First round of descriptive/external exercises
Patricia C. Wrede
1. Write a paragraph to a page describing a place (a street, a building,
the interior of a room, a scenic view, a field, a clearing in a forest,
whatever) without using *any* adjectives or adverbs. The idea is to
concentrate on concrete nouns or verbs, e.g. "chunk of granite" instead of
"rock." For extra credit, don't use any adverbial or adjectival phrases
(like "of granite," above), either. Again, not filtered through a
particular viewpoint character -- omniscient or camera-eye.
2. Write one to three paragraphs describing an animal such as a horse, a
dog, or a cat, without ever using the respective noun (i.e., "horse" or
"dog" or "cat"). For extra credit, also avoid words that would make it
relatively easy to identify the animal, like "hooves" or "whiskers." When
you finish, see if the nearest handy person can figure out what animal you
were describing. If they guess wrong, try again. This can be filtered or
not, whatever you want.
3. Pick three to four major characters out of your current WIP. For each
character, do a one-paragraph description of whatever they're carrying in
their pockets, handbacks, backpacks, saddlebags, or whatever, in such a way
as to provide a sense of what each character is like. Do not mention the
names of the characters, though you may use pronouns. Do not go into the
backstory of the things, what they mean, or why the character is carrying
them. Omniscient, necessarily.
4. Write a one or two-page description of an event involving at least two
characters, as if it is being observed from a slight distance. This can be
filtered through the eyes of a third character who doesn't know either of
the first two and who is not particularly involved in whatever is going on,
or it can be camera-eye or omniscient. The point is to describe what
happens.
That should do to go on with; when you're done with these, I'll grab the
next chunk. The reason these are mostly omniscient is that the point is to
start by doing concrete what-is-that descriptions, unfiltered through a POV,
so that Catja (or anybody) can get a sense of how to do that and what it's
like. The next set will start factoring in filtering, and will use some of
the stuff from these as a basis.
(Some of these look like fun; I might do a couple myself, if I can steal the
time from revisions.)
Patricia C. Wrede
Irina Rempt
> 3. Pick three to four major characters out of your current WIP. ... For
> each character, do a one-paragraph description of whatever they're
> carrying in their pockets, handbacks, backpacks, saddlebags, or
> whatever, in such a way as to provide a sense of what each character is
> like.
Ooh, that looks like fun! It's not mandatory to do all exercises if you do
one, is it? (I've never had much mileage out of exercises because they
didn't feel like real writing to me, but I want to do this one!)
> Do not mention the names of the characters, though you may use
> pronouns.
Is it permitted to mention names of other people?
> Do not go into the backstory of the things, what they mean,
> or why the character is carrying them. Omniscient, necessarily.
What makes that necessary? I can imagine that it's not in the spirit of
the exercise to describe someone's belongings from their own viewpoint or
someone else's, but I don't see any *necessity* for omni.
Irina
--
Vesta veran, terna puran, farenin. http://www.valdyas.org/irina/
Beghinnen can ick, volherden will' ick, volbringhen sal ick.
http://www.valdyas.org/foundobjects/index.cgi Latest: 12-Oct-2005
Patricia C. Wrede
news:434d5ee9$0$11066$e4fe...@news.xs4all.nl...
> Patricia C. Wrede wrote:
>
>> 3. Pick three to four major characters out of your current WIP. ... For
>> each character, do a one-paragraph description of whatever they're
>> carrying in their pockets, handbacks, backpacks, saddlebags, or
>> whatever, in such a way as to provide a sense of what each character is
>> like.
>
> Ooh, that looks like fun! It's not mandatory to do all exercises if you do
> one, is it? (I've never had much mileage out of exercises because they
> didn't feel like real writing to me, but I want to do this one!)
It's not mandatory to do any of 'em. Catja asked for some exercises, and I
went through some of my references and picked out (and then adapted a bit)
several that I thought would be a) particularly good for what she's having
trouble with, and b) fun.
I admit, this one ended up appealing to me a lot, too. :)
>> Do not mention the names of the characters, though you may use
>> pronouns.
>
> Is it permitted to mention names of other people?
I suppose.
>
>> Do not go into the backstory of the things, what they mean,
>> or why the character is carrying them. Omniscient, necessarily.
>
> What makes that necessary? I can imagine that it's not in the spirit of
> the exercise to describe someone's belongings from their own viewpoint or
> someone else's, but I don't see any *necessity* for omni.
I suppose it could be camera-eye, but I was thinking of the sort of
X-ray-vision aspect -- being able to see inside people's pockets and
backpacks and so on, which seems very omniscient to me. If you wanted to, I
suppose you could make it from the point of view of Superman, or the guy who
does the X-ray scans of the luggage at the airport, but I hadn't thought of
that, then. So you're right, and it isn't *necessary* for it to be
omniscient.
Patricia C. Wrede
Dan Goodman
> That should do to go on with; when you're done with these, I'll grab
> the next chunk. The reason these are mostly omniscient is that the
> point is to start by doing concrete what-is-that descriptions,
> unfiltered through a POV, so that Catja (or anybody) can get a sense
> of how to do that and what it's like. The next set will start
> factoring in filtering, and will use some of the stuff from these as
> a basis.
Slight problem for me: I see the omniscient narrator as a character --
the implied storyteller in the implied frame story.
--
Dan Goodman
Journal http://www.livejournal.com/users/dsgood/
Clutterers Anonymous unofficial community
http://www.livejournal.com/community/clutterers_anon/
Decluttering http://decluttering.blogspot.com
Predictions and Politics http://dsgood.blogspot.com
All political parties die at last of swallowing their own lies.
John Arbuthnot (1667-1735), Scottish writer, physician.
Pat Bowne
"Patricia C. Wrede" <pwred...@aol.com> wrote in message
news:11kqjti...@corp.supernews.com...
> For Catja and anyone else who wants to play.
What does 'playing' involve? Are we going to post and discuss the results
here? (Looking at all these exercises from all the people likely to want to
play seems as if it would be an onerous task).
Pat
R. L.
<pwred...@aol.com> wrote:
>"Irina Rempt" <ir...@valdyas.org> wrote in message
>news:434d5ee9$0$11066$e4fe...@news.xs4all.nl...
>> Patricia C. Wrede wrote:
/snip/
>>> Do not go into the backstory of the things, what they mean,
>>> or why the character is carrying them. Omniscient, necessarily.
Not that I'm planning to try this, but that is the sort of thing that would
make my muse fall apart into flints like the troll witches. No what they
mean, no why? Even in omni, my muse wants to know who (presumably the
reader?) wants to know what, and why they want to know it.... And, I
suppose, how much of it they need....
>> What makes that necessary? I can imagine that it's not in the spirit of
>> the exercise to describe someone's belongings from their own viewpoint or
>> someone else's, but I don't see any *necessity* for omni.
>
>I suppose it could be camera-eye, but I was thinking of the sort of
>X-ray-vision aspect -- being able to see inside people's pockets and
>backpacks and so on, which seems very omniscient to me. If you wanted to, I
>suppose you could make it from the point of view of Superman, or the guy who
>does the X-ray scans of the luggage at the airport, but I hadn't thought of
>that, then. So you're right, and it isn't *necessary* for it to be
>omniscient.
What flashed to my mind was some people discussing what they'd found in the
pockets of a stranger, guessing what sort of person he was. Sort of like
in Manning Coles. My usual thing -- first, what's the POINT of this; supply
someone who wants to know, and their reason for wanting to know....
--
RL at houseboatonstyx com (insert one 'the')
http://www.livejournal.com/users/houseboatonstyx/
"Transition scene" and "action scene" and
"descriptive scene" tell you what kind of scene.
http://tinyurl.com/7px68
Kevin J. Cheek
says...
> For Catja and anyone else who wants to play.
>
> 1. Write a paragraph to a page describing a place (a street, a building,
> the interior of a room, a scenic view, a field, a clearing in a forest,
> whatever) without using *any* adjectives or adverbs. The idea is to
> concentrate on concrete nouns or verbs, e.g. "chunk of granite" instead of
> "rock." For extra credit, don't use any adverbial or adjectival phrases
> (like "of granite," above), either. Again, not filtered through a
> particular viewpoint character -- omniscient or camera-eye.
Sounds like off-line exercises, but for giggles, here goes an on-line
attempt:
I crept along the creek. Golden Orb spiders stood watch between the
hickories along the bank. I counted thirty webs in a hundred
paces before I turned my attention to the water. Here you could see the
limestone bottom some thirty feet below the surface. A gar stalked
minnows in the shadows. Ahead I saw a row of turtles sunning themselves
on a cypress log. One by one they dove into the water. In the swamp an
owl hooted; downstream another answered. All the while the mosquitos
swarmed about me, giving thanks for the bounty they were about to
receive.
> 2. Write one to three paragraphs describing an animal such as a horse, a
> dog, or a cat, without ever using the respective noun (i.e., "horse" or
> "dog" or "cat"). For extra credit, also avoid words that would make it
> relatively easy to identify the animal, like "hooves" or "whiskers." When
> you finish, see if the nearest handy person can figure out what animal you
> were describing. If they guess wrong, try again. This can be filtered or
> not, whatever you want.
Behind me I heard it following. It kept to the shadows, gliding between
the palmettos like some black ghost instead of an animal. Every now and
then the breeze swirled along the slough and I smelled the faint whiff of
carrion. I never knew you could smell them. It had to be close, and with
that thought I clutched my hickory limb tighter.
I thought of trying to shinny up a hickory. Could it follow? I tried to
remember. It's African kin sometimes dined in trees, lounging on a handy
limb, so likely it would do the same. If I was going to be lunch, I
wasn't about to deliver myself to its dinner table.
A low growl came from behind. I spun and stared. I thought it would
scream. But no, that was only in the spring during mating season, and
this was late summer. In the shadows beneath some wild grapes I could
make out cypress knees - just before I saw the greenish glint of its
eyes.
> 3. Pick three to four major characters out of your current WIP. For each
> character, do a one-paragraph description of whatever they're carrying in
> their pockets, handbacks, backpacks, saddlebags, or whatever, in such a way
> as to provide a sense of what each character is like. Do not mention the
> names of the characters, though you may use pronouns. Do not go into the
> backstory of the things, what they mean, or why the character is carrying
> them. Omniscient, necessarily.
He felt his arm. It was just a nick, but he felt his blood trickle all
the way down to his wrist. He did a quick assessment. He had his
tinderbox, though he didn't dare make a fire right now. Dagger. Helmet.
And of course his sword. He glanced at woman and the girl.
"Do you have provisions in your pack?" he asked.
The woman shook her head. "Only a few personal items for the journey. A
clean habit. Clothes. Odds and ends." She adjusted the straps. The pack
looked too heavy for just clothing, but he ignored that for now.
"And you?" he said as the turned to the girl.
"Nothing," she said. "Just the clothes I'm wearing." She looked down at
her dress. It was plain, but better quality than what most wore. The girl
ran her hand along the fabric and sighed, as though her clothing
was horsehair instead of wool.
> 4. Write a one or two-page description of an event involving at least two
> characters, as if it is being observed from a slight distance. This can be
> filtered through the eyes of a third character who doesn't know either of
> the first two and who is not particularly involved in whatever is going on,
> or it can be camera-eye or omniscient. The point is to describe what
> happens.
A bit lengthy for public display, so I'll omit this one.
--
-Kevin J. Cheek
Remove corn to send e-mail.
Patricia C. Wrede
news:11kreuo...@corp.supernews.com...
I was thinking of off-line, for just those reasons, with maybe some
discussion on-line of which ones were hard/easy/useful/unexpected/whatever.
Patricia C. Wrede
Brian M. Scott
<kev...@maize.planttel.net> wrote in
<news:MPG.1db7a25d7...@nntp.planttel.net> in
rec.arts.sf.composition:
> In article <11kqjti...@corp.supernews.com>, pwred...@aol.com
> says...
>> For Catja and anyone else who wants to play.
>> 1. Write a paragraph to a page describing a place (a street, a building,
>> the interior of a room, a scenic view, a field, a clearing in a forest,
>> whatever) without using *any* adjectives or adverbs. The idea is to
>> concentrate on concrete nouns or verbs, e.g. "chunk of granite" instead of
>> "rock." For extra credit, don't use any adverbial or adjectival phrases
>> (like "of granite," above), either. Again, not filtered through a
>> particular viewpoint character -- omniscient or camera-eye.
> Sounds like off-line exercises, but for giggles, here goes an on-line
> attempt:
> I crept along the creek. Golden Orb spiders stood watch between the
> hickories along the bank. I counted thirty webs in a hundred
> paces before I turned my attention to the water. Here you could see the
> limestone bottom some thirty feet below the surface. A gar stalked
> minnows in the shadows. Ahead I saw a row of turtles sunning themselves
> on a cypress log. One by one they dove into the water. In the swamp an
> owl hooted; downstream another answered. All the while the mosquitos
> swarmed about me, giving thanks for the bounty they were about to
> receive.
You have several words that are functioning adjectivally,
including 'Golden', 'thirty' (twice), 'limestone', and
'cypress'. 'Downstream' is adverbial.
[...]
Brian
Patricia C. Wrede
"R. L." <see...@no-spams.coms> wrote in message
news:jnjrk1pgja0hn0v7a...@4ax.com...
> On Wed, 12 Oct 2005 16:57:34 -0500, "Patricia C. Wrede"
> <pwred...@aol.com> wrote:
>
>>"Irina Rempt" <ir...@valdyas.org> wrote in message
>>news:434d5ee9$0$11066$e4fe...@news.xs4all.nl...
>>> Patricia C. Wrede wrote:
> /snip/
>
>>>> Do not go into the backstory of the things, what they mean,
>>>> or why the character is carrying them. Omniscient, necessarily.
>
> Not that I'm planning to try this, but that is the sort of thing that
> would
> make my muse fall apart into flints like the troll witches. No what they
> mean, no why? Even in omni, my muse wants to know who (presumably the
> reader?) wants to know what, and why they want to know it.... And, I
> suppose, how much of it they need....
That's part of why I normally hate exercises. However, when one has a
specific skill that one is trying to learn or hone, they can be useful. In
that case (which is pretty much the situation Catja is in), there is no
"why," except "to learn how to do it so you can use it elsewhere," any more
than there is a musical "why" to practicing scales on the piano, other than
"to teach your fingers how to do it so you can use it elsewhere." I've
never heard of a composer or pianist fretting about needing a muse (or the
musical equivalent) to play scales, and I don't think one is necessary in
order to write exercises.
If you don't find exercises interesting or useful, don't do them. If you
have no intention of doing them at all, I don't quite see why you want to
complain about them. If you're not going to *do* an exercise, why should it
*matter* to you whether it'd be easy or hard or make your muse dry up and
blow away?
>>> What makes that necessary? I can imagine that it's not in the spirit of
>>> the exercise to describe someone's belongings from their own viewpoint
>>> or
>>> someone else's, but I don't see any *necessity* for omni.
>>
>>I suppose it could be camera-eye, but I was thinking of the sort of
>>X-ray-vision aspect -- being able to see inside people's pockets and
>>backpacks and so on, which seems very omniscient to me. If you wanted to,
>>I
>>suppose you could make it from the point of view of Superman, or the guy
>>who
>>does the X-ray scans of the luggage at the airport, but I hadn't thought
>>of
>>that, then. So you're right, and it isn't *necessary* for it to be
>>omniscient.
>
>
> What flashed to my mind was some people discussing what they'd found in
> the
> pockets of a stranger, guessing what sort of person he was. Sort of like
> in Manning Coles. My usual thing -- first, what's the POINT of this;
> supply
> someone who wants to know, and their reason for wanting to know....
The POINT of this is to figure out a) how to do straight description without
filtering (which means I *didn't* want first-person or tight-third or
do-it-in-dialog; not because they're not worth doing, but because doing it
that way is not the POINT of the exercise), b) to do straight, non-filtered
description in such a way that it provides characterization and/or insight
(which, again, means I didn't want filtered viewpoints, because it's way too
easy to use the filtering to provide the characterization and/or insight,
and while that is a good and useful technique, it isn't the one that's
supposed to be being practiced in this particular exercise).
If you have to have some other "why" for your exercises, then *make one up*.
As long as it doesn't violate the constraints of the exercise, you'll
practice the skill, which is the reason I posted them.
Patricia C. Wrede
Darkhawk (H. Nicoll)
> I was thinking of off-line, for just those reasons, with maybe some
> discussion on-line of which ones were hard/easy/useful/unexpected/whatever.
I'm likely going to do the ones I find amusing and post them to my
livejournal, myself. :P
--
Darkhawk - H. A. Nicoll - http://aelfhame.net/~darkhawk/
They are one person, they are two alone
They are three together, they are for each other
- "Helplessly Hoping", Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young
Joann Zimmerman
spams.coms says...
> What flashed to my mind was some people discussing what they'd found in the
> pockets of a stranger, guessing what sort of person he was. Sort of like
> in Manning Coles. My usual thing -- first, what's the POINT of this; supply
> someone who wants to know, and their reason for wanting to know....
That's backward. It's not finding them there and trying to make sense of
it (ala Coles, Wimsey or any other amateur detective). Rather, you know
the character; what's the best way (through items in pockets) of
conveying to the reader what this character is? In the course of the
story, what would they need to pull out of their pockets/handbag, and is
this counter to how you've thought of them? Some characters in no way
would carry a mirror, or paper, others wouldn't leave home without them.
(I've not written the exercise, but I did do a mental checklist, and
discovered a whole little bit about my courtesan's domestic life that I
hadn't known.)
--
"I never understood people who don't have bookshelves."
--George Plimpton
Joann Zimmerman jz...@bellereti.com
Irina Rempt
> That's backward. It's not finding them there and trying to make sense of
> it (ala Coles, Wimsey or any other amateur detective). Rather, you know
> the character; what's the best way (through items in pockets) of
> conveying to the reader what this character is? In the course of the
> story, what would they need to pull out of their pockets/handbag, and is
> this counter to how you've thought of them? Some characters in no way
> would carry a mirror, or paper, others wouldn't leave home without them.
