Always Keep Learning, Part I
When I’m asked for writing advice, the first thing I say, no matter the age group or skill level of my audience, is “always keep learning.” I tell them to seek out opportunities to develop their skills, expand their knowledge, and challenge themselves creatively: take a class, read a book on craft, join a critique group, read outside of your genre, attend a retreat, the possibilities go on and on. I’ve done all of these at one point or another and continue to do them when I can, but in my experience by far the most valuable—and cheapest—way to keep learning, no matter where you’re at in your journey, is to learn how to extrapolate your own lessons, writing exercises, and challenges from any creative work.
I talked a little about this in my last newsletter, on Every Frame a Painting and getting inspired by film and TV, and I thought it might be fun to walk you through the way I extrapolate lessons on writing craft from other written work.
To illustrate, I’d love to talk about about my contribution to a YA horror anthology that releases today: The House Where Death Lives, edited by my friend and fellow author Alex Brown (Damned If You Do). My story, “Vanishing Point,” is about a fifteen-year-old girl named Viv grappling with the loss of her mother, who died in a room at the far end of a hallway that Viv has always suspected to be longer and more sinister than it appears. I love writing short stories (though I don’t get to do them much these days), and this, I think, is the best one I’ve written to date.
It’s also inspired, like the anthology itself, by The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson. I love the Netflix adaptation by Mike Flanagan, but aside from the house and a few character names, they aren’t very similar in terms of plot. The TV series is about a family that moves into the house with the intention of flipping it. The novella is about a group of strangers with paranormal sensitivities enlisted to stay at the house while under observation by a psychologist. What they do have in common is a creeping, lurking sense that something is seriously, sinisterly wrong, from the very first scene to the last, and it’s this feeling that inspired “Vanishing Point.”
Let’s start by taking a look at this two-page scene from the novella (Chapter 5, Scene 4), where two of the subjects, Eleanor and Theodora, are sharing a room when they start hearing noises from the other side of the wall:
Sitting up in the two beds beside each other, Eleanor and Theodora reached out between and held hands tight; the room was brutally cold and thickly dark. From the room next door, the room which until that morning had been Theodora's, came the steady low sound of a voice babbling, too low for words to be understood, too steady for disbelief. Holding hands so hard that each of them could feel the other's bones, Eleanor and Theodora listened, and the low, steady sound went on and on, the voice lifting sometimes for an emphasis on a mumbled word, falling sometimes to a breath, going on and on. Then, without warning, there was a little laugh, the small gurgling laugh that broke through the babbling, and rose as it laughed, on up and up the scale, and then broke off suddenly in a little painful gasp, and the voice went on. Theodora's grasp loosened, and tightened, and Eleanor, lulled for a minute by the sounds, started and looked across to where Theodora ought to be in the darkness, and then thought, screamingly, Why is it dark? Why is it dark? She rolled and clutched Theodora's hand with both of hers, and tried to speak and could not, and held on, blindly, and frozen, trying to stand her mind on its feet, trying to reason again. We left the light on, she told herself, so why is it so dark? Theodora, she tried to whisper, and her mouth could not move; Theodora, she tried to ask, why is it dark? and the voice went on, babbling, low and steady, a little liquid gloating sound. She thought she might be able to distinguish the words if she lay perfectly still, if she lay perfectly still, and listened, and listened and heard the voice going on and on, never ceasing, and she hung desperately to Theodora's hand and felt an answering weight on her own hand. Then the little gurgling laugh came again, and the rising mad sound of it drowned out the voice, and then suddenly absolute silence. Eleanor took a breath, wondering if she could speak now, and then she heard a little soft cry which broke her heart, a little infinitely sad cry, a little sweet moan of wild sadness. It is a child, she thought with disbelief, a child is crying somewhere, and then, upon that thought, came the wild shrieking voice she had never heard before and yet knew she had heard always in her nightmares. "Go away!" it screamed. "Go away, go away, don't hurt me," and, after, sobbing, "Please don't hurt me. Please let me go home," and then the little sad crying again. I can't stand it, Eleanor thought concretely. This is monstrous, this is cruel, they have been hurting a child and I won't let anyone hurt a child, and the babbling went on, low and steady, on and on and on, the voice rising a little and falling a little, going on and on. Now, Eleanor thought, perceiving that she was lying sideways on the bed in the black darkness, holding with both hands to Theodora's hand, holding so tight she could feel the fine bones of Theodora's fingers, now, I will not endure this. They think to scare me. Well, they have. I am scared, but more than that, I am a person, I am human, I am a walking reasoning humorous human being and I will take a lot from this lunatic filthy house but I will not go along with hurting a child, no, I will yell I will I will yell "STOP IT," she shouted, and the lights were on the way they had left them and Theodora was sitting up in bed, startled and disheveled. "What?" Theodora was saying. "What, Nell? What?" "God God," Eleanor said, flinging herself out of bed and across the room to stand shuddering in a corner, "God God--whose hand was I holding?"
