my Jive has improved. . . .


CICADAS AND OTHER FANTASIES KEPT IN GLASS JARS
by Sandi Kivkovich

My father claims to have captured fifty cicadas in glass jars.
He also claims to have freed them.
"I can't kill anything," he said.
My father claims he can tell when it is going to rain.
His sisters tell how as a child he pretended to be the wind and the storm cloud.
"I can't hide my feelings," he said.
My father claims he can tell a story about anything.
He captivated my youth and beyond.
"Life is a story," he said.
My father claims that he understands feelings.
All are important.
"A child's problems seem as large to them as those of adults," he said.
My father claims he is fine.
He slaps his knee and laughs and sings songs in gibberish to me.
"What's your name little girl?" he said.

New Wheels

Exercise Your InkTank

The story goes that false starts can be useful failures—at least you’re writing, right?—but as useful as they are, they can also be demoralizing, frustrating, intimidating, exasperating, and annoying. Over time you may develop a sense for what has wheels and what doesn’t, but even the most experienced of writers have false starts. I know several novelists who have written several (one of them five) novels, before they’ve found the story they wanted to tell. They regard their novels-never-to-be in this way: it’s precious trash. Some writers cannibalize old failed projects, pulling a few lines, an image, or even a chapter into their current work. Some simply take what they’ve learned and translate it. But what do you do with those pages-that-go-nowhere sitting on your hard drive after you’ve scrapped them for the metal?

Here’s one idea: you give them away. My gift to you this evening is a collection of little fits and starts, all of Salon-workable length, all culled from my fail-files. See what you can do with them. Pick any one or two you like and revise it in any way you please. It’s yours now. I won’t need it back when you’re done.

1. Again it happens that I am terrible. It isn’t often that every face looks petulant. Even the ones I don’t know. And the meaning the world has to offer is ground down, a smart kick, or there’s merely the birds in their sheer numbers winding the cycle of the rooftops and me. You can look and there they are. And then that’s all there is.

2. I rent a cottage on a two-mile spread with another rental set up ten feet across a gravel drive from mine. The other place is a three bedroom house. Probably a hundred years old. I live in its converted shed. Probably once the site of an outhouse. It’s nice though, remodeled. The stove almost works, carpet’s stained, but you can work around these things, or over. The neighbors are boys, maybe eighteen, maybe still in high school. I did not know that this would happen when I moved in.

3. My father claims to have captured fifty cicadas in glass jars.
He claims also to have freed them. “I can’t kill anything,” he said.

4. I never wanted a good explanation for heat lightening.

5. I was little when my mother first told me not to get my hopes up. She said it would hurt more in the end if you went in thinking positive. And, if you went in expecting failure, think how good you’d feel about it if you had luck. I was an awkward girl and it struck me she was probably right. I went into womanhood expecting it would turn out poorly. My hopes were so low, good weather excited me. When I hit high school, I couldn’t get a date. Then it came out I was easy because who’d date a girl with a sack of bricks for an ass? I played that game and I wasn’t stupid about it. I knew about taking what you can get and what it can get you. I kept my eye off the prize. Once I’d had it done to me every way by most everybody, I figured life would get measly and lonely again. I figured at best I’d marry somebody cheaper than me and bury his complaints in my thighs. But then Walter showed up with his hands stroking my back like I was a little bird. Walter showed up and it was love, love, love.

6. The last thing the widow says to her keeper is, do not try to know how to say love. Many times we fail disbelieving. Is it you? Is it you? Are you the one? I don’t want you to tell me. It’s something we’ve already done. And so we must sleep. We must decide now that our living here is enough.

7. There is only as much tension in the finest disguises.
Otherwise, we would always be thieves.

8. All kids believe in God and sugar.

9. The President, for Christ sake,
is up there in a helicopter, surveying.
Our worst fears, he says,
are heading South.

As Promised: Three Prose Poems by Russell Edson

Grass

The living room is overgrown with grass. It has
come up around the furniture. It stretches through
the dining room, past the swinging door into the
kitchen. It extends for miles and miles into the
walls . . .

There's treasure in grass, things dropped or put
there; a stick of rust that was once a penknife, a
grave marker. . . All hidden in the grass at the
scalp of the window . . .