>
> (I've not written the exercise, but I did do a mental checklist, and
> discovered a whole little bit about my courtesan's domestic life that I
> hadn't known.)
I was mentally examining the Prince Regent's satchel (a small leather one
that he carries wherever he goes) and I found a nice little bit of
culture: a "marriage box" containing snips of the spouses' hair, plaited
together, with some of their children's hair pushed through the loops (I
think, but I'm not completely sure, that that hair is snipped off at the
name-giving ritual. If so, I'll have to go and edit it in _Terms of
Service_ before I next send it out). Prince Valain and his wife's
marriage-boxes are silver, but less affluent people will have wooden
ones, decorated as their means allow.
The rest of the prince's belongings were humdrum: some coins (but
"imprinted with an idealised version of his late mother's face") and his
seal ring, which he doesn't wear because it's bloody heavy.
R. L.
wrote:
>In article <jnjrk1pgja0hn0v7a...@4ax.com>, see-sig@no-
>spams.coms says...
>
>> What flashed to my mind was some people discussing what they'd found in the
>> pockets of a stranger, guessing what sort of person he was. Sort of like
>> in Manning Coles. My usual thing -- first, what's the POINT of this; supply
>> someone who wants to know, and their reason for wanting to know....
>
>That's backward. It's not finding them there and trying to make sense of
>it (ala Coles, Wimsey or any other amateur detective). Rather, you know
>the character; what's the best way (through items in pockets) of
>conveying to the reader what this character is?
That's content, not presentation. In a real story, you'd be right about how
to make up the contents of the pockets. But this exercise is about
presentation, describing what the items looked like and smelled like, etc.
Even in omni or camera-eye, some stories will need things described in
precise weight and chemical composition, some in much more general terms.
-- What's more importnat, is why the items in the pocket *matter* to the
*story*.
The presentation could describe everything from a pocket in terms of how
new and clean and fresh-smelling the items were. Or how dirty, how old. Or
how heavy. Or how big. Or how brightly colored. Those would all be physical
descriptions, could be camera eye. But there would still be some pattern.
Joann Zimmerman
spams.coms says...
> On Thu, 13 Oct 2005 11:11:58 -0500, Joann Zimmerman <jz...@bellereti.com>
> wrote:
>
> >In article <jnjrk1pgja0hn0v7a...@4ax.com>, see-sig@no-
> >spams.coms says...
> >
> >> What flashed to my mind was some people discussing what they'd found in the
> >> pockets of a stranger, guessing what sort of person he was. Sort of like
> >> in Manning Coles. My usual thing -- first, what's the POINT of this; supply
> >> someone who wants to know, and their reason for wanting to know....
> >
> >That's backward. It's not finding them there and trying to make sense of
> >it (ala Coles, Wimsey or any other amateur detective). Rather, you know
> >the character; what's the best way (through items in pockets) of
> >conveying to the reader what this character is?
>
>
> That's content, not presentation. In a real story, you'd be right about how
> to make up the contents of the pockets. But this exercise is about
> presentation, describing what the items looked like and smelled like, etc.
>
> Even in omni or camera-eye, some stories will need things described in
> precise weight and chemical composition, some in much more general terms.
> -- What's more importnat, is why the items in the pocket *matter* to the
> *story*.
>
> The presentation could describe everything from a pocket in terms of how
> new and clean and fresh-smelling the items were. Or how dirty, how old. Or
> how heavy. Or how big. Or how brightly colored. Those would all be physical
> descriptions, could be camera eye. But there would still be some pattern.
Sorry, it looked like to me you were not getting the why of describing
the stuff in the pockets. Once you've gotten round that, doing the
"presentation layer" is not that problematic in my view. It's getting
*what it is that has to be described* that's the tricky part for me.
Or else there are things about the word "why" that we are using
differently. I'm beginning to suspect that's the case, no matter what
else.
R. L.
<pwred...@aol.com> wrote:
>
>"R. L." <see...@no-spams.coms> wrote in message
>news:jnjrk1pgja0hn0v7a...@4ax.com...
>> On Wed, 12 Oct 2005 16:57:34 -0500, "Patricia C. Wrede"
>> <pwred...@aol.com> wrote:
>>
/snip/
>>>> Patricia C. Wrede wrote:
>> /snip/
>>
>>>>> Do not go into the backstory of the things, what they mean,
>>>>> or why the character is carrying them. Omniscient, necessarily.
>>
>> Not that I'm planning to try this, but that is the sort of thing that
>> would
>> make my muse fall apart into flints like the troll witches. No what they
>> mean, no why? Even in omni, my muse wants to know who (presumably the
>> reader?) wants to know what, and why they want to know it.... And, I
>> suppose, how much of it they need....
/snip talk about why do exercises/
>> What flashed to my mind was some people discussing what they'd found in
>> the
>> pockets of a stranger, guessing what sort of person he was. Sort of like
>> in Manning Coles. My usual thing -- first, what's the POINT of this;
>> supply
>> someone who wants to know, and their reason for wanting to know....
>
>The POINT of this is to figure out a) how to do straight description without
>filtering (which means I *didn't* want first-person or tight-third or
>do-it-in-dialog; not because they're not worth doing, but because doing it
>that way is not the POINT of the exercise),
You keep talking about the purpose of _doing_ an exercise.
I'm talking about something that would be in the text itself: some point or
focus or pattern within the resulting paragraph.
> b) to do straight, non-filtered
>description in such a way that it provides characterization and/or insight
About the character who owned the objects....
>(which, again, means I didn't want filtered viewpoints, because it's way too
>easy to use the filtering to provide the characterization and/or insight,
About the character who was examining the objects.... Or, in omni or
camera-eye, about the reader who is presumably going to read this... Or
about the sort of story it's going to be in....
I wonder if you've got some sort of default filter of your own that you're
calling 'non-filtered'. -- Even if characterization of the owner is the
focus, the point, acting as a filter....
Brian M. Scott
<see...@no-spams.coms> wrote in
<news:jl3tk1hj9s21e2tat...@4ax.com> in
rec.arts.sf.composition:
> On Thu, 13 Oct 2005 11:11:58 -0500, Joann Zimmerman <jz...@bellereti.com>
> wrote:
>>In article <jnjrk1pgja0hn0v7a...@4ax.com>, see-sig@no-
>>spams.coms says...
>>> What flashed to my mind was some people discussing what
>>> they'd found in the pockets of a stranger, guessing
>>> what sort of person he was. Sort of like in Manning
>>> Coles. My usual thing -- first, what's the POINT of
>>> this; supply someone who wants to know, and their
>>> reason for wanting to know....
>> That's backward. It's not finding them there and trying
>> to make sense of it (ala Coles, Wimsey or any other
>> amateur detective). Rather, you know the character;
>> what's the best way (through items in pockets) of
>> conveying to the reader what this character is?
> That's content, not presentation. [...] But this
> exercise is about presentation, describing what the items
> looked like and smelled like, etc.
This exercise is about _conveying_information_about_a_
_character_ without getting into the character's head, but
rather by giving physical descriptions of concrete physical
objects.
[...]
Brian
R. L.
wrote:
>In article <jl3tk1hj9s21e2tat...@4ax.com>, see-sig@no-
>spams.coms says...
>> On Thu, 13 Oct 2005 11:11:58 -0500, Joann Zimmerman <jz...@bellereti.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>> >In article <jnjrk1pgja0hn0v7a...@4ax.com>, see-sig@no-
>> >spams.coms says...
>> >
>> >> What flashed to my mind was some people discussing what they'd found in the
>> >> pockets of a stranger, guessing what sort of person he was. Sort of like
>> >> in Manning Coles. My usual thing -- first, what's the POINT of this; supply
>> >> someone who wants to know, and their reason for wanting to know....
>> >
>> >That's backward. It's not finding them there and trying to make sense of
>> >it (ala Coles, Wimsey or any other amateur detective). Rather, you know
>> >the character; what's the best way (through items in pockets) of
>> >conveying to the reader what this character is?
Well, if it's about characterizing the owner of the pockets -- that's more
than I knew before. That could be the pattern within the paragraph: its
point, its focus, why the paragraph is going to matter within the context
of the story.
>> That's content, not presentation. In a real story, you'd be right about how
>> to make up the contents of the pockets. But this exercise is about
>> presentation, describing what the items looked like and smelled like, etc.
>>
>> Even in omni or camera-eye, some stories will need things described in
>> precise weight and chemical composition, some in much more general terms.
>> -- What's more importnat, is why the items in the pocket *matter* to the
>> *story*.
>>
>> The presentation could describe everything from a pocket in terms of how
>> new and clean and fresh-smelling the items were. Or how dirty, how old. Or
>> how heavy. Or how big. Or how brightly colored. Those would all be physical
>> descriptions, could be camera eye. But there would still be some pattern.
>
>Sorry, it looked like to me you were not getting the why of describing
>the stuff in the pockets. Once you've gotten round that, doing the
>"presentation layer" is not that problematic in my view. It's getting
>*what it is that has to be described* that's the tricky part for me.
>
>
>Or else there are things about the word "why" that we are using
>differently. I'm beginning to suspect that's the case, no matter what
>else.
Something like that, apparently.
Open purses at 20 paces? That should take care of the "what it is that has
to be described".
<gets purse>
Ok, dammit, there's still a first and a middle and a last. How about
chronological order of what's seen, that's as neutral as I can think of.
Still there will have to be filtering by level of detail.
Dangling from the shoulder strap fittings are two sets of keys, one on a
yellow plastic /slide clamp thingy/, one on a maroon /slide clamp thingy/.
The keys on they yellow s.c.t. appear to be mostly car keys, Chevrolet,
oldish. The maroon s.c.t. has a post office box key and an improvised
shopping list folder.
[ Ok, there's dozens of presentation filtering decisions already made, and
I'm not even into the purse yet. There's enormous amounts of possible
detail about that 'folder'. It's a new credit card holder from a local
bank, but what's in it is pieces of scratch paper (inkjet spreadsheet
out-takes) sloppily cut to fit it, one with a local phone number memo. It's
held together awkwardly by a new office supply clamp thingy, and the
shopping lists are actually clamped outside the folder, and getting rather
bent at the corners. ]
[ Need I go on, or is it clear what I mean about filtering, pattern? And
this isn't even real camera eye, it uses shortcuts like 'improvised' and
'sloppily'. ]
<from here on I'm attempting to engage with the exercise, so bail now>
The front compartment is divided into spaces for checkbook, credit cards,
etc. Most of this compartment is empty: clean, new. There are eight
identical ballpoint pens sticking up halfway neatly, and one mechanical
pencil (all cheap supermarket brands, the kind sold in packets of a dozen).
Some sloppily folded dollar bills are spilling out of another strange
plastic little thing. [ looks ] Ok, that's from a bank several years ago
and it's stamped "receipt holder"; there is nothing in it but one- and
five-dollar bills, stuffed in carelessly. Loosely looped around five of the
pens is a wristwatch on a homemade white elastic band nearly an inch wide,
fastened with black velcro. It tells day of week, date, and time and says
"water resist" but it doesn't have any fancy knobby stuff around it looking
'sporty' and it's just one color, black In appropriate spaces are tweezers
and nail clippers, and a safe deposit key and a (small, light, flat, cheap
plastic) compass. The eyebrow pencil hasn't been used for years. [ Ok,
that's omni, that is. ]
In the middle compartment (which is the hardest to get to, and the safest),
is a second-generation checkbook: a new maroon plastic one from a new bank,
inside an old black leather checkbook holder that has a clear pocket on its
outside with a current driver's license in it, placed upside down so it
will right side up face the clerk when the checkbook is on a counter being
written in. This black holder is nice soft slick leather, tho lightweight,
and getting white and cracked on its spine. It has gone through several
banks in the last ten years. [ That's still omni, that is, I think. ]
This middle compartment has one zippered pocket, unzipped, with a plastic
bag showing, which holds receipts for recent hardware purchases in case of
needing to exchange them. Also some larger money and a flat folding steel
pocketknife of quite good quality from McGucken's Hardware in Boulder in c.
1990. Also people's business cards etc.
Also in the middle compartment, is a cell phone, car charger, folding
magnifying glass, various bottles of emergency stuff, some current memos,
and lord knows what all that has sunk to the bottom. [ Does the Omniscient
Narrator know? ]
In the third compartment, which closes with a zipper across its top, is
another improvised memo list folder with Post-It pads and such clamped into
a very nice old leather soft billfold, golden brown, not matching anything.
[ Oh, enough! Patterns keep breaking in! ]
R. L.
wrote:
>On Thu, 13 Oct 2005 17:03:17 GMT, "R. L."
><see...@no-spams.coms> wrote in
><news:jl3tk1hj9s21e2tat...@4ax.com> in
>rec.arts.sf.composition:
>
>> On Thu, 13 Oct 2005 11:11:58 -0500, Joann Zimmerman <jz...@bellereti.com>
>> wrote:
/snip/
>> But this
>> exercise is about presentation, describing what the items
>> looked like and smelled like, etc.
>
>This exercise is about _conveying_information_about_a_
>_character_ without getting into the character's head, but
>rather by giving physical descriptions of concrete physical
>objects.
Straight from the omni narrator or camera eye, to the reader of that story?
With purpose and emphasis presumably determined by the larger context?
Julian Flood
"Brian M. Scott" wrote
>
> This exercise is about _conveying_information_about_a_
> _character_ without getting into the character's head, but
> rather by giving physical descriptions of concrete physical
> objects.
My character has _pockets_?
JF
Patricia C. Wrede
news:MPG.1db8434b9...@news.individual.net...
> That's backward. It's not finding them there and trying to make sense of
> it (ala Coles, Wimsey or any other amateur detective). Rather, you know
> the character; what's the best way (through items in pockets) of
> conveying to the reader what this character is? In the course of the
> story, what would they need to pull out of their pockets/handbag, and is
> this counter to how you've thought of them? Some characters in no way
> would carry a mirror, or paper, others wouldn't leave home without them.
>
> (I've not written the exercise, but I did do a mental checklist, and
> discovered a whole little bit about my courtesan's domestic life that I
> hadn't known.)
What *I* got, when I started really thinking about this was... Well, my
current WIP only has two characters, both of whom are currently amnesiac and
who aren't carrying *anything*. Which means that, for them, the exercise
becomes about describing what's *missing* -- what *ought* to be in their
respective pockets, but that isn't there...the stuff they automatically
reach for without thinking, only to wonder why on earth they just did that
and what it was they were so sure they had handy. Fascinating take on it.
The whole question of where it all *went* is a plot point, and outside the
scope of the exercise...
Patricia C. Wrede
Patricia C. Wrede
"Kevin J. Cheek" <kev...@maize.planttel.net> wrote in message
news:MPG.1db7a25d7...@nntp.planttel.net...
> In article <11kqjti...@corp.supernews.com>, pwred...@aol.com
> says...
>> For Catja and anyone else who wants to play.
>>
>> 1. Write a paragraph to a page describing a place (a street, a building,
>> the interior of a room, a scenic view, a field, a clearing in a forest,
>> whatever) without using *any* adjectives or adverbs. The idea is to
>> concentrate on concrete nouns or verbs, e.g. "chunk of granite" instead
>> of
>> "rock." For extra credit, don't use any adverbial or adjectival phrases
>> (like "of granite," above), either. Again, not filtered through a
>> particular viewpoint character -- omniscient or camera-eye.
>
> Sounds like off-line exercises, but for giggles, here goes an on-line
> attempt:
>
> I crept along the creek.
Either you skipped ahead to the more advanced version(s), which I haven't
actually posted yet, or you missed the part about "not filtered through a
particular viewpoint character" -- first-person POV is pretty nearly as
filtered as you can get, and you did *all* of them that way. Which is OK,
actually, because you got the main points I was hoping for -- the concrete
external descriptions -- even if it *was* filtered. But still.
Patricia C. Wrede
Patricia C. Wrede
>>The POINT of this is to figure out a) how to do straight description
>>without
>>filtering (which means I *didn't* want first-person or tight-third or
>>do-it-in-dialog; not because they're not worth doing, but because doing it
>>that way is not the POINT of the exercise),
>
> You keep talking about the purpose of _doing_ an exercise.
>
> I'm talking about something that would be in the text itself: some point
> or
> focus or pattern within the resulting paragraph.
Yes. I know. And I'm saying that an exercise doesn't require that, in
order to serve the purpose of the exercise, any more than it needs a
particular theme or point of view ... unless, of course, that's part of the
point of the exercise. If *you* need that, make it up. Or don't bother
doing the exercises.
An exercise *isn't* *part* of a larger work. It doesn't *have* an inherent
purpose or function that it's going to contribute to a larger whole. If you
want it to have one, you have to make it up, and when you do, you can make
that purpose or function be whatever you want, or you can just ignore it.
It'll still be the same exercise, and it'll still teach you the same things
(or not, if you can't learn from exercises).
You can do the what-are-they-carrying exercise as if a camera is panning
over the aftermath of a great battle, lingering on the stuff that has
spilled out of the torn backpacks lying by some of the corpses. Or you can
do it as if a shelf broke in an airport baggage-handling machine, splitting
open a bunch of bags whose stuff is going to get mixed together, for later
plot purposes. Or you can do it as if you've decided to do an extremely
idiosyncratic "Dramatis Persona" list that doesn't have anything in
particular to *do* with a story. It *does* *not* *matter* to writing the
exercise. You have to make up the characters, for goodness' sake; if you
need this other stuff, make it up, too.
>> b) to do straight, non-filtered
>>description in such a way that it provides characterization and/or insight
>
> About the character who owned the objects....
Yes. That was kind of the point of the exercise.
>>(which, again, means I didn't want filtered viewpoints, because it's way
>>too
>>easy to use the filtering to provide the characterization and/or insight,
>
> About the character who was examining the objects.... Or, in omni or
> camera-eye, about the reader who is presumably going to read this... Or
> about the sort of story it's going to be in....
Heavy filtering, of the sort Catja has been doing, can (and frequently does)
provide *both* sorts of characterization and/or insight -- into the
character who owns the objects *and* into the character examining them
(assuming that they aren't the same character, which is perfectly possible).