It’s a fabulous scene, and there’s a lot here to think about, including the repeated emphasis on Eleanor and Theodora holding hands—“held hands tight,” “[h]olding hands so hard that each of them could feel the other’s bones,” “clutched Theodora’s hand with both of hers,” “hung desperately to Theodora’s hand and felt an answering weight on her own hand,” “holding with both hands to Theodora’s hand, holding so tight she could feel the fine bone’s of Theodora’s fingers”—all of which serves to focus the attention on their clasped hands and not, in a throwaway detail in the very first line of the scene, the fact that they are “in the two beds beside each other” holding hands over the gap between them. This, to me, makes it all the more disconcerting when Eleanor shouts, the lights come on, Theodora is awake in her bed not knowing what happened, and what unnerves Eleanor most isn’t the voice beyond the walls, the voice that’s scared her so much this whole time, but this small gap in logic that we didn’t even know to pay attention to until we realize it bookends the scene: They start in separate beds. When the lights come on they are in separate beds. And the scariest part of the scene wasn’t the voice at all but the hand, the hand she clung to so desperately for comfort, the hand that wasn’t Theodora’s at all but some unknown, close, menacing thing.
The other thing that really strikes me about this scene, and struck me when I read it for the first time, is that creeping, lurking sense that something is seriously, sinisterly wrong. This isn’t a scene of monsters or gore or jump scares—it’s a scene of a mostly unintelligible voice and a hand that we don’t even know is scary until the end. But throughout it—and throughout the entire book, actually—it feels to me like the gritted teeth emoji, like the high-pitched whine you didn’t realize you were hearing until you heard it, like the prickling at the back of your neck that tells you you’re not alone.
Which brings me to the first thing I think about when I’m trying to extrapolate a lesson from a piece of writing: WHAT effect does this have on me?
Really, I think this comes down to the simple act of paying attention. How am I moved by the writing? Am I moved by the writing? Frustrated? Confused? Awestruck? Exhilarated? WHAT is this doing to me?
In the opening of his craft book, A Swim in the Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life, George Saunders describes this process as follows:
read the story, then turn your mind to the experience you've just had. Was there a place you found particularly moving? Something you resisted or that confused you? A moment when you found yourself tearing up, getting annoyed, thinking anew? Any lingering questions about the story? Any answer is acceptable. If you (my good-hearted trooper of a reader) felt it, it's valid. If it confounded you, that's worth mentioning. If you were bored or pissed off: valuable information. No need to dress up your response in literary language or express it in terms of "theme" or "plot" or "character development" or any of that.
That’s it. That’s all there is to this first step. Pay attention to how you reacted to the writing. Articulate it, if you can, even if in emoji-form.
OK, so this scene feels like 😬.
Sometimes the next step, particularly when my reaction to a piece of writing is negative—disinterested, disoriented, disgusted, and the like—is to ask, WHY might this effect be intentional? I think there’s a host of things to be learned when something rubs you the wrong way—beyond “it’s just not to my taste” or “it’s not good”—because often the writer made that choice for a reason, and there’s always a possibility that I just haven’t looked deeply enough to understand that reason. Maybe there’s something I’m missing. Maybe I thought the writing was supposed to be about x when it’s really about y. And so on. (Saunders talks about this, too, in his thoughts on what he calls “non-normative” aspects of the story in “The Singers” by Ivan Turgenev.)
In these situations, I try to lead with curiosity rather than judgment. I try to ask questions. I aim for wonder.
I adore this whole passage, but let’s assume, so that we can have an example, that there was something that, to me, just felt off about it. My task, then, is not to say, “Because it’s bad,” but to ask, “Why?” What, exactly, rubbed me the wrong way about it? Was it too obvious? Was it unbalanced? Did it feel unearned?