In a cellar under the grass an old man sits in a
rocking chair, rocking to and fro. In his arms he
holds an infant, the infant body of himself. And
he rocks to and fro under the grass in the
dark . . .



Accidents

The barber has accidentally taken off an ear. It lies like
something newborn on the floor in a nest of hair.
Oops, says the barber, but it musn't've been a very good
ear, it came off with very little complaint.
It wasn't, says the customer, it was always overly waxed.
I tried putting a wick in it to burn out the wax, thus to find my
way to music. But lighting it I put my whole head on fire. It
even spread to my groin and underarms and to a nearby
forest. I felt like a saint. Someone thought I was a genius.
That's comforting, says the barber, still, I can't send you
home with only one ear. I'll have to remove the other one. But
don't worry, it'll be an accident.
Symmetry demands it. But make sure it's an accident, I
don't want you cutting me up on purpose.
Maybe I'll just slit your throat.



Antimatter

On the other side of a mirror there's an inverse world,
where the insane go sane; where bones climb out of the
earth and recede to the first slime of love.

And in the evening the sun is just rising.

Lovers cry because they are a day younger, and soon
childhood robs them of their pleasure.

In such a world there is much sadness which, of course,
is joy.
But it has to be an accident . . .

Found Poems by Salon Members

Please note: selections have been published in order of their submission. If you'd like to publish your found poem on the blog, please submit it via the Writers Salon yahoo group.


AN ANCIENT IMMOVABLE ARM

An ancient immovable arm,
Invisible, balanced.
An ancient immovable arm,
With prolong sound, merged people with pain, grief,
Energy, fierce pride and pleasure.

The words were borrowed from Webster, page 797 (Ms).

Kalman Kivkovich

A CONSTELLATION OF GROWTH

A constellation of days designated
for planting trees,
for flowing water, not restrained or limited,
style flavored with caraway seeds,
people growing, trembling or quivering with excitement.

Words taken from Webster's Dictionary Page 63 (A's)

Sandi Kivkovich


POPEYE'S "SMOKING GUN"

This new food fear
becomes inconvenient again.
71 percent were women,
after discovering
an opened bag of spinach.
Nine California farms
zero in on three
health authorities.
The "smoking gun"
has died.
Watch how the leafy green,
the tainted greens,
could be a crucial clue.

from the CNN article "Health chiefs find 'smoking gun' spinach" dated 9/21/06
Jason Gallagher

Find Found Poetry

Exercise Your InkTank
Writing without Composing

If you’ve never heard of found poetry, you’re about to because:
1. It’s everywhere
2. Everybody’s doing it, whether they intent to or not (see Donald Rumsfeld)
3. It’s a good way to see language as language
4. Its critique of the way we use language is implicit (built-in)
5. Its critique of the culture in which the original text was created is implicit
6. You’ve decided to attend the Salon and there’s no escaping it now

The rules are very simple: using ordinary texts from the world around you, create a poem. Do not write. Compose. You may subtract lines of text and re-arrange them, but you may not add any words or phrases of your own. Your poem need not follow any formal structure (although it can, if you like) but pay close attention to what line breaks can do to the meaning and rhythm of your lines. A line as simple as the one I am writing now, can begin to look like a poem quite easily:

A line as simple
As the one I am
Writing now can
Begin to look like a poem
Quite easily.

Below you’ll find a few examples of famous (notorious) found poems. A simple Google search will provide you with a few thousand or million more. We’ll draw our original texts from a hat. Should no hats prove present or available to us, original texts will be drawn in some other equally exciting and totally random fashion. Feel free to write on your original text (maybe crossing out or highlighting words or phrases) and then transfer your found poem to the back of this sheet. Try to compose (not write) at least five lines. We’ll share them and then the best (to be determined by wild hooting and hollering) will be published on the blog.

THE UNKNOWN
As we know,
There are known knowns.
There are things we know we know.
We also know
There are known unknowns.
That is to say
We know there are some things
We do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns,
The ones we don't know
We don't know.