Either of those would defeat the purpose of doing the exercise, which is to
*not* filter, to concentrate on concrete, specific, *external* details.
If you want some other sort of exercise, present some other sort of problem
for which doing exercises is a reasonable way to learn whatever the
solution-techique is.
> I wonder if you've got some sort of default filter of your own that you're
> calling 'non-filtered'. -- Even if characterization of the owner is the
> focus, the point, acting as a filter....
You certainly are reading a tremendous lot into one lousy exercise. Which I
didn't make up myself, BTW; I re-worded it slightly ("Take four characters
from your current WIP" is not the way it was phrased in the book I found it
in), but the notion wasn't mine.
If you don't like it and don't think it would be helpful *for you*, fine;
don't bother doing it. Other people seem to think doing it would be
interesting and fun, and perhaps useful. But kindly don't try to make it
into more than it is.
Patricia C. Wrede
Brian M. Scott
<see...@no-spams.coms> wrote in
<news:jiatk1hjbhn146auo...@4ax.com> in
rec.arts.sf.composition:
> On Thu, 13 Oct 2005 13:39:27 -0400, "Brian M. Scott" <b.s...@csuohio.edu>
> wrote:
>>On Thu, 13 Oct 2005 17:03:17 GMT, "R. L."
>><see...@no-spams.coms> wrote in
>><news:jl3tk1hj9s21e2tat...@4ax.com> in
>>rec.arts.sf.composition:
>>> On Thu, 13 Oct 2005 11:11:58 -0500, Joann Zimmerman <jz...@bellereti.com>
>>> wrote:
> /snip/
>>> But this
>>> exercise is about presentation, describing what the items
>>> looked like and smelled like, etc.
>>This exercise is about _conveying_information_about_a_
>>_character_ without getting into the character's head, but
>>rather by giving physical descriptions of concrete physical
>>objects.
> Straight from the omni narrator or camera eye, to the reader of that story?
> With purpose and emphasis presumably determined by the larger context?
There is no larger context. It's an *exercise*, like scales
on a musical instrument, intended to develop a particular
skill.
Brian
Dorothy J Heydt
R. L. <see...@no-spams.coms> wrote:
>
>Open purses at 20 paces? That should take care of the "what it is that has
>to be described".
>
><gets purse>
[schnipp much detailed description]
Let's try mine, smaller and simpler.
A rectangular fabric pouch on a long strap made of rat-tail, sewn
in some Third World country from bits of cheap velveteen and a
panel of fragile brocade that has already frayed out once at the
bottom and had to be patched with a strip of tough cotton
broadcloth. The dominant color is black. It's divided by fabric
partitions into three pockets: one half-sized with a zipper, one
full-sized with a zipper, and one full-sized without.
In the first pocket is money -- a couple of twenties, a couple of
singles, a bit of change -- and an ATM card.
In the second pocket is a pen, a checkbook in a crumbling black
plastic holder, and a small fabric measuring tape that rolls up
into a little plastic box. The checkbook holder contains the
usual block of checks and the usual check register. Between the
check register and the holder have been tucked a Costco card and
a California non-driver's ID card. Between the check block and
the holder have been tucked a medical insurance card and a dental
insurance card. The deposit slips at the back of the check
block, which no one ever uses any more, have been used for
shopping lists.
The third pocket, the one without a zipper, contains a
handkerchief, a peppermint drop, and a Ricola sugarless herbal
cough drop; though if you caught the purse as it was actually
being taken outside, there might be a paperback book in there
too.
Dorothy J. Heydt
Albany, California
djh...@kithrup.com
Alma Hromic Deckert
<pwred...@aol.com> wrote:
>
>What *I* got, when I started really thinking about this was... Well, my
>current WIP only has two characters, both of whom are currently amnesiac and
>who aren't carrying *anything*. Which means that, for them, the exercise
>becomes about describing what's *missing* -- what *ought* to be in their
>respective pockets, but that isn't there...the stuff they automatically
>reach for without thinking, only to wonder why on earth they just did that
>and what it was they were so sure they had handy. Fascinating take on it.
>
Ooo, I *like* that.
I tried doing it with one of my characters, one who kind of belongs in
two very different and distinct cultures, and you wouldn't believe
what a hodgepodge of luggage that girl carries in her bags...
A.
Brian M. Scott
<see...@no-spams.coms> wrote in
<news:qr5tk11n63dip9eae...@4ax.com> in
rec.arts.sf.composition:
[...]
> Well, if it's about characterizing the owner of the pockets -- that's more
> than I knew before.
??? From Patricia's original post:
For each character, do a one-paragraph description of
whatever they're carrying in their pockets, handbacks,
backpacks, saddlebags, or whatever, in such a way
as to provide a sense of what each character is like.
Note: 'in such a way as to provide a sense of what each
character is like'.
[...]
> The front compartment is divided into spaces for checkbook, credit cards,
> etc. Most of this compartment is empty: clean, new. There are eight
> identical ballpoint pens sticking up halfway neatly, and one mechanical
> pencil (all cheap supermarket brands, the kind sold in packets of a dozen).
> Some sloppily folded dollar bills are spilling out of another strange
> plastic little thing. [ looks ] Ok, that's from a bank several years ago
> and it's stamped "receipt holder"; there is nothing in it but one- and
> five-dollar bills, stuffed in carelessly. Loosely looped around five of the
> pens is a wristwatch on a homemade white elastic band nearly an inch wide,
> fastened with black velcro. It tells day of week, date, and time and says
> "water resist" but it doesn't have any fancy knobby stuff around it looking
> 'sporty' and it's just one color, black In appropriate spaces are tweezers
> and nail clippers, and a safe deposit key and a (small, light, flat, cheap
> plastic) compass. The eyebrow pencil hasn't been used for years. [ Ok,
> that's omni, that is. ]
It could be; it could also very easily be first person.
[...]
Brian
Joann Zimmerman
spams.coms says...
> On Thu, 13 Oct 2005 12:16:10 -0500, Joann Zimmerman <jz...@bellereti.com>
> wrote:
>
> >In article <jl3tk1hj9s21e2tat...@4ax.com>, see-sig@no-
> >spams.coms says...
> >> On Thu, 13 Oct 2005 11:11:58 -0500, Joann Zimmerman <jz...@bellereti.com>
> >> wrote:
> >>
> >> >In article <jnjrk1pgja0hn0v7a...@4ax.com>, see-sig@no-
> >> >spams.coms says...
> >> >
> >> >> What flashed to my mind was some people discussing what they'd found in the
> >> >> pockets of a stranger, guessing what sort of person he was. Sort of like
> >> >> in Manning Coles. My usual thing -- first, what's the POINT of this; supply
> >> >> someone who wants to know, and their reason for wanting to know....
> >> >
> >> >That's backward. It's not finding them there and trying to make sense of
> >> >it (ala Coles, Wimsey or any other amateur detective). Rather, you know
> >> >the character; what's the best way (through items in pockets) of
> >> >conveying to the reader what this character is?
>
> Well, if it's about characterizing the owner of the pockets -- that's more
> than I knew before. That could be the pattern within the paragraph: its
> point, its focus, why the paragraph is going to matter within the context
> of the story.
Right like it said in the exercise: "do a one-paragraph description of
whatever they're carrying in their ... in such a way as to provide a
sense of what the character is like."
[Stuff in RL's purse deleted]
I didn't get any sense from that of what you are like.
"When she fell, the velvet waist-bag had hit the ground and spilled
open. A number of gold coins were scattered prodigally about. The
scraps of fabric--blue and gold velvet, and a matching gold silk--had
not been substantial enough to keep the pocket mirror's silver case,
liberally encrusted with antique goddesses, from breaking open. An
orange, almost out of season, had not split open, but the shards of
mirror-glass had rendered it inedible. Still protruding from the bag was
a twist of silk, in the blue of the Aspiranti, threaded with a golden
needle."
Spend a minute thinking about what you think the character is about,
from this description. Then hit the spoiler space.
S
P
O
I
L
E
R
[While not literally referencing the backstory in my paragraph, each of
these items is informed by it: Mia is a courtesan, very highly-paid. The
"prodigal" is a reference to her money habits. She had been given the
pick of some fabric bolts just in from the East, and has taken a few
samples to see if they're what she wants. Although the story as a whole
revolves around large mirrors, she would naturally have a very tiny
mirror, in an elaborate case, rather like a 20th-c woman's powder
compact. The antique gods with which it is decorated show the taste and
refinement of the giver, a young man who runs with the most advanced
intellectual crowd. She had taken a whole basket of oranges to her
mother, but had kept one back as a possible snack; she appears to suffer
occasionally from low blood sugar, a condition which will become
seriously exacerbated when she takes up the practice of magic. The twist
of thread, in a particular color, indicates that at least occasionally
she entertains her main patron somewhere other than her own apartments;
he is a member of a fraternity whose identifying feature is stockings in
a peculiar shade, trimmed with gaudy ribbons. The discussion we had here
of men's underwear and hose a month or two back got me to conclude that
part of her special services would include sewing his stockings back on
if he'd completely stripped, so there's a scene (at her place) in which
she does sew up his hose, although it's not right around the incident of
the fall, which actually does take place.]
R. L.
<pwred...@aol.com> wrote:
>"R. L." <see...@no-spams.coms> wrote in message
>news:dm4tk11ge7n5pp121...@4ax.com...
>> On Wed, 12 Oct 2005 23:46:17 -0500, "Patricia C. Wrede"
>> <pwred...@aol.com> wrote:
/snip/
>> You keep talking about the purpose of _doing_ an exercise.
>>
>> I'm talking about something that would be in the text itself: some point
>> or focus or pattern within the resulting paragraph.
>
>Yes. I know. /snip/
> If *you* need that, make it up.
Looking at what those are and how to make one up (focus, pattern, whatever)
-- is just what I'm doing. And very helpful it is.
/snip/
Look, I'm not faulting your exercise, or insisting on trying it. (Tho I did
try a bit, in a reply to Joann iirc.)
>You can do the what-are-they-carrying exercise as if a camera is panning
>over the aftermath of a great battle, lingering on the stuff that has
>spilled out of the torn backpacks lying by some of the corpses.
There are still choices about what items to mention, and how much detail on
each.
>Or you can
>do it as if a shelf broke in an airport baggage-handling machine, splitting
>open a bunch of bags whose stuff is going to get mixed together, for later
>plot purposes.
That would take care of what the objects were. I suppose their later plot
purpose, might determine what details get mentioned now, too....
/snip/
>Heavy filtering, of the sort Catja has been doing, can (and frequently does)
>provide *both* sorts of characterization and/or insight -- into the
>character who owns the objects *and* into the character examining them
>(assuming that they aren't the same character, which is perfectly possible).
>Either of those would defeat the purpose of doing the exercise, which is to
>*not* filter, to concentrate on concrete, specific, *external* details.
Hm.
Version A:
The leftover objects included a knitting bag, a briefcase, and a diaper
bag. In the knitting bag were 18 inch steel needles, shimmering metallic
green. In the briefcase were hooked carton openers and razor pasteup
cutters, still in their original wrapping. In the diaper bag were six
packages of diaper pins, unopened.
Version B:
The leftover objects includled a soft lumpy bag covered in tapestry with a
floral pattern in soft faded green and gray; a shiny alligator leather
monogrammed briefcase with brass fittings; and a hot pink plastic bag with
cracked handles, from which came a faint order of sewage. In the lumpy
green bag was a half-knitted sweater in shades of avocado, moss green, and
teal, folded neatly around its knitting needles, also green. In the
briefcase were order forms, brochures, a presentation pointer, a miniature
slide projector, cassette tapes, and various tools in bright colored
plastic wrap. In the pink bag were dirty diapers, stuffed on top of plastic
packages of baby thermometers, diaper pins, and pacifiers.
That's specific, external details. Well, both versions could use a few more
adjectives. But thedifference in the results sounds like some sort of
'filtering' to me. Would you call it something else?
--
RL at houseboatonstyx com (insert one 'the')
http://www.livejournal.com/users/houseboatonstyx/
"Transition scene" and "action scene" and
Alma Hromic Deckert
Heydt) wrote:
>In article <qr5tk11n63dip9eae...@4ax.com>,
>R. L. <see...@no-spams.coms> wrote:
>>
>>Open purses at 20 paces? That should take care of the "what it is that has
>>to be described".
>>
>><gets purse>
>
>[schnipp much detailed description]
>
>Let's try mine, smaller and simpler.
>
Let's try another take.
I've kind of got into the habit of not carrying an actual PURSE, in
the sense of a handbag, for a while. What I have instead is an
overlarge black leather wallet-type leather doodad which has a
zippered half and another half that closes with a leather strap and a
clasp. In this, as follows: the zippered half has two sides, divided
by a tiny zippered pocketlet in the middle. In one of the open sides I
have money (actual paper bills) and a bunch of credit or ATM or the
like cards stacked in pockets along tie side. In the other open side
there is a mess of ATM account balance receipt printouts, a tiny
matchbook-sized notebook, and a thin cardboard ticket-like object that
proclaims "Charter Member of the [Seattle} Science Fiction Museum and
Hall Of Fane" - it is a voucher for a Charter Member T-shirt, never
redeemed. In the zippered pocketlet there are a bunch of tiny "lucky
charms": a little silver feather, a tiny gold tortoise, and an
orthodox cross, plus a lucky penny I picked up off the ground at one
point and stuck in there. The feather fell off the thing that's
currently attached to the zipper that closes this whole section, whcih
is a delicate little wire dreamcatcher strung with tiny blue beads.
In the other section, the one that closes with a strap, I have two
different checkbooks (long story), and there's a pen tucked into the
fold - it used to be a smart matt black one which I loved but I
somehow lost it and its replacement is a faux-cloissone one, red, with
a chinese dragon winding around it. In the pockets on the other side
of the checkbook holder, I have a bunch of cards - including but not
limited to the Costco card, the library card, my HHilton membership
card, my Amtrak membership card, my drivers licence, a photograph
which hubby and I had taken together about a year or so ago, and a
batch of business cards from the latest con I just came back from.
This, and my keys (which contain car and house keys, a P O Box key, a
badly out of date Medcalert bracelet, a small flashlight and a
commemorative medallion keyring from the 600th anniversary of a
historical event) are what I usually carry in hand.
There IS a handbag, of course, and in THAT there is also a hairbrush,
a Moleskin notebook in which there are scribbled notes about various
stories and random inspirations which hit me when the notebook was
handy, a Moleskin concertina receipt receptacle which gets stuffed
with things I can deduct from taxes whenever I go anywhere deductible,
(usually) my address book, sometimes my cell phone (when I remember
it), a small tartan fabric cosmetics purse which contains an ancient
kohl eyeliner pencil and about four different kinds of lipstick
although I rarely wear any these days) and about twenty (i exaggerate
of course but damn near it) pens in various stages of slow expiration
and of various colours and shades. Sometimes sunglasses. Oh, and there
are also loose bookplates in the outer pocket of that, as well as a
sheet of cold medicine someone gave me at a booksigning once when I
was fairly obviously miserably sick with a full-blown headcold. The
cold is long gone, the medicine was never removed from the pocket....
A.
Joann Zimmerman
ang...@vaxer.net says...
> Oh, and there
> are also loose bookplates in the outer pocket of that, as well as a
> sheet of cold medicine someone gave me at a booksigning once when I
> was fairly obviously miserably sick with a full-blown headcold. The
> cold is long gone, the medicine was never removed from the pocket....
Thanks for reminding me. My character still has the needle and thread in
her bag, despite having told the chap with the fancy stockings to get
temporarily lost about a week previously. She is therefore either
unorganized or a closet sentimentalist.
Dorothy J Heydt
In the context of what you've just said, one might have guessed
something from your paragraph. Without the context, all I could
tell was "She's got money."
Patricia C. Wrede
I wouldn't call the difference "filtering" at all. I'd call it a difference
in style.
You're right to say that different styles are suited to different stories.
But since, for any given exercise that happens *not* to be about style, the
style doesn't usually matter so far as doing the exercise is concerned, you
can pick whatever style you want, for whatever reason you want, and use
that. Either or both of the above work just fine as a response to the
describe-what-they're-carrying exercise.
I think you're trying to be a lot more advanced than the exercise calls
for -- you're doing *more* *than* one thing, looking at how the choice of
details and the presentation might affect some hypothetical story. But an
exercise isn't an excerpt from a story, and most of the time, it isn't
*trying* to do more than one thing. Not yet, anyway. That's why you start
with stuff like "describe an event" or "List what somebody has in his
backpack," and once you've figured out how to do that, the *next* exercise
is "describe the same event from the viewpoint of one of the participants"
or "describe what's in the backpack from the viewpoint of a) the person's
estranged lover, b) the person's mother, c) a complete stranger who picked
it up by accident on the subway." And after *that*, you go on to "Describe
the contents of the backpack from the point of view of the estranged lover,
whom you, but not the reader, know is going to get run over by a train in
the next scene."
(Actually, I'm not planning to do that sort of sequence, though if anybody
thinks it'd be interesting, they might as well go for it. I'm just poking
around for stuff I think will be of assistance for Catja's particular
problems, and I'm not going to post another set of possible exercises until
I find out what she thought of this set -- whether they were hard, easy,
helpful, enlightening, stupid, or what.)
Patricia C. Wrede
S. Palmer
> For Catja and anyone else who wants to play.
I'm not feeling inclined to post my responses to these online, but I
thought I'd let you know that I found them worthwhile exercises and
definitely will keep my eye out for the next set (though to be fair I
tend to keep my eye out for any posts coming from you, even if I'm
totally stuck in lurker mode.)
-Suzanne
Kevin J. Cheek
b.s...@csuohio.edu says...
> You have several words that are functioning adjectivally,
> including 'Golden', 'thirty' (twice), 'limestone', and
> 'cypress'. 'Downstream' is adverbial.
Golden Orb Spider is a proper name, just like Red Cockaded Woodpecker. A
Golden Orb Spider is a large yellow-black spider several inches across
which weaves huge orb-shaped webs. They resemble something out of a
jungle movie. What I see there is a capitalization error in the s in
spider.