Let’s say it felt sloppy. OK, where? Maybe here:
I am scared, but more than that, I am a person, I am human, I am a walking reasoning humorous human being and I will take a lot from this lunatic filthy house but I will not go along with hurting a child, no, I will yell I will I will yell "STOP IT," she shouted, and the lights were on the way they had left them and Theodora was sitting up in bed, startled and disheveled.
This sentence is chock-a-block with comma splices. Commas, according to my high school English teacher, are weak punctuation. They can’t hold together independent clauses the way a semi-colon can and shouldn’t try. But this sentence is strung together by commas. It’s a run-on. In English Comp, it would’ve been red-penned to death.
But if we assume Jackson knows what she’s doing, then the next question is, again, “Why?” Why would she do this? We know she knows how to use a semi-colon—she does it in the first sentence of the scene! So, why, here, does she so intentionally avoid them? Why does she need this long sentence at all when she could have technically split it up with periods, like so?
I am scared, but more than that, I am a person. I am human. I am a walking reasoning humorous human being and I will take a lot from this lunatic filthy house but I will not go along with hurting a child. No, I will yell. I will. I will yell. "STOP IT," she shouted, and the lights were on the way they had left them and Theodora was sitting up in bed, startled and disheveled.
Split up in this way, the passage now has an entirely different feel. It feels more sturdy, more concrete, more logical.
So, again, why? What Jackson’s purpose in stripping the logic out of this passage? Why make this choice?
I think it’s because this isn’t a logical passage, and at this moment, nothing in Eleanor’s world is concrete. This is a passage where Eleanor is being pushed past her breaking point. She’s terrified. She’s in the dark. There’s a child being hurt in the next room, and she knows she should try to stop it, but she is too scared to move. All of this narration is going on inside her head, her thoughts piling on top of each other, one by one by one, not according to reason but according to the more instinctual impulses of fear and empathy. In this instinctual world, things happen fast, and they don’t always happen in a way that makes sense. The lines are blurred between one thought and another, illustrated even further by the dropped punctuation in “I will yell I will I will yell” and the collapsing of Eleanor’s internal world, “I will yell,” and the external world, wherein she does actually yell, “STOP IT.”
It isn’t until after she shouts, and the lights come back on, that the fast-paced terror of her internal world finally subsides. Things are concrete again. They can be relied upon. And the sentence—as well as Eleanor’s terror—can finally end.
It’s a great learning opportunity, and it came out of what was initially a negative reaction, but rather than dismissing it, we followed our sense of curiosity and wonder. Why? What choice is the author making? Where does that choice manifest? Why make that choice? Is there something we’re not seeing? Is there something at work here we’ve overlooked? What?
It’s easy to learn from something you immediately responded to—at least, it’s easy to point out why you responded to it—but it’s a lot more challenging, and can be a lot more fruitful, to learn from something you initially resisted or even dismissed.
But for me, there was no resistance to this passage. There’s so much to dive into here, so many techniques at work in developing that creeping, lurking, sinister, gritted-teeth-emoji feeling, so I could go straight to the heart of the matter, WHERE is this effect most prominent?
In my next newsletter, I’ll detail the rest of my process, pinpointing what craft elements are used to create an effect, and then I’ll show you how I used these craft elements to build the voice in my own work. Subscribe to make sure you don’t miss Part II!
Upcoming
Catch me this Saturday, August 10 at Books Inc. Alameda for the Northern California launch of The House Where Death Lives, with Alex Brown, Gina Chen, and Sandra Proudman, moderated by Tara Sim. Event details & RSVP here.
What I’m into these days
Roses. Since starting to grow tulips, I’ve become enamored with the idea of being able to grow my own bouquets all through the warm season. I have a few peonies, and last year I picked up some lilacs, but the bloom times for both of these are fleeting, so I’ve started to gravitate toward roses, which have many varieties that bloom in flushes throughout the year. I tested out my rose-growing skills last year with a miniature variety called Petite Peach, and once it came back with a bang, I’ve since added Emily Bronte, a creamy-apricoty-pinky English shrub rose bred by David Austin, and Dainty Bess, which has showy single-flowered blossoms with red stamens (pictured below). If this year’s additions are a success, I’ve got my eye on a couple more for next year!