Donald Rumsfeld, Feb. 12, 2002,
Department of Defense news briefing


A CHALLENGE TO YOUR SPIRIT
Girls and boys of America
Are the hope of the world!
You can’t evade it, young America.
And are you going to go on dancing
And spinning on your ear?
What are you thinking about, sitting
There staring into the dark?
Haven’t you been lying around long
Enough?
Shouldn’t you go to work?
Find as interesting a subject as possible.
Write as vivid a sketch as you can
Of a person who attracts you or an animal.

Annie Dillard from “Junior High English” from Mornings Like This: Found Poems

Take-Out Sestina

The Take-Out Assignment for the week is to write a sestina with these six (Salon-generated) end-words: metrosexual, obtuse, crystal, equivocate, time bomb, terrorist. Take a look at the craftshop post for the formal structure the sestina follows. Consider shifting the words for variety and telling a story with a cohesive narrative. We'll take a look at these on Thursday -- we've already seen a few remarkable entries.

Orange saccharine Narcotics Orgasm Frosty Cascade

A Partial Sestina by the Salon Collective on the Spot

Her eyes caught my gaze like fresh narcotics
An unattented hookah burned shisha so saccharine
Silvery water that roared nature's orgasm
Evaporating condensing perspiration turned frosty
Removing all memory of a world with colors rippling red ostentatious orange.

Better than narcotics are oranges
What the hell am I doing with these narcotics
They only make the rings in my nost frosty
It lingers on the lips of my love like an orgasm
Goose bumps down my back cascade

Down Main Street we cascade
To a room painted bright orange
Many colors in your mind like a mental orgasm
Stawberry fields forever these are great narcotics
Ripped out mouth smiles saccharine
Frosty

Formal Attire

Exercise Your InkTank

Today we’re going to try on some formal constraints. That’s right. We’re getting conventional up in here. Maybe you’ve written some formal poetry before, a few pantoums or a villanelle, perhaps. Maybe you’ve written poems before but nothing formal because formal poetry is stale and frusty and/or absolutely terrifying. Or maybe you’ve never written a poem before at all. No matter your disposition or level of experience, the truth (and it’s not one I’m making up this time) is that formal constraints are a good way to free yourself from habit and to invite real invention into your writing space. You may find a new turn of phrase or a new image, a new story or a new voice, or you may simply find that a new form reminds you of what you valued in more familiar forms. At a minimun, you’ll leave today having written a sestina with your fellow Salonists.

The Suit
A sestina. Let’s talk about what that is first: It’s a poem consisting of six six-line stanzas and one three-line envoy. The end-words (we’ll generate these together) in each stanza are the same, but they follow different sequences. Here’s the pattern the sestina follows:

1 2 3 4 5 6 - End words of lines in first sestet.
6 1 5 2 4 3 - End words of lines in second sestet.
3 6 4 1 2 5 - End words of lines in third sestet.
5 3 2 6 1 4 - End words of lines in fourth sestet.
4 5 1 3 6 2 - End words of lines in fifth sestet.
2 4 6 5 3 1 - End words of lines in sixth sestet.
(6 2) (1 4) (5 3) - Middle and end words of lines in tercet.

The Tailors
Who comes up with this stuff? In this case, the French. The sestina appeared in France in the twelfth century, initially in the work of a troubadour. Why are we here at InkTank writing a sestina? Because the sestina is one of the best poetic forms for storytelling. Its repetition and long line-length make it an ideal form for our purposes. What are our purposes? We’re all about storytelling here, no matter the genre. Why do we keep using forms the French developed? It is merely a coincidence, I assure you.

See Me/You/He, She, It Again

Although we’ve worked with perspective before, it’s an issue that often re-appears in our conversations, and the sticking point is generally the idea of POV shifts in the third person. Why, you might ask, can’t I enter the minds of more than one character in the third person?

Here’s a response:

1. RULES: There is no rule against the use of an omniscient narrator – of course there isn’t – but it is true today that many stories written in the third-person perspective, are written in the third-person limited perspective. This means that the story resides near one character, though it may shift to another between chapters or sections. You’ll find that stories that are written from an omniscient perspective generally have something in common: a very strong narrative voice that is the controlling force of the story. Think of One Hundred Years of Solitude. We follow that story from character to character because the narrator leads us there carefully. Each move that the narrator makes in that novel, is made for a reason that is clear to the reader. The voice is thick and big and easily identifiable.