--
-Kevin J. Cheek
Remove corn to send e-mail.
R. L.
remember it.
On Thu, 13 Oct 2005 20:29:06 GMT, R. L. <see...@no-spams.coms> wrote:
>On Thu, 13 Oct 2005 14:11:21 -0500, "Patricia C. Wrede"
><pwred...@aol.com> wrote:
/snip/
>>Or you can
>>do it as if a shelf broke in an airport baggage-handling machine, splitting
>>open a bunch of bags whose stuff is going to get mixed together, for later
>>plot purposes.
/snip/
>Version A:
>The leftover objects included a knitting bag, a briefcase, and a diaper
>bag. In the knitting bag were 18 inch steel needles, shimmering metallic
>green. In the briefcase were hooked carton openers and razor pasteup
>cutters, still in their original wrapping. In the diaper bag were six
>packages of diaper pins, unopened.
>
>Version B:
>The leftover objects includled a soft lumpy bag covered in tapestry with a
>floral pattern in soft faded green and gray; a shiny alligator leather
>monogrammed briefcase with brass fittings; and a hot pink plastic bag with
>cracked handles, from which came a faint order of sewage. In the lumpy
>green bag was a half-knitted sweater in shades of avocado, moss green, and
>teal, folded neatly around its knitting needles, also green. In the
>briefcase were order forms, brochures, a presentation pointer, a miniature
>slide projector, cassette tapes, and various tools in bright colored
>plastic wrap. In the pink bag were dirty diapers, stuffed on top of plastic
>packages of baby thermometers, diaper pins, and pacifiers.
>
>That's specific, external details. Well, both versions could use a few more
>adjectives. But the difference in the results soubnds like some sort of
>'filtering' to me. Would you call it something else?
[Patricia's] reply called it 'style' not 'filtering'.*
In any case it made a difference in CONTENT: which objects and details were
mentioned. Version A focused on sharp objects, possible weapons. Version B
focused on colors and decorations, barely mentioning the sharp objects.
This is all being helpful. I see that what is shattering my muse on
certain passages may be 'choice paralysis'. So maybe these exercises will
be useful, if I begin each one by making up whatever context stuff it takes
to get her working on it.
--
RL at houseboatonstyx com (insert one 'the')
http://www.livejournal.com/users/houseboatonstyx/
* ( It *felt* like filtering as I did it, but whatever.)
Brian M. Scott
<kev...@maize.planttel.net> wrote in
<news:MPG.1db8c8f7b...@nntp.planttel.net> in
rec.arts.sf.composition:
> In article <s832w0v8wps8$.c0vgenq...@40tude.net>,
> b.s...@csuohio.edu says...
>> You have several words that are functioning adjectivally,
>> including 'Golden', 'thirty' (twice), 'limestone', and
>> 'cypress'. 'Downstream' is adverbial.
> Golden Orb Spider is a proper name, just like Red Cockaded Woodpecker.
Doesn't matter: 'Golden' still functions adjectivally, as
indeed does 'Golden Orb'.
[...]
Brian
Kevin J. Cheek
says...
> Either you skipped ahead to the more advanced version(s), which I haven't
> actually posted yet, or you missed the part about "not filtered through a
> particular viewpoint character" -- first-person POV is pretty nearly as
> filtered as you can get, and you did *all* of them that way. Which is OK,
> actually, because you got the main points I was hoping for -- the concrete
> external descriptions -- even if it *was* filtered. But still.
I'm not sure I can write without filtering it through a viewpoint
character. When I write fiction, I see the scene through the main
character's eyes. Even in third person it's filtered through the main
character's senses. When I do try to write the omnipresent view, it comes
out in passive voice. I've read enough omnipresent viewpoints that I
*should* be able to do so, but I don't seem to have the knack. OTOH, that
could be a reason for exercise, too.
Kevin J. Cheek
b.s...@csuohio.edu says...
> Doesn't matter: 'Golden' still functions adjectivally, as
> indeed does 'Golden Orb'.
I think does, since it's part of the proper name. It's like the name "Mad
Max."
Brian M. Scott
<kev...@maize.planttel.net> wrote in
<news:MPG.1db8fa6dc...@nntp.planttel.net> in
rec.arts.sf.composition:
> In article <1cdb8z5op0wxw.1a7miiq4y42o4$.d...@40tude.net>,
> b.s...@csuohio.edu says...
>> Doesn't matter: 'Golden' still functions adjectivally, as
>> indeed does 'Golden Orb'.
> I think does, since it's part of the proper name. It's
> like the name "Mad Max."
In which 'Mad' is plainly an adjective modifying 'Max'.
By the way, my original comment was not intended to be read
as a statement that the passage violated the spirit of the
exercise; it was more in the nature of an observation that
'adjective' and 'adverb' are in practice a bit fuzzy,
especially in the case of nouns used adjectivally. For
further fuzziness, note that 'He held a golden orb' violates
the constraint, while 'He held an orb of gold' does not.
Brian
Zeborah
> What *I* got, when I started really thinking about this was...
I started off by thinking that in the book I'd actually described my
protag's purse, or rather his sparse luggage, albeit from the antag's
pov. *Then* I realised I hadn't described my antag's luggage, and I
realised they probably don't have much more than my protag, and probably
like him they've got a photo of their family.
And it'll be downright easy to find somewhere for them to meditate on
that, which will provide some actual physical description, which is
desperately needed -- and hint at some of their similarities with the
protag at the same time. That's character and setting and theme, woot!
Zeborah
--
Gravity is no joke.
http://www.geocities.com/zeborahnz/
Dan Goodman
> That's specific, external details. Well, both versions could use a
> few more adjectives. But thedifference in the results sounds like
> some sort of 'filtering' to me. Would you call it something else?
One of them says more about the owner than the other does.
Which, within the context of the exercise, means that it's better.
Now, in Tim O'Brien's short story "The Things They Carried," this kind
of description is the _entire_ story. In another kind of story,
detailed description of what a particular character carried might only
get in the way of the story.
And in another story, two different characters would see the stuff in
those two ways -- and they would be characterizing those people rather
than the owner of the stuff.
--
Dan Goodman
Journal http://www.livejournal.com/users/dsgood/
Clutterers Anonymous unofficial community
http://www.livejournal.com/community/clutterers_anon/
Decluttering http://decluttering.blogspot.com
Predictions and Politics http://dsgood.blogspot.com
All political parties die at last of swallowing their own lies.
John Arbuthnot (1667-1735), Scottish writer, physician.
Dan Goodman
> In article <11ktcdp...@corp.supernews.com>, pwred...@aol.com
> says...
> > Either you skipped ahead to the more advanced version(s), which I
> > haven't actually posted yet, or you missed the part about "not
> > filtered through a particular viewpoint character" -- first-person
> > POV is pretty nearly as filtered as you can get, and you did all of
> > them that way. Which is OK, actually, because you got the main
> > points I was hoping for -- the concrete external descriptions --
> > even if it was filtered. But still.
>
> I'm not sure I can write without filtering it through a viewpoint
> character. When I write fiction, I see the scene through the main
> character's eyes. Even in third person it's filtered through the main
> character's senses. When I do try to write the omnipresent view, it
> comes out in passive voice. I've read enough omnipresent viewpoints
> that I should be able to do so, but I don't seem to have the knack.
> OTOH, that could be a reason for exercise, too.
I see "omnipresent" viewpoint as a character. Perhaps the implied
author (who can be rather different from the actual author.) More
usually, the implied storyteller in the implied frame story.
But a reader who doesn't see fiction that way isn't likely to know the
writer does. Unless the story is presented as a historical document
("This is how Nita Cain became a heroine by destroying Heaven") or as
fiction not written in our time and place ("Return with us to the
kinder, simpler times of the 27th Century, when duels were fought with
nothing more dangerous than atomic weapons....")/
R. L.
wrote:
>R. L. wrote:
>
>> That's specific, external details. Well, both versions could use a
>> few more adjectives. But thedifference in the results sounds like
>> some sort of 'filtering' to me. Would you call it something else?
>
>One of them says more about the owner than the other does.
>
>Which, within the context of the exercise, means that it's better.
I'm afraid I'd missed the part about characterizing the owner. I was
working off Patricia's later suggestion of some random objects belonging to
different people, objects which would later prove important to the plot.
So in the first version, I was thinking of the (obvious) hijacking/weapons
kind of later importance, and emphasizing the sharp objects.
In the second version, I wanted contrast with the first, so I concentrated
on colors, emotional things. I suppose for those to become important to the
plot later, the plane would have to go down in Darkest Savageland and they
be used as trade goods....
/snip/
>And in another story, two different characters would see the stuff in
>those two ways -- and they would be characterizing those people rather
>than the owner of the stuff.
That's closer to what I was getting at. That even when no character is
doing the observing, still there is something that felt *to me* like a
filter helping me choose which details to mention.
Darkhawk (H. Nicoll)
> That's backward. It's not finding them there and trying to make sense of
> it (ala Coles, Wimsey or any other amateur detective). Rather, you know
> the character; what's the best way (through items in pockets) of
> story, what would they need to pull out of their pockets/handbag, and is
> this counter to how you've thought of them? Some characters in no way
> would carry a mirror, or paper, others wouldn't leave home without them.
Some of the stuff in there isn't even what they'd pull out of their
pockets, though. When I did this exercise, I noted that one of the
characters is the sort of person who would find a feather lying around,
take a fancy to it, and stick it in his bag (and then forget about it so
it winds up in dreadful condition). He isn't ever going to produce the
feather in the story, but he's the sort of person who *has* one.
Then there's the way in which things are described. My first reader for
the WIP correctly identified which character one of my paragraphs was
referring to because it began "Turning out his pockets", which is not a
phrasing that coexists happily with the other major male character.
(That one being the one who keeps a switchblade in his bag.)
--
Darkhawk - H. A. Nicoll - http://aelfhame.net/~darkhawk/
They are one person, they are two alone
They are three together, they are for each other
- "Helplessly Hoping", Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young
Helen Hall
opsclimbers.freeserve.co.uk> writes
>
>"Brian M. Scott" wrote
>
>>
>> This exercise is about _conveying_information_about_a_
>> _character_ without getting into the character's head, but
>> rather by giving physical descriptions of concrete physical
>> objects.
>
>
>JF
Does he wear clothes? If he wears clothes, men's clothing usually has
pockets. Women's clothing often doesn't, which is annoying.
Does your character never put his hands in his pockets or take an item
from them?
Helen
--
Helen, Gwynedd, Wales *** http://www.baradel.demon.co.uk
Catja Pafort
> For Catja and anyone else who wants to play.
>
> 1. Write a paragraph to a page describing a place (a street, a building,
> the interior of a room, a scenic view, a field, a clearing in a forest,
> whatever) without using *any* adjectives or adverbs. The idea is to
> concentrate on concrete nouns or verbs, e.g. "chunk of granite" instead of
> "rock." For extra credit, don't use any adverbial or adjectival phrases
> (like "of granite," above), either. Again, not filtered through a
> particular viewpoint character -- omniscient or camera-eye.
> (Some of these look like fun; I might do a couple myself, if I can steal the
> time from revisions.)
If this is your idea of fun, I don't want to learn your idea of torture.
This was *really really* hard to do. Three things happened: adjectives
sneaked in though the side door, the prose went flat, and I dropped into
heavy internalisation. Or all at once.
Something along the lines of:
---- begin exercises ----
The house was built from bricks. The windows at the back are will let in
drafts; they were not included in the window replacement offer. Curses
to all who fall for the promises of double-grazing salesmen and curses
to all who promise, to themselves and others, that 'it will get fixed'.
The day the sun begins to move around the Earth will please all parties
to that contract. Delays might not be avoided; on that day, Hell shall
freeze over, and a majority of builders will engage in icescating.
I gave in and attempted to describe a piece of reality:
First, the sounds. The roar of civilisation, swoosh, swoosh, as cars
pass on the motorway. They destroy the illusion of wilderness from the
beginning for all but a few, never even let it arise. Those who can
learn to ignore it hear the rustling of wind in the leaves and the song
of birds. Three, four, five calls, though the callers never appear. Then
the flapping of wings and a cackling of rooks, followed by silence.
Underneath one's feet, leaves rustling. Above, autumn colours in all
their splendour, whispering as the trees turn to sway with the breeze.
Underneath, only deadness, remnants of summer, struggling; threats of
winter and darkness and despair.
Feet squelch through the mud, mud that tries to suck the shoes from
one's feet, mud waiting for the traveller's fall, mud waiting to rejoice
in it. Mud with _personality_.
A forest of birches, out of tune with the Countryside. Oaks, like the
one providing shade to the observers bench, yes. But birches? In
England?
Opposite, the mother of birch trees, its dryad dancing on the grass.
Across the clearing stand her sapling children, stem after stem after
stem reaching for the sunlight and dancing with the breeze, _flirting_
with it, even if the dance costs leaves. Further along the path, and the
observer curses the sense or propriety that forces her to resist the
impulse to take off her shoes. *Now* she understands the mud.
Last, the swoosh, swoosh of cars on the motorway, connecting the
observer with reality.
---- end exercises---
Not Happy.
Catja
Patricia C. Wrede
news:1h4e3j6.1p4eoarsa09noN%use...@greenknight.org.uk.invalid...
> Patricia C. Wrede <pwred...@aol.com> wrote:
>
>> For Catja and anyone else who wants to play.
>>
>> 1. Write a paragraph to a page describing a place (a street, a building,
>> the interior of a room, a scenic view, a field, a clearing in a forest,
>> whatever) without using *any* adjectives or adverbs. The idea is to
>> concentrate on concrete nouns or verbs, e.g. "chunk of granite" instead
>> of
>> "rock." For extra credit, don't use any adverbial or adjectival phrases
>> (like "of granite," above), either. Again, not filtered through a
>> particular viewpoint character -- omniscient or camera-eye.
>
>
>> (Some of these look like fun; I might do a couple myself, if I can steal
>> the
>> time from revisions.)
>
> If this is your idea of fun, I don't want to learn your idea of torture.
It's a challenge, like writing a sonnet.
> This was *really really* hard to do. Three things happened: adjectives
> sneaked in though the side door, the prose went flat, and I dropped into
> heavy internalisation. Or all at once.
*No internalization.* This is supposed to be *description.*
It's *supposed* to be hard. I have a rought time when I try this, too; I
find it takes a while to get into it. And part of the point is to do it
*without* letting the prose go flat; to find more interesting nouns and
verbs to take up the slack where you normally depend on adjectives. You
start with general words and simple sentences, like "The house was built
from bricks," and then shuffle things around until you get "Bricks tumbled
around the base of the mansion, extras left over from the construction" or
"Bricks flaked from the front of the residence, crumbled along its sides,
cracked by the windows at the back." It takes a while.
> I gave in and attempted to describe a piece of reality:
You did a lot better with this one, I thought -- lots more vivid. I
especially liked the description of the mud.
> Not Happy.
What, if anything, did you get out of doing that? Besides frustrated...
Patricia C. Wrede
Brian M. Scott
<use...@greenknight.org.uk.invalid> wrote in
<news:1h4e3j6.1p4eoarsa09noN%use...@greenknight.org.uk.invalid>
in rec.arts.sf.composition:
[...]
> Feet squelch through the mud, mud that tries to suck the shoes from
> one's feet, mud waiting for the traveller's fall, mud waiting to rejoice
> in it. Mud with _personality_.
Lovely description. (I have met such mud. Designers of
cross country courses delight in it, and its name is Slog.)
[...]
Brian
Catja Pafort
> >> (Some of these look like fun; I might do a couple myself, if I can steal
> >> the time from revisions.)
> >
> > If this is your idea of fun, I don't want to learn your idea of torture.
>
> It's a challenge, like writing a sonnet.
I haven't tried that. And in the near future, I won't.
> > This was *really really* hard to do. Three things happened: adjectives
> > sneaked in though the side door, the prose went flat, and I dropped into
> > heavy internalisation. Or all at once.
>
> *No internalization.* This is supposed to be *description.*
That what I told myself.
> It's *supposed* to be hard. I have a rought time when I try this, too; I
> find it takes a while to get into it. And part of the point is to do it
> *without* letting the prose go flat; to find more interesting nouns and
> verbs to take up the slack where you normally depend on adjectives. You
> start with general words and simple sentences, like "The house was built
> from bricks," and then shuffle things around until you get "Bricks tumbled
> around the base of the mansion, extras left over from the construction" or
> "Bricks flaked from the front of the residence, crumbled along its sides,
> cracked by the windows at the back." It takes a while.
How many decades should I give it?
> > I gave in and attempted to describe a piece of reality:
>
> You did a lot better with this one, I thought -- lots more vivid. I
> especially liked the description of the mud.
It was a little easier because it had no characters in it. The first bit
was my house, where the ghost of the former owner - figuratively -
turned up almost immediately - *her* bright idea to have a 'six windows,
one door' deal when the house has eight.
In the second, I was completely alone, left my conscience at the van,
and sat down and tried to describe what I saw.
> > Not Happy.
>
> What, if anything, did you get out of doing that? Besides frustrated...
A pretty good demonstration of my shortcomings. It doesn't matter where
I start, within two sentences I'm back at internalisation. And once I'm
*doing* it I have no difficulties in coming up with interesting and
vivid detail. Take away my stabilisers, and I've forgotten how to ride
the verbal bike - I just *could not come up with _anything at all_* -
and not because I can't imagine places, but because I literally did not
have words to describe them.
'The house was built from bricks' - yeah, *that* I can see, and the next
thing I would normally do is to talk about their rough texure and the
flaking paint above. I can get from 'I can see bricks' to 'there are
bricks' or 'the house was built of bricks'. What I can't do is make the
mental leap from there to 'bricks tumbled.' Such sentences do not occur
to me unless they're *very* well trodden verbal paths - rain falls, mist
rises, and never the twain shall meet. But take any ordinary object -
the metal mug that sits, full of cold tea, on my desk, and I'm
completely stumped as to what it could *do* - mugs, like bricks, don't
have an internal dynamic to me, they just _are_. It sits there. It is
respectively has been filled with tea. If you take all my adjectives
away from me, and everything this mug _means_ to me then I'm left with
an item on a desk, _and nothing to say about it_.
It doesn't matter how long I stare at it.
No wonder I don't have any externalisation. I can't do it, so I avoid
it.
Catja
Alma Hromic Deckert
(Catja Pafort) wrote:
>Patricia C. Wrede <pwred...@aol.com> wrote:
>
>
>> >> (Some of these look like fun; I might do a couple myself, if I can steal
>> >> the time from revisions.)
>> >
>> > If this is your idea of fun, I don't want to learn your idea of torture.
>>
>> It's a challenge, like writing a sonnet.
>
>I haven't tried that. And in the near future, I won't.
>
You haven't had the benefit of a sonnet-writing grandfather who fed
you the stuff since you were in the cradle, like I have <G> To this
day, gimme a first line with the right number of syllables and you'll
have a sonnet in ten minutes or less...
A.
R. L.
(Catja Pafort) wrote:
/snip/
>
>> > Not Happy.
>>
>> What, if anything, did you get out of doing that? Besides frustrated...
>
>
>A pretty good demonstration of my shortcomings. It doesn't matter where
>I start, within two sentences I'm back at internalisation. And once I'm
>*doing* it I have no difficulties in coming up with interesting and
>vivid detail. Take away my stabilisers, and I've forgotten how to ride
>the verbal bike - I just *could not come up with _anything at all_* -
>and not because I can't imagine places, but because I literally did not
>have words to describe them.
I tried one at my Livejournal, and had a similar problem. I couldn't get
anything very definite except as part of something slanted, filtered, with
a rather personal voice. (I think I was channeling Konrad Lorenz or
someone.)
What about writing it your way first, to *get* the interesting and vivid
detail, and then doing a complete rewrite to get rid of the stabilizers
afterwards, as tho they were scaffolding. (I may have to do that with some
topic sentences or something; something to give me a context, a mold, then
remove it later.)
>'The house was built from bricks' - yeah, *that* I can see, and the next
>thing I would normally do is to talk about their rough texure and the
>flaking paint above. I can get from 'I can see bricks' to 'there are
>bricks' or 'the house was built of bricks'. What I can't do is make the
>mental leap from there to 'bricks tumbled.'
Well, having stationary inanimate objects use action verbs is an example
Patricia gave, but it's not required for the exercise, is it?
>Such sentences do not occur
>to me unless they're *very* well trodden verbal paths - rain falls, mist
>rises,
Me too. I don't particularly like the action verb thing.
> and never the twain shall meet.
:-)
>But take any ordinary object -
>the metal mug that sits, full of cold tea, on my desk, and I'm
>completely stumped as to what it could *do* - mugs, like bricks, don't
>have an internal dynamic to me, they just _are_.
Exactly. A mug described as /action verbing/ is not a realistic mug.
> It sits there. It is
>respectively has been filled with tea. If you take all my adjectives
>away from me, and everything this mug _means_ to me then I'm left with
>an item on a desk, _and nothing to say about it_.
I'm at a loss without adjectives too. The best I could do would be to limit
it to sort of impersonal, objective adjectives: color, shape, etc.
>
>It doesn't matter how long I stare at it.
>
>
>No wonder I don't have any externalisation. I can't do it, so I avoid
>it.
Well, I seem to bounce off the exercise too, and otherwise we're very
different, so that should be encouraging. My bouncing off suggests to me
that I need such an exercise; it shouldn't be *that* impossible.
Irina Rempt
It was that kind of mud that made Naomi decide, at eight and a bit, that
she wanted to be an archaeologist. We went to a dig (Roman remains) and
were *very* glad that we had our wellies: most of the way from the bus
stop there was at least some squelchy mud, and the terrain around the
Roman remains was so bad that I didn't only have to pull Naomi out, but
an old gentleman as well.
Irina
--
Vesta veran, terna puran, farenin. http://www.valdyas.org/irina/
Beghinnen can ick, volherden will' ick, volbringhen sal ick.
http://www.valdyas.org/foundobjects/index.cgi Latest: 12-Oct-2005
Patricia C. Wrede
> On Sat, 15 Oct 2005 15:39:15 +0100, use...@greenknight.org.uk.invalid
> (Catja Pafort) wrote:
>>But take any ordinary object -
>>the metal mug that sits, full of cold tea, on my desk, and I'm
>>completely stumped as to what it could *do* - mugs, like bricks, don't
>>have an internal dynamic to me, they just _are_.
>
> Exactly. A mug described as /action verbing/ is not a realistic mug.
Metaphor.
But even apart from metaphor, my thesaurus lists three more vivid verbs as
synonyms for "sit" -- squat, roost, and perch -- and eighteen others (mostly
not appropriate, but still) under "seat" (to which the first entry refers);
it
has even more under the verbs "to stand" and "to place." And if a mug
can sit and stand, it can perch, settle, roost, repose, lodge, or squat as
well. If using an action verb in such a context bothers you just absolutely
desperately, you can use passive voice to imply an actor other than the mug
or the bricks.
>> It sits there. It is
>>respectively has been filled with tea. If you take all my adjectives
>>away from me, and everything this mug _means_ to me then I'm left with
>>an item on a desk, _and nothing to say about it_.
>
> I'm at a loss without adjectives too. The best I could do would be to
> limit it to sort of impersonal, objective adjectives: color, shape, etc.
As I said to Catja -- it's a mental habit, a way of looking at things and
thinking about them. Um. Adjectives are all about *attributes* of stuff :
color, size, shape, weight, etc. Nouns are about the stuff *itself*; verbs
are about what it is doing or having done to it.
If you are going to describe something without benefit of adjectives, you
can rely on its *relationships* with other things -- other stuff -- around
it. I did the mug already, a couple of times over, in the post I just wrote
to Catja, talking about the steam rising from it or the tea congealed in the
bottom, and about the marks left on the desk by previous uses. The steam,
the tea, and the rings on the desk are all not the mug itself, but they
still give a sense of the mug and imply that it's used well and often.
There are other tools you can use, as well. Often, you
can look at the adjectives you'd use and turn them into verbs: "A steaming
mug of hot tea sat on the corner of the desk" is easy enough to make into "A
mug of tea steamed on the corner of the desk" (or "...sat and steamed..." if
you prefer). You can use similie and metaphor -- "A mug of tea sat and
steamed on the corner of the desk, like a locomotive at a station waiting
for commuters to board." (OK, so it's coffee that usually gets people going
on the way to the office; I drink tea in the morning.) You can play with
tense and sentence structure -- "A smear of red against the light ... the
thunk of porcelain landing on wood ... a scent like tar burning -- and a mug
of Lapsang Souchong sits and steams on the corner of the desk."
>>It doesn't matter how long I stare at it.
>>
>>
>>No wonder I don't have any externalisation. I can't do it, so I avoid
>>it.
>
> Well, I seem to bounce off the exercise too, and otherwise we're very
> different, so that should be encouraging. My bouncing off suggests to me
> that I need such an exercise; it shouldn't be *that* impossible.
If it's any consolation, I think it took me about two hours to come up with
a paragraph, the first time I tried it. I think it's hard mainly because
adjectives and adverbs are so easy and straightforward -- one forgets that
there's a whole toolbox full of *other* tools just waiting to be used.
Patricia C. Wrede
Patricia C. Wrede
> Patricia C. Wrede <pwred...@aol.com> wrote:
>> It's *supposed* to be hard. I have a rought time when I try this, too; I
>> find it takes a while to get into it. And part of the point is to do it
>> *without* letting the prose go flat; to find more interesting nouns and
>> verbs to take up the slack where you normally depend on adjectives. You
>> start with general words and simple sentences, like "The house was built
>> from bricks," and then shuffle things around until you get "Bricks
>> tumbled
>> around the base of the mansion, extras left over from the construction"
>> or
>> "Bricks flaked from the front of the residence, crumbled along its sides,
>> cracked by the windows at the back." It takes a while.
>
> How many decades should I give it?
How often and how frequently do you want to repeat the exercise? It gets
easier every time I do it. I used to have to keep grabbing thesaurus and
looking up synonyms for "house" and "wind" and "rock" about every three
words, and then sort of juggle those around until I got something. Now I
only have to do it once or twice in a paragraph. ( I checked synonyms for
"house," above, but I'd already come up with "mansion" and "residence" on my
own, and my thesaurus didn't have anything else interesting that I could
have used instead.)
>> > I gave in and attempted to describe a piece of reality:
>>
>> You did a lot better with this one, I thought -- lots more vivid. I
>> especially liked the description of the mud.
>
> It was a little easier because it had no characters in it.
Ah -- it was *supposed* to have no characters in it: omniscient or
camera-eye, remember? Nothing about *why* things got the way they are, or
*how* they work or feel, or judgements about whether the way they work is a
good thing or a bad one. Just a description of what is there. All four of
these are supposed to be like that, as much as possible: what's there, what
it looks/feels/sounds/smells like, and that's all.
>The first bit
> was my house, where the ghost of the former owner - figuratively -
> turned up almost immediately - *her* bright idea to have a 'six windows,
> one door' deal when the house has eight.
>
> In the second, I was completely alone, left my conscience at the van,
> and sat down and tried to describe what I saw.
It's interesting that you did something real, in both cases, and that you
had a hard time sticking with the exercise the first time (where there is, I
take it, some considerable emotional involvement...), and succeeded much
better the second time. Was the second piece as difficult as the first?
>> What, if anything, did you get out of doing that? Besides frustrated...
>
> A pretty good demonstration of my shortcomings. It doesn't matter where
> I start, within two sentences I'm back at internalisation. And once I'm
> *doing* it I have no difficulties in coming up with interesting and
> vivid detail. Take away my stabilisers, and I've forgotten how to ride
> the verbal bike - I just *could not come up with _anything at all_* -
> and not because I can't imagine places, but because I literally did not
> have words to describe them.
>
> 'The house was built from bricks' - yeah, *that* I can see, and the next
> thing I would normally do is to talk about their rough texure and the
> flaking paint above.
Possibly doing without adjectives and adverbs was too advanced for the very
first thing.
>I can get from 'I can see bricks' to 'there are
> bricks' or 'the house was built of bricks'. What I can't do is make the
> mental leap from there to 'bricks tumbled.' Such sentences do not occur
> to me unless they're *very* well trodden verbal paths - rain falls, mist
> rises, and never the twain shall meet. But take any ordinary object -
> the metal mug that sits, full of cold tea, on my desk, and I'm
> completely stumped as to what it could *do* - mugs, like bricks, don't
> have an internal dynamic to me, they just _are_. It sits there. It is
> respectively has been filled with tea. If you take all my adjectives
> away from me, and everything this mug _means_ to me then I'm left with
> an item on a desk, _and nothing to say about it_.
>
> It doesn't matter how long I stare at it.
Well, what happens if you start by doing it with adjectives and then work
backward? Or start with "A mug of tea sat on the desk" and then check a
thesaurus for synonyms for "sit", to give you some ideas? And even if it
*is* just sitting there, and you can't find a more interesting verb, there's
more to it than that -- steam and the scent and maybe even a wave of heat
from the sides, if it's fresh; if it's cold, then there's the congealed look
that tea gets, with a bit of slick floating on the surface and fragments of
the leaves lurking in the bottom, that you can't see because of the slick
and the way the tea has stewed.
But in order to get from "a red enameled mug on a wooden desk" to "a smear
of red against wood -- my mug, perched on the corner of my desk" you have to
start by seeing just what's there. Not what it means or what you feel about
it, or what your POV character thinks it means or how he feels about it.
(It is, of course, very nearly impossible for most people to be this
objective about what they describe, but it's worth a try.) After that,
though, you have to figure out your own way in -- the thing that will
trigger the associations and alternative-word-choices *for you*.
> No wonder I don't have any externalisation. I can't do it, so I avoid
> it.
It's just a way of thinking about things -- a habit of thought -- and like
everything else about writing, it gets better with practice. Most people
have no trouble doing a fairly standard essay-description of something -- a
place, a room, whatever -- because they did a bunch of them when they were
in grammar school, learning to write. It's finding substitutes for words
and replacements for phrases that don't involve relying on adjectives that's
tough.
I find that what this particular exercise does for me is to force me to
really *dig* into a description. Adjectives and adverbs are *easy* --
they're right there on top of my head most of the time: bright sunlight,
dark shadows, chill breeze, and so on. The red enameled mug on a wooden
desk. But if I take the easy route, I don't stop to think about what *else*
I could say that would convey the image more vividly -- the steam rising
against the light from the window, visible as a ripple in the air; my cat
wrinkling his nose and backing away from the heat and the scent of the tea
(or circling in frustration as he waits for it to cool, if the tea is
catnip); the stains on the desk-top that record weeks and months of mugs
that landed hard and sloshed tea over their rims.
Doing this consciously and deliberately in this exercise is the equivalent,
for me, of your riding instructor saying "Move that there; relax this
muscle; hold your knee like that" and then realizing what it *feels like* --
the no-adjective exercise is a way of practicing the habit of thought that
doesn't go for the easy adjective every single time, but that always (or at
least often) considers what other possibilities there might be. Making it a
*rule* that I can't use adjectives/adverbs for a bit keeps me from giving up
too soon and going with the easy and obvious thing that I already know how
to do.
It's like the plotting exercise, where you come up with twenty things that
*could* happen next, and then throw away the first ten because those were
the easy, obvious ones. After you do that a couple of times, you start
throwing away the obvious plot twists *before* you write them down, because
you've learned to recognize them. Doing without adjectives and adverbs is
training in coming up with stronger nouns and verbs, so that when I'm
writing a description of the palace I don't go into adjectival overload.
(The really hard ones for me are the adverbs, because I have more trouble
just identifying what they *are*. The -ly ones are easy, but the rest of
them...)
Patricia C. Wrede
ShellyS
thread, and a bit sideways, so I want to hijack it a moment for a
question.
Patricia C. Wrede wrote:
(much snippage)
> As I said to Catja -- it's a mental habit, a way of looking at things and
> thinking about them. Um. Adjectives are all about *attributes* of stuff :
> color, size, shape, weight, etc. Nouns are about the stuff *itself*; verbs
> are about what it is doing or having done to it.
Way back when on AOL, we discussed once a way of describing a setting
from a tight third pov where the character wouldn't notice everything.
If you'll recall, Patricia, I was using a bar setting and my protag was
a drunk. You pointed out how I could describe things from his pov, the
details of what he'd see. He might not notice the decorations but he
would notice all the different types of booze, that sort of thing.
So to me, when I rewrote the scene (for the long on-hold collaborative
novel that is now becoming a trilogy and will end up being very
different -- don't ask, long story), there was a lot of what I'd
consider Zach's personal feelings re: the setting, how he's relating to
it. Is that internalization in this sense or something else?
Since I'm not as much into the adjective/no adjective issue, I'm more
trying to figure out this whole issue/exercise could apply to how I
describe things and how I might do that better.
> If you are going to describe something without benefit of adjectives, you
> can rely on its *relationships* with other things -- other stuff -- around
> it. I did the mug already, a couple of times over, in the post I just wrote
> to Catja, talking about the steam rising from it or the tea congealed in the
> bottom, and about the marks left on the desk by previous uses. The steam,
> the tea, and the rings on the desk are all not the mug itself, but they
> still give a sense of the mug and imply that it's used well and often.
>
> There are other tools you can use, as well. Often, you
> can look at the adjectives you'd use and turn them into verbs: "A steaming
> mug of hot tea sat on the corner of the desk" is easy enough to make into "A
> mug of tea steamed on the corner of the desk" (or "...sat and steamed..." if
> you prefer). You can use similie and metaphor -- "A mug of tea sat and
> steamed on the corner of the desk, like a locomotive at a station waiting
> for commuters to board." (OK, so it's coffee that usually gets people going
> on the way to the office; I drink tea in the morning.) You can play with
> tense and sentence structure -- "A smear of red against the light ... the
> thunk of porcelain landing on wood ... a scent like tar burning -- and a mug
> of Lapsang Souchong sits and steams on the corner of the desk."
Ooooo. Nice. I'm not looking at this from a rules or better/worse view,
which by now you should know I hate, but this whole discussion has been
fascinating and given how poor I am at looking at this sort of thing
consciously, I'm trying to tease out the issues. What is an advantage
of writing this way, rather than internalizing (?) a bit by saying
something like (and I'm poor at off the top of my head examples, too)
...the mug of tea she'd barely touched perched on the edge of the desk,
already cooled... where the description relates back to character.
One thing I've been struggling with is the opening of the solo novel I
started a couple of years ago when my collaborator's health got worse,
and ended up abaondoning when I couldn't make it work. I've been
inspired to try it again from a different perspective, going back to
winging it, and I'm having fun with it, but setting things up in the
opening scene so the protag is interesting while still making the
descriptions sing is confounding me a bit.
(snip)
Shelly, the ever curious
R. L.
<pwred...@aol.com> wrote:
>"R. L." <see...@no-spams.coms> wrote in message
>news:02c2l1d18v1n4va6o...@4ax.com...
>> On Sat, 15 Oct 2005 15:39:15 +0100, use...@greenknight.org.uk.invalid
>> (Catja Pafort) wrote:
/snip/
>If you are going to describe something without benefit of adjectives, you
>can rely on its *relationships* with other things -- other stuff -- around
>it. I did the mug already, a couple of times over, in the post I just wrote
>to Catja, talking about the steam rising from it or the tea congealed in the
>bottom, and about the marks left on the desk by previous uses. The steam,
>the tea, and the rings on the desk are all not the mug itself, but they
>still give a sense of the mug and imply that it's used well and often.
>
>There are other tools you can use, as well. Often, you
>can look at the adjectives you'd use and turn them into verbs: "A steaming
>mug of hot tea sat on the corner of the desk" is easy enough to make into "A
>mug of tea steamed on the corner of the desk" (or "...sat and steamed..." if
>you prefer). You can use similie and metaphor -- "A mug of tea sat and
>steamed on the corner of the desk, like a locomotive at a station waiting
>for commuters to board." (OK, so it's coffee that usually gets people going
>on the way to the office; I drink tea in the morning.) You can play with
>tense and sentence structure -- "A smear of red against the light ... the
>thunk of porcelain landing on wood ... a scent like tar burning -- and a mug
>of Lapsang Souchong sits and steams on the corner of the desk."