2. READERS: Frequent shifts between characters in the third person that take place without an apparent system of logic irritate readers. They can become lost, they can feel violated, and worst of all, they can lose faith in the writer. Frequent shifts between characters in the third person can also prevent readers from fully entering the world of the story. Readers would rather understand the story from one character’s perspective, than know what everyone in the book is thinking about everything that happens, if it means that they can spend a little quality time getting to know that one character. In other words, rather than opening the story, frequent POV shifts often close the story to readers, restricting them to a surface level.

3. TRAPS: Many writers fall into the POV shift trap early on because they simply don’t know the stakes. But others fall in because (in truth) it is easier to tell readers what characters are thinking or hiding than finding ways to show it. For many readers and editors alike, shifts in the third-person are signs of laziness or sloppiness. Even if you’re making a deliberate choice, that choice may be interpreted in that way. You should know that before you decide to take the risk.

4. PREROGATIVE: It’s yours. But a little time spent deciding exactly why you’ve made the choice you’ve made in terms of perspective is a gift you should give yourself. You deserve it.

In The News:

BEDFORD, New Hampshire (AP) -- A woman turned herself in to police Wednesday after a store surveillance video captured footage of two children sneaking behind display cases to steal thousands of dollars worth of jewelry, allegedly on instructions from their mother and grandmother.

Find a way to enter this story – it’s a real one, pulled from the headlines today. Your first choice should be narrative perspective. Think about why you’ve chosen to write from 1st, 2nd, or some variety of 3rd and be ready to talk about it. Then write a short short.

Styling A Style

Some writers are known for their style. You know their writing as theirs when you read or hear it because the choices they make in terms of language are distinctive and unique to them. On one end of the style spectrum, you’ve got voicey writers. Think of Barry Hannah who, in describing a dream he once had (of a bar and after giving up liquor), writes, “pickled eggs in a massive jar at the end of a dark-wooded gold-wrapped bar, immense.” A writer with a more transparent style of writing might have described this dream differently, “there was a jar of eggs at the end of the bar,” for example. But Hannah is a writer who is interested in the way the sounds of words in combination can effect their meaning. Lots of folks cite writers like Hemingway and Hempel as standing firmly at the transparent end of the style spectrum. (You’ll see an excerpt from Hempel at the bottom.)

Both voicey and transparent styles have their merits, as do styles that land somewhere in the middle. And different styles serve different purposes. But how do most writers come upon their styles? Is it a choice? Something you’re born with? If you asked Barry Hannah how he found his style, I think he’d tell you it had something to do with learning to pay attention to the story he wanted to tell and then locating the right voice to tell it in. Read about it in his essay “Mr. Brain, He Want A Song.” It’s in a book of essays about writing called The Eleventh Draft, one which I highly recommend to you.

Finding your style might have a good deal to do with finding your voice, which is often regarded as a sort of essence of self, communicated through the writing. But it’s probably important to note that your style might shift considerably between projects and change over time. Writers make many stylistic changes, but the truth is likely that we can never quite escape ourselves. Even if we make serious changes in our approaches to stories, signs of our selves will remain.

What’s your style?

Maybe you feel you’ve already found your style, or maybe you’re still hunting it down. Either way, trying on different styles is a good way of sussing out some margins for yourself. Let’s do a little of that today, shall we? Spend a few minutes re-writing the following passage from Amy Hempel’s story “In A Tub,” using a very very voicey voice. Then, using your re-write as the template, re-write the passage using a different voice. You may add any details or ruminations that you like, but let’s keep it in first-person POV and stick with the basic scenario of a character standing on a deck.

At the back of my house I can stand in the light from the sliding glass door and look out onto the deck. The deck is planted with marguerites and succulents in red clay pots. One of the pots is empty. It is shallow and broad, and filled with water like a birdbath.

And You Say: What Is An Exquisite Corpse?

One happy consequence of our last meeting was the composition of three Exquisite Corpses, all of them about Ohio. We each wrote a small paragraph on a sheet of paper and then folded the paper over so that only the last few words were in view. The next writer in line had only that last bit to work with and was challenged with the task of carrying the story along.