That's pretty subjective, even tho it doesn't have any personal pronouns in
it. So was the mud with personality, that wanted to suck boots down.
So I'm not sure how much this is supposed to provide externalisation.
[....]
>>>No wonder I don't have any externalisation. I can't do it, so I avoid
>>>it.
--
Brian M. Scott
<use...@greenknight.org.uk.invalid> wrote in
<news:1h4hamb.eoci29qsuhvuN%use...@greenknight.org.uk.invalid>
in rec.arts.sf.composition:
[...]
> But take any ordinary object - the metal mug that sits,
> full of cold tea, on my desk, and I'm completely stumped
> as to what it could *do* - mugs, like bricks, don't have
> an internal dynamic to me, they just _are_. It sits
> there. It is respectively has been filled with tea. If
> you take all my adjectives away from me, and everything
> this mug _means_ to me then I'm left with an item on a
> desk, _and nothing to say about it_.
Hm; for starters, it has a mouth:
The mug gaped up from the blotter. The tea that stained
its lip had left a trickle of drool down one side. The
dust motes that had danced above it now hovered or
drifted down and were swallowed up.
(Mind you, that's hardly *objective* description, and I did
use a few adverbs.)
[...]
Brian
Patricia C. Wrede
news:1129407620.7...@g49g2000cwa.googlegroups.com...
> Since I'm not as much into the adjective/no adjective issue, I'm more
> trying to figure out this whole issue/exercise could apply to how I
> describe things and how I might do that better.
It depends on what you're trying to do, and what you're already good at. Or
not good at.
It's another tool for the toolbox. If you only ever do a filtered
tight-third POV or first-person POV, like your guy who's drunk in the bar,
then this kind of thing doesn't have a whole lot of practical utility,
because it's mainly about making more vivid word choices, and in a filtered
POV, your word choices (and what you describe) are constrained by the POV.
But even then, it is occasionally useful to work "out of the box" so to
speak, to give yourself a little practice in coming up with vivid nouns and
verbs and phrasings that you might not normally think of. And of course, if
you ever write a character's POV who *does* think like that, you'll need to
figure out how to do it then, if you haven't before.
If you do camera-eye or omniscient, or if you have ambition to try them,
then this sort of exercise is both useful and practical, because you
probably won't have an omniscient narrator who makes comments and judgements
about all the stuff he's observing (unless you're Steven Brust doing Paarfi)
and camera-eye doesn't have an explicit narrator at all.
But the main advantage is...well, it's an *exercise*. People don't lift
weights because lifting weights is an advantage. They lift weights to build
their muscles, so that under other circumstances back in real life, when
they have to haul a 50-lb bag of cat food in from the car or heave a
suitcase into one of those overhead bins in an airplane, they are capable of
doing it. But they don't build muscles by heaving suitcases into and out of
overhead bins, over and over. They do exercises instead, that are (one
hopes) done under more deliberate and controlled conditions.
Patricia C. Wrede
Patricia C. Wrede
"R. L." <see...@no-spams.coms> wrote in message
Well, for starters, "subjective" is not the same as "internal." And I
wouldn't call even the last of those sentences, the one that messes around
with structure, "subjective." There's obviously a person around
somewhere -- that mug didn't land on the corner of the desk all by itself --
but we aren't seeing the events through their eyes, or through the eyes of
anybody in particular that we know of.
It seems to me that practically every time anybody writes a sentence that
has any pizzazz to it -- anything that's more vivid than "The mug of tea sat
on the desk" -- you interpret it as "subjective." This makes me wonder if
you haven't internalized the notion that word choices reflect the POV
character a little *too* strongly, such that *any* word choice or phrasing
that is even a little unusual has come to seem, to you, as if it *must* say
something about the POV character (and that there must, perforce, *be* a POV
character).
Word choice and phrasing *can* say something about the POV character or
narrator, but it doesn't *have* to, so far as I'm concerned. If you think
it does and must, then for you all of these exercises will be, necessarily,
subjective. From my perspective, pretty much any of them could be fit into
any viewpoint that required some description, except in a few cases where
the POV character has a voice that just isn't compatable with the phrasing.
But in most cases, they'd fit equally well into omniscient, camera-eye,
first-person, or filtered tight-third; the viewpoint would depend on what's
*around* them. Which is what I wanted.
However, even if you're not convinced, "subjective" is not the same as
"internalizing".
All of these exercises are about describing *real things* (or things that
are supposed to be real in the context of a story) -- objects, people,
places, animals, events. All of those things are, presumably, external to
whoever is describing them. My mug of tea -- and Catja's, I assume -- is
not part of me; it is an object that sits on my desk. The things that my
characters haul around in their pockets -- or don't -- are not part of them;
they're objects external to those characters, even though all of them only
exist on paper and/or inside my very own personal head at the moment. These
are not supposed to be hallucinations. So they're about describing
*external things* -- things that are outside the head of any narrator, POV
or otherwise. External things can be described subjectively (through the
mental filters of a particular person or POV) or objectively (unfiltered).
What Catja was doing, what she describes as "internalizing," was *not
providing* the stuff that was outside the character's head. If you look at
the original version of the scene she posted, she had no physical
description of the fencing salle, nor of Arbet, nor of Geflan, nor of any of
The Crowd. There was hardly anything that qualified as a description of the
fencing. Instead of "externalizing" -- describing the physical moves each
person made, or the sounds, or anything else that was happening outside
Geflan's head -- most of the scene only gives Geflan's *internal reactions*
to whatever is going on outside. For instance, at the start of the scene,
we see Arbet bounce in place. That's an external event; it's something
that's happening outside Geflan's head, that anyone could observe. We then
get Geflan's *feelings* in response -- he feels clumsy and tense -- and then
more feelings as his respect for his fencing master rises because the
fencing master is testing him, "leading him into their elaborate dance."
But the only *outside, external* event that's been described is Arbet
bouncing. How is bouncing testing Geflan? How is it an elaborate dance,
let alone one in which Arbet is leading? He's just standing there, bouncing
*That* is "internalization" -- it is not subjectively reporting events or
describing things that are happening outside the character; it is not
describing any of those places, people or events at all, except possibly by
implication. A truly omniscient narrator might be able to report a
character's thoughts, feelings, assumptions, and emotional reactions
objectively, but in general, it's pretty hard to do them any way *but*
subjectively.
I specified omniscient or camera-eye in order to reduce the likelihood of
falling into this kind of thing -- of reporting a POV character's feelings
and assumptions and logical conclusions and emotional reactions about
something (all of which are happening inside the POV's head), rather than
reporting what stuff looks and sounds and feels and smells and tastes like
(all of which is stuff that occurs outside the POV's head). I never said
anything about being objective vs. being subjective. And on this group, I'm
not sure I'd dare.
Patricia C. Wrede
Zeborah
> "R. L." <see...@no-spams.coms> wrote in message
> news:02c2l1d18v1n4va6o...@4ax.com...
> > Exactly. A mug described as /action verbing/ is not a realistic mug.
>
> Metaphor.
>
> But even apart from metaphor, my thesaurus lists three more vivid verbs as
> synonyms for "sit" -- squat, roost, and perch -- and eighteen others
> (mostly not appropriate, but still) under "seat" (to which the first entry
> refers); it has even more under the verbs "to stand" and "to place." And
> if a mug can sit and stand, it can perch, settle, roost, repose, lodge, or
> squat as well.
Or if it's made of coloured glass and empty it could glow in sunlight;
or if newly filled with hot coffee it could steam; if newly filled with
cold-from-the-fridge water it could glisten with condensation.
Zeborah
>Most people
> have no trouble doing a fairly standard essay-description of something -- a
> place, a room, whatever -- because they did a bunch of them when they were
> in grammar school, learning to write.
You know, I don't think I did. Maybe I did. The only one I remember is
in primary school having to describe what an imaginary person looked
like using similes. And it was so difficult for me that I actually
cheated -- possibly the only time in my life -- and copied a sentence
off someone sitting next to me. That gave me inspiration enough to
expand it into a kind of system of metaphors, but I have a horrid
feeling that doing so led to the teacher being convinced that this other
girl had copied off me. :-(
Bob Throllop
I suggest you go back and try again.
Cully_J
"Patricia C. Wrede" <pwred...@aol.com> wrote in message
news:11kqjti...@corp.supernews.com...
> For Catja and anyone else who wants to play.
>
> 1. Write a paragraph to a page describing a place (a street, a building,
> the interior of a room, a scenic view, a field, a clearing in a forest,
> whatever) without using *any* adjectives or adverbs. The idea is to
> concentrate on concrete nouns or verbs, e.g. "chunk of granite" instead of
> "rock." For extra credit, don't use any adverbial or adjectival phrases
> particular viewpoint character -- omniscient or camera-eye.
The origin of baseball -
The field that baseball is usually played on was void of any people. Just
chipmunks and squirrels were in the outfield running around. It seemed that
they were pretending to be players of baseball themselves.
But, instead of tossing a baseball around, they tossed a small pebble. They
also swung at the pebble with a twig.
One would think that they wanted to be humans because they were mimicking a
game normally played by humans. But, actually, they were just staying in
touch with thier roots.
It's not known that the game of baseball was actually invented by a breed of
squirrels. It was humans that noticed the squirrels and chipmunks tossing a
pebble around and swinging at it with the twig. It was humans that - thanks
to these rodents - came up with the game of baseball.
Thanks squirrels and chipmunks!!!
Love,
Cully_J
Brian M. Scott
<zeb...@gmail.com> wrote in
<news:1h4iort.jahk5mmyvmgwN%zeb...@gmail.com> in
rec.arts.sf.composition:
> Patricia C. Wrede <pwred...@aol.com> wrote:
>> Most people have no trouble doing a fairly standard
>> essay-description of something -- a place, a room,
>> whatever -- because they did a bunch of them when they
>> were in grammar school, learning to write.
> You know, I don't think I did.
If I did, I don't remember, but I have to admit that it's
the sort of boring assignment that I probably wouldn't
remember.
[...]
Brian
Anna Mazzoldi
> For Catja and anyone else who wants to play.
>
> 1. Write a paragraph to a page describing a place (a street, a
> building, the interior of a room, a scenic view, a field, a clearing
> in a forest, whatever) without using any adjectives or adverbs. The
> idea is to concentrate on concrete nouns or verbs, e.g. "chunk of
> granite" instead of "rock." For extra credit, don't use any
> adverbial or adjectival phrases (like "of granite," above), either.
> Again, not filtered through a particular viewpoint character --
> omniscient or camera-eye.
Prompted by this, I took a scene from my WIR and went through it with a
highlighter looking for adjectives and adverbs. And found out that I am
really confused about their functional definition -- functional to this
exercise, that is. Clearly it doesn't mean "any adjectives at all": for
example, I'm pretty sure that adjectives like "his" and "that" would be
allowed. But where does it stop? I've had this problem before with
similar exercises.
So here is my question. Here is a selected passage from the scene I was
looking at: would anybody be so good as to tell me which adjectives or
adverbs would violate the rules of this exercise, and which wouldn't?
(Since it wasn't written for the exercise, the passage doesn't follow
the original specs: it's a description of a fairly static scene rather
than a place, and it's filtered third -- but let's ignore that, I'm
only worried about the adjectives and adverbs.)
--- start quote ---
What was keeping them all in check, or at least in uncertainty, was the
truce. Was it still standing? Technically, yes. The peace was sacred
until the rope was untied -- and both of the knots had to be undone, by
the same hands that had tied them. There was precedent for this, though
not quite as spectacular. But in practice, and right now, the rope
would stay tied only as long as someone was determined -- and strong
enough -- to keep it that way. And he was painfully conscious that he
didn't have that strength.
He did however manage to tear away from the two imperial guards who had
grabbed him, and who now let him go without pursuing the matter any
further -- just before another voice shouted from the opposite
direction.
"Stop!"
This was a real battlefield voice, he thought, allowing himself to
admire its effect for a moment.
[....] or whether it was sheer awe at the way in which he had turned
his back on the only two naked weapons in the field [....]
--- end quote ---
(I included that last fragment because I'm really puzzled about that
"naked": definitely an adjective, definitely modifying a noun, but take
it away and the sentence becomes meaningless.) (Oh: I'm also puzzled
about that "battlefield" in the paragraph before. Definitely a noun,
but modifying another noun...)
TIA,
Anna
--
Anna Mazzoldi <http://aynathie.livejournal.com/>
Eunusco (sm): Castrato avellinese
Brian M. Scott
<AnnaU...@iol.ie> wrote in
<news:xn0e8kiv...@news.individual.net> in
rec.arts.sf.composition:
> Patricia C. Wrede wrote in rec.arts.sf.composition:
>> For Catja and anyone else who wants to play.
>> 1. Write a paragraph to a page describing a place (a street, a
>> building, the interior of a room, a scenic view, a field, a clearing
>> in a forest, whatever) without using any adjectives or adverbs. The
>> idea is to concentrate on concrete nouns or verbs, e.g. "chunk of
>> granite" instead of "rock." For extra credit, don't use any
>> adverbial or adjectival phrases (like "of granite," above), either.
>> Again, not filtered through a particular viewpoint character --
>> omniscient or camera-eye.
> Prompted by this, I took a scene from my WIR and went
> through it with a highlighter looking for adjectives and
> adverbs. And found out that I am really confused about
> their functional definition -- functional to this
> exercise, that is. Clearly it doesn't mean "any
> adjectives at all": for example, I'm pretty sure that
> adjectives like "his" and "that" would be allowed. But
> where does it stop? I've had this problem before with
> similar exercises.
<His> would normally be classified as a possessive pronoun,
<that> as a demonstrative pronoun.
> --- start quote ---
> "Stop!"
> --- end quote ---
There are several adjectives (e.g., <sacred>, modifying
<peace>, <same>, <spectacular>, modifying <precedent>) and
adverbs (e.g., <still>, <painfully>), but they're pretty
sparse; while they violate the letter of the requirement, I
don't think that they violate the spirit.
> (I included that last fragment because I'm really puzzled
> about that "naked": definitely an adjective, definitely
> modifying a noun, but take it away and the sentence
> becomes meaningless.) (Oh: I'm also puzzled about that
> "battlefield" in the paragraph before. Definitely a noun,
> but modifying another noun...)
Actually, on the basis of the intonation pattern that I use
in saying it, I'd be inclined to analyze <battlefield voice>
as a compound that happens to be written with a space, like
<White House>.
Brian
Anna Feruglio Dal Dan
> > Prompted by this, I took a scene from my WIR and went
> > through it with a highlighter looking for adjectives and
> > adverbs. And found out that I am really confused about
> > their functional definition -- functional to this
> > exercise, that is. Clearly it doesn't mean "any
> > adjectives at all": for example, I'm pretty sure that
> > adjectives like "his" and "that" would be allowed. But
> > where does it stop? I've had this problem before with
> > similar exercises.
>
> <His> would normally be classified as a possessive pronoun,
> <that> as a demonstrative pronoun.
At least in Italian grammar, there are cases in which "his" is a
adjective and cases when it's a possessive pronoun. Frex, in "His red
book" both his and red are adjectives; "the book is his" is a possessive
pronoun. I don't know if this distinction holds in English though.
Similarly, in Italian in "the peace was sacred", "sacred" is not an
adjective. (I think. Long years have passed since I studied this kind of
taxonomy of words).
> > So here is my question. Here is a selected passage from the scene I was
> > looking at: would anybody be so good as to tell me which adjectives or
> > adverbs would violate the rules of this exercise, and which wouldn't?
> > (Since it wasn't written for the exercise, the passage doesn't follow
> > the original specs: it's a description of a fairly static scene rather
> > than a place, and it's filtered third -- but let's ignore that, I'm
> > only worried about the adjectives and adverbs.)
>
> > --- start quote ---
>
> > What was keeping them all in check, or at least in
> > uncertainty, was the truce. Was it still standing?
> > Technically, yes. The peace was sacred until the rope was
> > untied -- and both of the knots had to be undone, by the
> > same hands that had tied them. There was precedent for
> > this, though not quite as spectacular. But in practice,
> > and right now, the rope would stay tied only as long as
> > someone was determined -- and strong enough -- to keep it
> > that way. And he was painfully conscious that he didn't
> > have that strength.
I think the only adjective I can detect here is "that". But I feel
pretty sure that it's used adverbially.
>
> > He did however manage to tear away from the two imperial
"two" is an adjective, but again, hardly a qualifying adjective.
> > guards who had grabbed him, and who now let him go
> > without pursuing the matter any further -- just before
> > another voice shouted from the opposite direction.
"another"
>
> > "Stop!"
>
> > This was a real battlefield voice, he thought, allowing
> > himself to admire its effect for a moment.
"real"
>
> > [....] or whether it was sheer awe at the way in which he
> > had turned his back on the only two naked weapons in the
> > field [....]
"sheer" and "naked"
>
> > --- end quote ---
>
> There are several adjectives (e.g., <sacred>, modifying
> <peace>, <same>, <spectacular>, modifying <precedent>) and
> adverbs (e.g., <still>, <painfully>), but they're pretty
> sparse; while they violate the letter of the requirement, I
> don't think that they violate the spirit.
--
Anna Feruglio Dal Dan
homepage: http://www.fantascienza.net/sfpeople/elethiomel
LJ: http://www.livejournal.com/users/annafdd/
Il mio romanzo online: http://homepage.mac.com/afdd/Senza.html
Bob Throllop
Anna Mazzoldi wrote:
> Patricia C. Wrede wrote in rec.arts.sf.composition:
>
> > For Catja and anyone else who wants to play.
> >
> > 1. Write a paragraph to a page describing a place (a street, a
> > building, the interior of a room, a scenic view, a field, a clearing
> > in a forest, whatever) without using any adjectives or adverbs. The
> > idea is to concentrate on concrete nouns or verbs, e.g. "chunk of
> > granite" instead of "rock." For extra credit, don't use any
> > adverbial or adjectival phrases (like "of granite," above), either.
> > Again, not filtered through a particular viewpoint character --
> > omniscient or camera-eye.
>
> Prompted by this, I took a scene from my WIR and went through it with a
> highlighter looking for adjectives and adverbs. And found out that I am
> really confused about their functional definition -- functional to this
> exercise, that is. Clearly it doesn't mean "any adjectives at all": for
> example, I'm pretty sure that adjectives like "his" and "that" would be
> allowed. But where does it stop? I've had this problem before with
> similar exercises.
>
> So here is my question. Here is a selected passage from the scene I was
> looking at: would anybody be so good as to tell me which adjectives or
> adverbs would violate the rules of this exercise, and which wouldn't?
>
> --- start quote ---
>
> What was keeping them all in check, or at least in uncertainty, was the
> truce. Was it still
<adv.>
> standing? Technically,
<adv.>
> yes. The peace was sacred
<adj.>
> until the rope was untied -- and both of the knots had to be undone, by
> the same hands that had tied them. There was precedent for this, though
> not quite as spectacular.
<adj.>
> But in practice, and right now,
<adv.>
> the rope
> would stay tied only as long as someone was determined
<adj.>
> -- and strong
<adj.>
> enough
<adv.>
> -- to keep it that way. And he was painfully
<adv.>
> conscious
<adj.>
> that he
> didn't have that strength.
>
> He did however
<adv.>
> manage to tear away
<adv.>
> from the two imperial guards who had
> grabbed him, and who now let him go without pursuing the matter any
> further
<adv.>
> -- just before another voice shouted from the opposite
<adj.>
> direction.
>
> "Stop!"
>
> This was a real
<adj.>
> battlefield voice, he thought, allowing himself to
> admire its effect for a moment.
>
> [....] or whether it was sheer
<adj.>
> awe at the way in which he had turned
> his back on the only two naked
<adj.>
> weapons in the field [....]
>
> --- end quote ---
>
> (I included that last fragment because I'm really puzzled about that
> "naked": definitely an adjective, definitely modifying a noun, but take
> it away and the sentence becomes meaningless.)
I think what you said at the end here really strikes to the heart of
the assignment--to write a passage that doesn't hang on the adjectives
and adverbs and the point-of-view they imply. In my view of the intent
of this assignment, this one adjective disqualifies this passage
because it violates the last part of Patricia's statement:
> > Again, not filtered through a particular viewpoint character --
> > omniscient or camera-eye.
You couldn't fix this "problem" by a
Bob Throllop
Bob Throllop wrote:
> > awe at the way in which he had turned
> > his back on the only two naked
>
> <adj.>
Figures that I have already spotted two adverbs I missed--"only" and
"two."
I've probably missed more, too, but there were several cases where I
wasn't sure if the word in question was an adverb or a pronoun. Us big
dumb guys get confused by all this fancy writing stuff.
Bob Throllop
Patricia C. Wrede wrote:
>
> How often and how frequently do you want to repeat the exercise? It gets
> easier every time I do it.
Could you post an example of what you consider a correct answer?
Brian M. Scott
<ada...@spamcop.net> wrote in
<news:1h4jplo.5so7ue14trjzsN%ada...@spamcop.net> in
rec.arts.sf.composition:
> Brian M. Scott <b.s...@csuohio.edu> wrote:
[...]
>> <His> would normally be classified as a possessive pronoun,
>> <that> as a demonstrative pronoun.
> At least in Italian grammar, there are cases in which "his" is a
> adjective and cases when it's a possessive pronoun. Frex, in "His red
> book" both his and red are adjectives; "the book is his" is a possessive
> pronoun. I don't know if this distinction holds in English though.
Yes: the terms are 'possessive adjective' and 'possessive
pronoun'.
> Similarly, in Italian in "the peace was sacred", "sacred" is not an
> adjective. (I think. Long years have passed since I studied this kind of
> taxonomy of words).
In English it's a predicate adjective and is said to be used
predicatively; in the construction <the sacred peace> it's
an attributive adjective and is said to be used
attributively.
[...]
>>> --- start quote ---
>>> What was keeping them all in check, or at least in
>>> uncertainty, was the truce. Was it still standing?
>>> Technically, yes. The peace was sacred until the rope was
>>> untied -- and both of the knots had to be undone, by the
>>> same hands that had tied them. There was precedent for
>>> this, though not quite as spectacular. But in practice,
>>> and right now, the rope would stay tied only as long as
>>> someone was determined -- and strong enough -- to keep it
>>> that way. And he was painfully conscious that he didn't
>>> have that strength.
> I think the only adjective I can detect here is "that".
> But I feel pretty sure that it's used adverbially.
That's a demonstrative pronoun in the traditional
terminology; it can also be called a determiner. It has no
adverbial function. <Still> and <painfully> are adverbs,
however.
In traditional English terminology the following are all
adjectives: sacred, same, spectacular, conscious
>>> He did however manage to tear away from the two imperial
> "two" is an adjective, but again, hardly a qualifying adjective.
<Imperial> is also an adjective.
>>> guards who had grabbed him, and who now let him go
>>> without pursuing the matter any further -- just before
>>> another voice shouted from the opposite direction.
> "another"
And <opposite>.
>>> "Stop!"
>>> This was a real battlefield voice, he thought, allowing
>>> himself to admire its effect for a moment.
> "real"
>>> [....] or whether it was sheer awe at the way in which he
>>> had turned his back on the only two naked weapons in the
>>> field [....]
> "sheer" and "naked"
And <only>.
>>> --- end quote ---
[...]
Brian
Brian M. Scott
<bobth...@brandx.net> wrote in
<news:1129494819.9...@f14g2000cwb.googlegroups.com>
in rec.arts.sf.composition:
> Bob Throllop wrote:
>>> awe at the way in which he had turned
>>> his back on the only two naked
>> <adj.>
> Figures that I have already spotted two adverbs I missed--"only" and
> "two."
Adjectives.
[...]
Brian
Brian M. Scott
<bobth...@brandx.net> wrote in
<news:1129494601.0...@g47g2000cwa.googlegroups.com>
in rec.arts.sf.composition:
> Anna Mazzoldi wrote:
[...]
>> awe at the way in which he had turned
>> his back on the only two naked
[...]
>> (I included that last fragment because I'm really puzzled about that
>> "naked": definitely an adjective, definitely modifying a noun, but take
>> it away and the sentence becomes meaningless.)
> I think what you said at the end here really strikes to the heart of
> the assignment--to write a passage that doesn't hang on the adjectives
> and adverbs and the point-of-view they imply. In my view of the intent
> of this assignment, this one adjective disqualifies this passage
> because it violates the last part of Patricia's statement:
>>> Again, not filtered through a particular viewpoint character --
>>> omniscient or camera-eye.
<Naked> does not imply any filtering; it's purely
descriptive.
Brian
Anna Mazzoldi
> On Sun, 16 Oct 2005 22:22:15 +0200, Anna Feruglio Dal Dan
> <ada...@spamcop.net> wrote in
> <news:1h4jplo.5so7ue14trjzsN%ada...@spamcop.net> in
> rec.arts.sf.composition:
>
> > Brian M. Scott <b.s...@csuohio.edu> wrote:
>
> [...]
>
> >> <His> would normally be classified as a possessive pronoun,
> >> <that> as a demonstrative pronoun.
>
> > At least in Italian grammar, there are cases in which "his" is a
> > adjective and cases when it's a possessive pronoun. Frex, in "His
> > red book" both his and red are adjectives; "the book is his" is a
> > possessive pronoun. I don't know if this distinction holds in
> > English though.
>
> Yes: the terms are 'possessive adjective' and 'possessive
> pronoun'.
Yes, of course: and obviously I meant the adjectives. I had thought of
writing "his rock" and "that rock" instead, but then I thought it would
be clear enough anyway... :-)
> > Similarly, in Italian in "the peace was sacred", "sacred" is not an
> > adjective. (I think. Long years have passed since I studied this
> > kind of taxonomy of words).
>
> In English it's a predicate adjective and is said to be used
> predicatively; in the construction <the sacred peace> it's
> an attributive adjective and is said to be used
> attributively.
Yes, same in Italian, though I don't remember the proper terms. My
question here is whether an adjective in a predicative construction
would be permitted by the terms of the exercise.
>
> >>> What was keeping them all in check, or at least in
> >>> uncertainty, was the truce. Was it still standing?
> >>> Technically, yes. The peace was sacred until the rope was
> >>> untied -- and both of the knots had to be undone, by the
> >>> same hands that had tied them. There was precedent for
> >>> this, though not quite as spectacular. But in practice,
> >>> and right now, the rope would stay tied only as long as
> >>> someone was determined -- and strong enough -- to keep it
> >>> that way. And he was painfully conscious that he didn't
> >>> have that strength.
>
> > I think the only adjective I can detect here is "that".
> > But I feel pretty sure that it's used adverbially.
>
> That's a demonstrative pronoun in the traditional
> terminology; it can also be called a determiner. It has no
> adverbial function. <Still> and <painfully> are adverbs,
> however.
And here my doubt would be on the status of that "still". ("Painfully"
would clearly be out, no problem there.) And what about "technically"?
> In traditional English terminology the following are all
> adjectives: sacred, same, spectacular, conscious
My doubts here would be "sacred" (mentioned above) and "same". Well,
and how to replace "spectacular" without getting long-winded...
> >>> He did however manage to tear away from the two imperial
>
> > "two" is an adjective, but again, hardly a qualifying adjective.
>
> <Imperial> is also an adjective.
...and one that gives me trouble.
> >>> guards who had grabbed him, and who now let him go
> >>> without pursuing the matter any further -- just before
> >>> another voice shouted from the opposite direction.
>
> > "another"
>
> And <opposite>.
Indeed. And would they be permitted or forbidden?
>
> >>> "Stop!"
>
> >>> This was a real battlefield voice, he thought, allowing
> >>> himself to admire its effect for a moment.
>
> > "real"
>
> >>> [....] or whether it was sheer awe at the way in which he
> >>> had turned his back on the only two naked weapons in the
> >>> field [....]
>
> > "sheer" and "naked"
>
> And <only>.
Ahhh, indeed. I hadn't spotted that one. *Very* tricky if forbidden...
--
Anna Mazzoldi <http://aynathie.livejournal.com/>
Clothes make the man. Naked people have little
or no influence on society.
-- Mark Twain
Anna Mazzoldi
Oh yes. But my problem is not spotting the adjectives and adverbs -- I
can do that all right (ok, so I missed at least one, but anyway...). It
is that I don't believe the exercise is meant to forbid *all*
adjectives and adverbs, and I'm trying to figure out which is which. My
reply to Brian upthread should clarify what I mean. I hope :-)
--
Anna Mazzoldi <http://aynathie.livejournal.com/>
Clothes make the man. Naked people have little
Anna Mazzoldi
> On 16 Oct 2005 13:30:01 -0700, Bob Throllop
Indeed. I think there are other bits of the passage that imply
filtering, but not this -- this simply means "the only two weapons that
had been unsheathed". (Which, BTW, is the only way I can think of to
replace that "naked", but it's a lot clumsier...)
--
Anna Mazzoldi <http://aynathie.livejournal.com/>
May the forces of evil become confused on the way to your house.
Patricia C. Wrede
news:xn0e8kiv...@news.individual.net...
> Patricia C. Wrede wrote in rec.arts.sf.composition:
>
>> For Catja and anyone else who wants to play.
>>
>> 1. Write a paragraph to a page describing a place (a street, a
>> building, the interior of a room, a scenic view, a field, a clearing
>> in a forest, whatever) without using any adjectives or adverbs. The
>> idea is to concentrate on concrete nouns or verbs, e.g. "chunk of
>> granite" instead of "rock." For extra credit, don't use any
>> adverbial or adjectival phrases (like "of granite," above), either.
>> Again, not filtered through a particular viewpoint character --
>> omniscient or camera-eye.
>
> Prompted by this, I took a scene from my WIR and went through it with a
> highlighter looking for adjectives and adverbs. And found out that I am
> really confused about their functional definition -- functional to this
> exercise, that is. Clearly it doesn't mean "any adjectives at all": for
> example, I'm pretty sure that adjectives like "his" and "that" would be
> allowed. But where does it stop? I've had this problem before with
> similar exercises.
Pronouns and demonstratives are generally allowed; so are adjectives that
are part of proper names, like "the Yellow River." If you want to be really
strict, you toss out even numbers and adjectives that are part of a noun
phrase (like "imperial guard") and adverbs that identify the passage of
time. I do that sometimes when I'm doing the exercise for me, but when I
give it to students I don't usually limit it that much. Not the first time,
anyway. <evil grin>
The idea for this isn't actually to apply it to something you've already
written (though I've frequently recommended doing the highlighter thing with
a WIP, especially if somebody seems to have too many adjectives/adverbs).
There are a fair number of passages in most stories that really don't tend
to use adjectives or adverbs a lot, because they're not doing visual
description (or description that works with other senses than sight). So
the point is to think of something where one would normally expect to find
lots of adjectives and adverbs, and then write a passage without them.
The bit you posted is a good example -- it didn't start off with very many
adjectives and adverbs. I'm leaving the identification part to Brian,
because he's frankly a whole lot better at the grammar stuff than I am, and
anyway he's already done it and I'd just be copying.
Patricia C. Wrede
Brian M. Scott
<AnnaU...@iol.ie> wrote in
<news:xn0e8kmy...@news.individual.net> in
rec.arts.sf.composition:
> Brian M. Scott wrote in rec.arts.sf.composition:
>> On Sun, 16 Oct 2005 22:22:15 +0200, Anna Feruglio Dal Dan
>> <ada...@spamcop.net> wrote in
>> <news:1h4jplo.5so7ue14trjzsN%ada...@spamcop.net> in
>> rec.arts.sf.composition:
>>> Brian M. Scott <b.s...@csuohio.edu> wrote:
[...]
>>>>> What was keeping them all in check, or at least in
>>>>> uncertainty, was the truce. Was it still standing?
>>>>> Technically, yes. The peace was sacred until the rope was
>>>>> untied -- and both of the knots had to be undone, by the
>>>>> same hands that had tied them. There was precedent for
>>>>> this, though not quite as spectacular. But in practice,
>>>>> and right now, the rope would stay tied only as long as
>>>>> someone was determined -- and strong enough -- to keep it
>>>>> that way. And he was painfully conscious that he didn't
>>>>> have that strength.
>>> I think the only adjective I can detect here is "that".
>>> But I feel pretty sure that it's used adverbially.
>> That's a demonstrative pronoun in the traditional
>> terminology; it can also be called a determiner. It has no
>> adverbial function. <Still> and <painfully> are adverbs,
>> however.
> And here my doubt would be on the status of that "still". ("Painfully"
> would clearly be out, no problem there.) And what about "technically"?
I'd call it a sentence adverb, like <hopefully> in
'Hopefully it was still standing'. But unlike <hopefully>
it doesn't really imply a point of view, so using it
wouldn't bother me; I suppose that only Patricia can really
say how strict a limitation she had in mind, though.
[...]
>>>>> He did however manage to tear away from the two imperial
>>> "two" is an adjective, but again, hardly a qualifying adjective.
>> <Imperial> is also an adjective.
> ...and one that gives me trouble.
Functionally <imperial guard> should probably be seen as a
single entity; it isn't a true compound, but <imperial>
seems essential to the specification in a way that <tall> in
<tall man> generally does not.
>>>>> guards who had grabbed him, and who now let him go
>>>>> without pursuing the matter any further -- just before
>>>>> another voice shouted from the opposite direction.
>>> "another"
>> And <opposite>.
> Indeed. And would they be permitted or forbidden?
If an adverbial prepositional phrase like <from the north>
is allowed in the first place, it seems a bit silly to
disallow <from the opposite direction> simply because an
embedded adjective is used to specify the direction. But
that's just my opinion.
[...]
Brian
ShellyS
> "ShellyS" <shel...@gmail.com> wrote in message
> news:1129407620.7...@g49g2000cwa.googlegroups.com...
>
> > Since I'm not as much into the adjective/no adjective issue, I'm more
> > trying to figure out this whole issue/exercise could apply to how I
> > describe things and how I might do that better.
>
> It depends on what you're trying to do, and what you're already good at. Or
> not good at.
Fair enough. :)
Ah, okay. One of my problems in this regard is that I for some reason
don't extrapolate well for writing, while I'm good at it for just about
everything else. So I can do exercises (well, it's like pulling teeth,
but I could probably get them done) and have no idea how it applies to
what I want to write. Having a clue as to how it can be used or what
effect it gives helps. Thanks. Whether or not I can think of more vivid
nouns and verbs for an exercise is still questionable, but worth
trying.
> If you do camera-eye or omniscient, or if you have ambition to try them,
> then this sort of exercise is both useful and practical, because you
> probably won't have an omniscient narrator who makes comments and judgements
> about all the stuff he's observing (unless you're Steven Brust doing Paarfi)
> and camera-eye doesn't have an explicit narrator at all.
I used to write omniscient. I didn't know there was another way, not
that I was particularly good at it, until a fan fic editor told me I
should write single povs that could alternate, what I now know is often
called tight third. And I've been using tight third with various levels
of filtering for so long now, I tend to not think of writing another
way.
(snip)
Shelly
Chris Dollin
> Open purses at 20 paces? That should take care of the "what it is that has
> to be described".
Not a purse as such: a shoulder-bag ...
... in the back three pockets: a mobile phone (off), a PDA, and some
lightweight headphones. The PDA has a storage card, which under inspection
is storing mostly (prog-) rock music.
In the front: passport (not usually there, left over from last week's
visit to Essen), datastick (nothing interesting on it at present), and
ticket-stubs (Essen again).
In the middle: wallet, pens, new notebook (just a few jottings on games
(Essen again)) glasses case with the other (presently, that would be
long-distance) pair in.