The idea behind the Exquisite Corpse (or the cadavre exuis, as the French surrealists who developed the technique would call it) is to allow the personality of the group to create a collective work of art. You'll see who we are in Ohio #1, #2, and #3 below. What do you think?

Interested in learning/doing more?


Visit a gallery of corpse paintings created by the famous French surrealists who created the exquisite Corpse technique here: Gallery
Visit a journal that fancies itself a literary corpse hotspot here: Journal
Visit a contemporary gallery of corpses here: Contemporary Gallery
And help people you don't know create a giant corpse poem here: Dada Poem

InkTank Exquisite Corpses

Ohio #2
It's dark down here in the subway beneath Central Parkway. The only light that filters down here is from the holes in the sidewalk above. But that's okay. Being homeless, you can't choose where you live.

You can choose to live on the Banks of the Ohio River, except then you look at Kentucky, whose skyline is not as spectacular as Cincinnati's. Or camp out at the corner of Hopple and I-75 and tell people for three straight months that you are stranded.

I don't think they care. So why do you ask the people or tell them?

Let me tell you why. To make an effort. And even beyond that, to find out why they have these tired ideas about Ohio. That all we are is the big pawn in presidential elections. That Columbus is named after a guy who discovered a place where a whole culture already lived. That Cleveland is only good for a ball game and the Rock and Roll Museum. And Cincinnati is sooooo conservative. God. I fucking hate all of that. All those boxes. And especially that last one.

It's the last one that says the most about Ohio. It's the one that explains why Ohioans say "Huh?" so much.

"Huh?" I didn't get it.


Ohio#1
Ohio is the place of the Cincinnati Reds, the Cleveland Indians, and the Cincinnati Bengals. In Ohio we love our football, basketball, and baseball. Ohio is the home of P&G products. Cincinnati is the home of General Electric.

General Electric is but one of the many industrial companies that makes Cincinnati a marketable economic power spot. Cincinnati is a metropolis, just like Columbus and several other Ohio cities.

It's always hot, sticky, and cloudy in July along the muddy Ohio. Unlike Columbus, whose river gently cools the downtown streets, the mighty Ohio applies its charm across the region in sweat that drops but does not cool those it kisses.

Ohio is home of a diverse climate. Some regions are hot, others cool. Some so hot that people's faces precipitate with the perspirations of sweat.

The winters in Ohio can be very harsh. I remember back in 1977, it seemed that we had two feet of snow or more. If you come to Ohio just make sure you have winter gear. If you don't, you will be in for a rude awakening of frosty freeze. We eat ice cream in the winter-time in Ohio.

We eat Skyline all year long too. Depending on how you look at it, there's no particularly good or bad time to eat a chilli cheese Coney with mustard and onions.


Ohio #3
Ohio is never as simple as it sounds. Look at it there - Ohio - simple as grass. But when you start to listen, it turns in your ear. The river expands inside it and makes everything dark, as after a flood.

There was a flood, you know, in Cincinnati in the 30s and a smaller one in the late 90s that still landed a Cincinnati suburb on CNN and a flood kitty in my mom's house. I watched from NC which, with its hurricanes and days-long deluges, is nothing, or not a whole lot, like Ohio.

Just like Ohio...Round on the outside and high in the middle. Ohio meaning "Hello" in Japanese and some forgotten phrase in the forgotten language of a forgotten race who once knew this place only as "Home."

Ohio, the heart of it all. Where red and blue clash every four years and the scarlet and grey play marching fighting songs.

It all starts at the Findlay Market Parade. Opening day is a big event. You should come out sometime to opening day. There is no certain dress attire. Just come out and have fun. It's opening day with the Cincinnati Reds. You have to love those Reds. They were the world champs in 1990 from start to finish.

People talk about the big red machine. I don't know what that is. Or was. And I couldn't tell you what a met is, exactly, I just know that it has meat in it and they sell it at the ball games.

But it's not as good as what they serve at Izzy's. But then, nothing is.

Dialogue on Dialogue

When I think about dialogue these days, I’m usually deciding how economical I want a scene to be. I want to give my readers a chance to hear my characters speak and to know their voices, but I don’t want to go so far as to flatten out the scene. The more fat I can cut away, the more potently the exchanges between characters will translate. That often means losing filler words like okay and alright and well, and I don’t know how many I don’t know’s. By the same token, though, I’m making an effort to push scenes through to their natural ends. I’ve been guilty in the past of mistaking my discomfort for the discomfort of my characters. That is, my investment in the moment becomes too great to discern the larger needs of the story, and I allow my characters to escape confrontation. Here’s something I’ve learned the hard way: the psychology of avoidance and denial is only as interesting as the psychology of avoidance and denial – collisions and connections between “real” people are what bring us back to stories again and again. The best bit of philosophical advice I can offer you about dialogue is to be brave, both about cutting and extending scenes.
“But what about some practical advice?” you say. “What about the nuts and the bolts?”
“I have some thoughts about that too,” I say. “Jesus. Get off my back already. As you can see, I don’t go in for complicated dialogue tags. I stick with say and leave it at that.”
“Do most writers make that choice?” you say.
“Yes,” I say. “I’d say so. It’s a matter of trusting the reader to correctly interpret the tone of the exchanges between characters.”
“What about quotation marks? Does everybody use them?”
“Not everybody. But I’d say that most folks do. It’s just a good way of keeping things clear.”
“What else have you got? Be brave, don’t use fancy tags. Is that it?”
“I’d also say that it’s a good idea not to use dialogue for exposition.”
“Care to explain?”
“Don’t use dialogue to deliver lots of information. It looks and feels funny. If I asked you how you were, you wouldn’t respond by telling me that you’ve been okay but it just hasn’t been the same since that back surgery in ’82 and even though when you became the town mayor and married my cousin Suzy you started feeling better about the world, you still have some pretty hefty misgivings. In others words, when writers cram background information into dialogue, readers sense the machinery at work. It isn’t real.”
“Okay, okay,” you say. “But how do I know when to summarize a scene and when to use dialogue.”
“That’s a good one,” I say. “I’d say when the dialogue can offer your readers more, when the way the characters talk can show them something about who they are. Or, when the scene is really important. People don’t want to hear that the big argument happened. They want to see it. They want to be there too.”
“I’d rather be anyplace than right here,” you say. “So I can relate to that.”
“Those sound like fighting words,” I say.
“They are,” you say. “They are fighting words. What are you going to do about it?”

Let’s Have Us A Fight
The exercise for this evening will be to stage a fight. A war of words, so to speak. Render this fight as completely in dialogue as you can, using only a few words here or there outside of the quotation marks. Just to make things a little more needlessly complicated, we’ll generate a few key words and expressions to work into our scenes. Include as many characters as you like, but two will probably do.

Where The Heart Is

Exercise Your InkTank

“The truth is, fiction depends for its life on place. Location is the crossroads of circumstance, the proving ground of ‘What happened? Who’s here? Who’s coming?’ – and that is the heart's field.”
- Eudora Welty, “Place in Fiction,” Collected Essays, New York, 1994.

It seems like all we writers ever talk about is character. Character, character, character. As though there’s nothing more to stories than the people who occupy them. But characters have to have places to be, right? In fact, in order to be, they must be somewhere, unless (of course) they’re disembodied voices. Even if we don’t invest a great deal of attention to place as storytellers, there always is place in our stories. It’s inevitable. And it’s more important than folks might think. As Eudora Welty phrases it, “fiction depends for its life on place.” Without place, there is no story, and without the story, there is no storyteller. Our lives too depend on place.

When conversations about place happen, they’re often about regional classifications. Writers who write with a strong sense of place in their stories are often categorized by that place. Their work is often said to be in some sense about place, or the place is said to be a character in the story in the sense that it plays a significant role. Many people read regional writing in order to get a sense of that place – this places a good deal of responsibility on the writers. They have the power to determine the character of their homes in the minds of all their readers.

You’ve heard of that wily band of Southern writers and you know how those East Coast writers can be. Sometimes you hear about Midwestern writers and sometimes the talk telescopes in on a particular Midwestern city like Chicago. In the work of Stuart Dybek, for example, we find Chicago rendered in intricate detail. But have you ever heard anything about those Cincinnati, Ohio writers? Who are they? What are they doing? Let’s find out.

Who is Cincinnati?
Rather than beginning with an idea of character, we’re going to begin today with an idea of place. We all live in or around the same place and yet I’d wager that none of us see it in quite the same way. Just as our ways of seeing and experiencing are informed by our distinct senses of place, so will our characters be informed by the world surrounding them. Our rendering of our place and the people who occupy it will determine Cincinnati’s character in the minds of our readers. Think about it. You have the power to make Cincinnati who it is. You might begin by considering the ways in which Cincinnati has made you who you are. Begin with a specific location. Describe it. What details make that place who it is? Write a paragraph in which your sense of who Cincinnati is, is evoked.

Guys & Dolls

Exercise Your InkTank

When we talk about character description, we aren’t simply talking about what our characters look like. After all, the color of their hair isn’t often terribly important to our understanding of who they are, unless of course it defines or describes their experiences in the world somehow. An albino’s corn-silk sheen might be meaningful beyond the color itself, for example, and even a bald head can mean a certain attitude about age. But a straight list of physical details (eye color, hairstyle, figure) doesn’t really give us much in that regard. It may lead our readers to the water, but we’ve still got to coax them to drink, to believe that the water is real.

When we talk about character details, we’re talking about the details that give our readers (and perhaps even ourselves) a sense of who characters are in the world of the story. For that reason, physical details should do more than just fill in the blanks. Think of it this way: a story can conjure a vivid and effective sense of characters without ever once mentioning their physical appearances. If readers’ imaginations are actively engaged in the story, they will supply those details themselves, using their own lives and stories as templates. Some readers may even chose to supplant the physical details you’ve supplied with their own, if theirs prove more useful to their believing and imagining. It all boils down to a matter of trust and/or control. How much control do you wish to have over your readers’ imagining and how much do you trust them to see what you’re hoping they’ll see? A bit of advice: give your readers the benefit of the doubt and give them character details that do more than describe physical appearance. Let those details do two jobs at once.

So, here’s our girl. She’s a vintage cut-out doll. Let’s put a new dress on her and let’s make it one that means. It’s our job to bring Edith to life. I’ve given her a name. Now let’s give her a life. And finally, let’s generate some physical details that express that life most accurately. Write an introduction to Edith that would fall early in a story, establishing who she is for our imagined readers.

Return To This Place

A blog-world reminder that our next Salon meeting is this Thursday (the 15th). All manner of exciting and informative and hilarious discussion will take place. Writers of all levels, backgrounds, and areas of expertise are welcome. And all signs point to an important Cincinnati literary event to remember.

Framed

Exercise Your InkTank
Framed

One of the oldest forms of the story is the frame story, which makes sense given the story’s roots in oral tradition. Often the frame of the story involves the act of telling of a story. The teller narrates a story to a fictional audience, whether actual or implied. Eventually, the larger frame seems to fall away and the true story becomes the story that is told within the frame story, the story within the story.

In the best frame stories, we are always aware of the frame, though we may not focus on it. In the worst frame stories, the frame is a clunky device that merely bookends a story.

The telling of the story (or the frame) need not have primary or equal interest but it should certainly have an impact on the shape and character of the story within. The frame can determine the bent with which the story within is told, it can provide an occasion for the story within, it can even give the audience a glimpse of the world beyond the story within.

In establishing a good frame, we have to think about how we want the story within to be told; we have to think about audience. For our craftshop exercise today, I’m going to provide you with some criteria which should help you to establish a sound frame.

Here goes: Your storyteller is a character in the story within the story. Though not the most important character, she does have a story to tell. As a teenager, she knew a man who was later to become a highly respected and well known public figure. At one time, though, he was an ordinary high school student. They weren’t friends. They shared an evening together, both of them stranded (awkwardly) at a party in the woods gone haywire. There were others there and he wouldn’t have noticed her there, but she saw him do something extraordinary. Something that would make the story worth telling now, especially in light of who he has become. And perhaps also in light of who it is that she has become.

Your task is to find a way to let this character tell her story. Give her an audience within the story. Give her a voice. Ease us into the story within a story.