At other times, you would also find in it folded A4 printouts, sandwiches,
a paperback, or a copy of New Scientist - but not all at the same time.
--
Hedgehog
Notmuchhere: http://www.electric-hedgehog.net/
Otherface: Jena RDF/Owl toolkit http://jena.sourceforge.net/
Catja Pafort
> >> You start with general words and simple sentences, like "The house was
> >> built from bricks," and then shuffle things around until you get
> >> "Bricks tumbled around the base of the mansion, extras left over from
> >> the construction" or "Bricks flaked from the front of the residence,
> >> crumbled along its sides, cracked by the windows at the back." It
> >> takes a while.
> >
> > How many decades should I give it?
>
> How often and how frequently do you want to repeat the exercise?
On current form? <snarls>
I want to do the others first.
> It gets easier every time I do it. I used to have to keep grabbing
> thesaurus
I'm allowed to use a thesaurus?
> and
> looking up synonyms for "house" and "wind" and "rock" about every three
> words, and then sort of juggle those around until I got something.
That, err, didn't even occur to me. I thought I had to get it right. The
concept of creeping up on it sideways, so to speak, was not in my mental
space.
>
> >> > I gave in and attempted to describe a piece of reality:
> >>
> >> You did a lot better with this one, I thought -- lots more vivid. I
> >> especially liked the description of the mud.
> >
> > It was a little easier because it had no characters in it.
>
> Ah -- it was *supposed* to have no characters in it: omniscient or
> camera-eye, remember?
Oh, I read the specs - but every time I tried to describe something
belonging to one of the novel, people crept into the scene and I was
relating things back to my characters.
> It's interesting that you did something real, in both cases, and that you
> had a hard time sticking with the exercise the first time (where there is, I
> take it, some considerable emotional involvement...), and succeeded much
> better the second time. Was the second piece as difficult as the first?
It was easier because I could look up/listen/walk around (I did a fair
bit of walking around for it) and I could find an arc for it, I didn't
feel as if I was staring against a brick wall. Also, birds and trees and
mud were all things I could find actions for.
> >> What, if anything, did you get out of doing that? Besides frustrated...
> >
> > A pretty good demonstration of my shortcomings. It doesn't matter where
> > I start, within two sentences I'm back at internalisation. And once I'm
> > *doing* it I have no difficulties in coming up with interesting and
> > vivid detail. Take away my stabilisers, and I've forgotten how to ride
> > the verbal bike - I just *could not come up with _anything at all_* -
> > and not because I can't imagine places, but because I literally did not
> > have words to describe them.
> >
> > 'The house was built from bricks' - yeah, *that* I can see, and the next
> > thing I would normally do is to talk about their rough texure and the
> > flaking paint above.
>
> Possibly doing without adjectives and adverbs was too advanced for the very
> first thing.
It was a brilliant exercise because it proved just how big a skillgap
there was. I'm not used to tasks that I can't fudge, and this one was
impossible to do without at least thinking about the skills I was
missing.
> >I can get from 'I can see bricks' to 'there are
> > bricks' or 'the house was built of bricks'. What I can't do is make the
> > mental leap from there to 'bricks tumbled.' Such sentences do not occur
> > to me unless they're *very* well trodden verbal paths - rain falls, mist
> > rises, and never the twain shall meet. But take any ordinary object -
> > the metal mug that sits, full of cold tea, on my desk, and I'm
> > completely stumped as to what it could *do* - mugs, like bricks, don't
> > have an internal dynamic to me, they just _are_. It sits there. It is
> > respectively has been filled with tea. If you take all my adjectives
> > away from me, and everything this mug _means_ to me then I'm left with
> > an item on a desk, _and nothing to say about it_.
> >
> > It doesn't matter how long I stare at it.
>
> Well, what happens if you start by doing it with adjectives and then work
> backward? Or start with "A mug of tea sat on the desk" and then check a
> thesaurus for synonyms for "sit", to give you some ideas? And even if it
> *is* just sitting there, and you can't find a more interesting verb, there's
> more to it than that -- steam and the scent and maybe even a wave of heat
> from the sides, if it's fresh; if it's cold, then there's the congealed look
> that tea gets, with a bit of slick floating on the surface and fragments of
> the leaves lurking in the bottom, that you can't see because of the slick
> and the way the tea has stewed.
I think what I need is to come up with mental shapes for everything I'm
trying to describe; _and then_ to use the thesaurus to find more
interesting ways of saying it. I like the idea of the mug squatting or
perching or hunkering - so even if I can only come up with 'sit', that
should give me some variety.
> But in order to get from "a red enameled mug on a wooden desk" to "a smear
> of red against wood -- my mug, perched on the corner of my desk" you have to
> start by seeing just what's there. Not what it means or what you feel about
> it, or what your POV character thinks it means or how he feels about it.
> (It is, of course, very nearly impossible for most people to be this
> objective about what they describe, but it's worth a try.) After that,
> though, you have to figure out your own way in -- the thing that will
> trigger the associations and alternative-word-choices *for you*.
I'm not sure I can manage that level of abstraction.
> > No wonder I don't have any externalisation. I can't do it, so I avoid
> > it.
>
> It's just a way of thinking about things -- a habit of thought -- and like
> everything else about writing, it gets better with practice. Most people
> have no trouble doing a fairly standard essay-description of something -- a
> place, a room, whatever -- because they did a bunch of them when they were
> in grammar school, learning to write. It's finding substitutes for words
> and replacements for phrases that don't involve relying on adjectives that's
> tough.
I'm finding even the simple form difficult, but then, I'm not very
visual at all, and half the time, I don't *see* what's there, I have a
mental image that's made up of other things, an assurance of tea-ness,
if you like.
> I find that what this particular exercise does for me is to force me to
> really *dig* into a description. Adjectives and adverbs are *easy* --
> they're right there on top of my head most of the time: bright sunlight,
> dark shadows, chill breeze, and so on. The red enameled mug on a wooden
> desk. But if I take the easy route, I don't stop to think about what *else*
> I could say that would convey the image more vividly
That might well be the key point about description. Mug-on-desk blends
into the background, and sometimes you want that-
> -- the steam rising
> against the light from the window, visible as a ripple in the air; my cat
> wrinkling his nose and backing away from the heat and the scent of the tea
> (or circling in frustration as he waits for it to cool, if the tea is
> catnip); the stains on the desk-top that record weeks and months of mugs
> that landed hard and sloshed tea over their rims.
- and those are the bits that make *this* mug special and rememberable.
I guess... they tell a story in themselves, a hint of _many_ hours spent
at the desk, of carelessness or preoccupation, and of course in relating
the mug to the environment - daylight, cat, stains - you're providing
more background and characterisation; and in a way avoid thinking 'why
is this mug described? Who'll get brained with it?'
> Doing this consciously and deliberately in this exercise is the equivalent,
> for me, of your riding instructor saying "Move that there; relax this
> muscle; hold your knee like that" and then realizing what it *feels like* --
> the no-adjective exercise is a way of practicing the habit of thought that
> doesn't go for the easy adjective every single time, but that always (or at
> least often) considers what other possibilities there might be. Making it a
> *rule* that I can't use adjectives/adverbs for a bit keeps me from giving up
> too soon and going with the easy and obvious thing that I already know how
> to do.
That makes a lot of sense.
> It's like the plotting exercise, where you come up with twenty things that
> *could* happen next, and then throw away the first ten because those were
> the easy, obvious ones. After you do that a couple of times, you start
> throwing away the obvious plot twists *before* you write them down, because
> you've learned to recognize them. Doing without adjectives and adverbs is
> training in coming up with stronger nouns and verbs, so that when I'm
> writing a description of the palace I don't go into adjectival overload.
It'll be useful for me to remind myself of the sheer scope of language.
If I can work out a way of doing this.
That's actually one of the principles of learning I know from other
contexts. If you have one solution to your problem, your mind will drift
towards it automatically. If you establish that there are alternatives,
you'll stop and *think* about it - because there is no 'default' way,
the mind will actually be adrift a little. It's great for panic
situations, but can be helpful under any circumstance.
Catja
Patricia C. Wrede
news:1h4jw7e.1wk3uw7igmo15N%use...@greenknight.org.uk.invalid...
> Patricia C. Wrede <pwred...@aol.com> wrote:
>
>> >> You start with general words and simple sentences, like "The house was
>> >> built from bricks," and then shuffle things around until you get
>> >> "Bricks tumbled around the base of the mansion, extras left over from
>> >> the construction" or "Bricks flaked from the front of the residence,
>> >> crumbled along its sides, cracked by the windows at the back." It
>> >> takes a while.
>> >
>> > How many decades should I give it?
>>
>> How often and how frequently do you want to repeat the exercise?
>
> On current form? <snarls>
The stuff that's really most useful and helpful always seems to be the
hardest, at fist.
> I want to do the others first.
Ah--do note that they aren't cumulative. That is, having given up
adjectives in the first one, you don't need to keep avoiding them in the
second one. I started with the no-adjectives one (which is from Ursula le
Guin's STEERING THE CRAFT, slightly personalized) in order to get that at
the front of your mind. Theoretically, when you do the other three, you'll
have that experience to remind you to think about alternative nouns and
verbs before you default to adjectives in *all* cases.
>
>> It gets easier every time I do it. I used to have to keep grabbing
>> thesaurus
>
> I'm allowed to use a thesaurus?
Why not? I won't say that anybody could use *any* tool that makes the
exercise easier, because I bet someone could come up with something that
made it not work in any useful fashion. But a dictionary and a thesaurus
are normal writing tools, and I don't see any reason why they should be
forbidden, for these exercises, anyway.
>
>> and
>> looking up synonyms for "house" and "wind" and "rock" about every three
>> words, and then sort of juggle those around until I got something.
>
> That, err, didn't even occur to me. I thought I had to get it right. The
> concept of creeping up on it sideways, so to speak, was not in my mental
> space.
The goal isn't to be able to come up with concrete nouns and verbs out of
absolutely nothing; it's to train yourself to see the stuff that *isn't*
concrete, that's a general or even generic noun depending on adjectives and
adverbs, so that you can figure out which ones to look for substitutes for.
You *do*, eventually, start to come up with more specific choices
automatically -- it becomes more of a habit. But you aren't required to
start out with the high-level skills that you will eventually develop.
>> Ah -- it was *supposed* to have no characters in it: omniscient or
>> camera-eye, remember?
>
> Oh, I read the specs - but every time I tried to describe something
> belonging to one of the novel, people crept into the scene and I was
> relating things back to my characters.
I hope you don't have too much trouble with that in the last two exercises.
I put them last on the list because they have people in them, at least by
implication, but maybe I should have made the whole first set of exercises
be doing stuff that had no people, just to give you a little more practice.
>> It's interesting that you did something real, in both cases, and that you
>> had a hard time sticking with the exercise the first time (where there
>> is, I
>> take it, some considerable emotional involvement...), and succeeded much
>> better the second time. Was the second piece as difficult as the first?
>
> It was easier because I could look up/listen/walk around (I did a fair
> bit of walking around for it) and I could find an arc for it, I didn't
> feel as if I was staring against a brick wall. Also, birds and trees and
> mud were all things I could find actions for.
When you are describing a place in a story, your *character* is walking
around in it/listening to it/looking at it. What he sees and hears and
feels -- all the outside input -- is what you have for your descriptions.
You may have to logic your way into it, to begin with: "My character is
having a sword fight, and he's really impressed by his teacher. Wait. What
is *happening*? They're fighting. The swords are hitting each other.
They're moving around. OK, the swords are moving; I have to say something
about the strokes. They'll make noise when they hit each other; I can put
that in. Hmm...the POV is going to feel it in his arm when a blow strikes
his sword; I can put that in, too. And they're moving...where? Oh, bugger,
I need to describe the *space*, too..." And then you think about what has
to be there, logically, in order for your scene to play out. And once you
have your list of what has to be there, *then* you figure out how to say it
vividly, and what order to put it in, and so on.
>> Possibly doing without adjectives and adverbs was too advanced for the
>> very
>> first thing.
>
> It was a brilliant exercise because it proved just how big a skillgap
> there was. I'm not used to tasks that I can't fudge, and this one was
> impossible to do without at least thinking about the skills I was
> missing.
Well, good. But you did quite well with the second paragraph; the bit about
the mud was really good (and quite memorable). So it's obviously not as big
a problem as you might think.
> I think what I need is to come up with mental shapes for everything I'm
> trying to describe; _and then_ to use the thesaurus to find more
> interesting ways of saying it. I like the idea of the mug squatting or
> perching or hunkering - so even if I can only come up with 'sit', that
> should give me some variety.
Now, see, there -- I said squat and perch, but you came up with "hunkering"
all on your own. And it's a really good choice. So you can do it; it's
just a matter of practice and habit.
>> But in order to get from "a red enameled mug on a wooden desk" to "a
>> smear
>> of red against wood -- my mug, perched on the corner of my desk" you have
>> to
>> start by seeing just what's there. Not what it means or what you feel
>> about
>> it, or what your POV character thinks it means or how he feels about it.
>> (It is, of course, very nearly impossible for most people to be this
>> objective about what they describe, but it's worth a try.) After that,
>> though, you have to figure out your own way in -- the thing that will
>> trigger the associations and alternative-word-choices *for you*.
>
> I'm not sure I can manage that level of abstraction.
It's not really abstract; it's just slowing down. You walk into a room;
your eyes see what's there; your brain processes it; and then you react to
it emotionally. The reaction comes *really fast*, but it's still a
*reaction* -- first, you see, *then* you react. You just need to slow down
and register the "seeing" part *before* you get to the reaction/emotion
part.
>> It's just a way of thinking about things -- a habit of thought -- and
>> like
>> everything else about writing, it gets better with practice. Most people
>> have no trouble doing a fairly standard essay-description of something --
>> a
>> place, a room, whatever -- because they did a bunch of them when they
>> were
>> in grammar school, learning to write. It's finding substitutes for words
>> and replacements for phrases that don't involve relying on adjectives
>> that's
>> tough.
>
> I'm finding even the simple form difficult, but then, I'm not very
> visual at all, and half the time, I don't *see* what's there, I have a
> mental image that's made up of other things, an assurance of tea-ness,
> if you like.
It doesn't have to be visual, though the visual component is important to
many people and you probably ought not to leave it out of your descriptions
entirely. But one of the things that's really hard for many people is
getting the *non*-visual bits of description in -- the sounds and smells and
sensations -- and I noticed that when you did your description of the scene,
you *started* with sounds. I thought that was really cool, and very
effective. And in many, many cases, using sounds and smells and sensations
as the basis for a description gives a more vivid picture to the reader than
using visuals.
I'm guessing that the exercise where you describe something *without* using
any visual cues is going to be a lot easier for you, if I give it to you,
than this one? :)
>> I find that what this particular exercise does for me is to force me to
>> really *dig* into a description. Adjectives and adverbs are *easy* --
>> they're right there on top of my head most of the time: bright sunlight,
>> dark shadows, chill breeze, and so on. The red enameled mug on a wooden
>> desk. But if I take the easy route, I don't stop to think about what
>> *else*
>> I could say that would convey the image more vividly
>
> That might well be the key point about description. Mug-on-desk blends
> into the background, and sometimes you want that-
Yes. But if it's the default, and you don't think about it, then you get
mug-on-desk even when you need *more* than that.
>> -- the steam rising
>> against the light from the window, visible as a ripple in the air; my cat
>> wrinkling his nose and backing away from the heat and the scent of the
>> tea
>> (or circling in frustration as he waits for it to cool, if the tea is
>> catnip); the stains on the desk-top that record weeks and months of mugs
>> that landed hard and sloshed tea over their rims.
>
> - and those are the bits that make *this* mug special and rememberable.
> I guess... they tell a story in themselves, a hint of _many_ hours spent
> at the desk, of carelessness or preoccupation, and of course in relating
> the mug to the environment - daylight, cat, stains - you're providing
> more background and characterisation; and in a way avoid thinking 'why
> is this mug described? Who'll get brained with it?'
Yes. And all those specifics provide the background and characterization by
*implication*. (And I was trying hard to do all of them without using any
adjectives or adverbs, just in case you didn't notice that part. :)
>> It's like the plotting exercise, where you come up with twenty things
>> that
>> *could* happen next, and then throw away the first ten because those were
>> the easy, obvious ones. After you do that a couple of times, you start
>> throwing away the obvious plot twists *before* you write them down,
>> because
>> you've learned to recognize them. Doing without adjectives and adverbs
>> is
>> training in coming up with stronger nouns and verbs, so that when I'm
>> writing a description of the palace I don't go into adjectival overload.
>
> It'll be useful for me to remind myself of the sheer scope of language.
> If I can work out a way of doing this.
Thesauruses and dictionaries are good, if you remember to use them.
> That's actually one of the principles of learning I know from other
> contexts. If you have one solution to your problem, your mind will drift
> towards it automatically. If you establish that there are alternatives,
> you'll stop and *think* about it - because there is no 'default' way,
> the mind will actually be adrift a little. It's great for panic
> situations, but can be helpful under any circumstance.
Exactly. In your case, you found one solution and used it and used it and
used it, for four or five books' worth of writing. That makes you end up
with some pretty well-ingrained habits to get around, hence (in all
probability) some of the trouble you're having figuring out how to do all of
this.
Patricia C. Wrede
R. L.
<pwred...@aol.com> wrote:
>"Catja Pafort" <use...@greenknight.org.uk.invalid> wrote in message
>news:1h4jw7e.1wk3uw7igmo15N%use...@greenknight.org.uk.invalid...
>> Patricia C. Wrede <pwred...@aol.com> wrote:
/snip/
>> It was easier because I could look up/listen/walk around (I did a fair
>> bit of walking around for it) and I could find an arc for it,
An arc? Is that something like what I was calling a 'theme' or
'hang-together' for the passage?
>> I didn't
>> feel as if I was staring against a brick wall. Also, birds and trees and
>> mud were all things I could find actions for.
>
>When you are describing a place in a story, your *character* is walking
>around in it/listening to it/looking at it. What he sees and hears and
>feels -- all the outside input -- is what you have for your descriptions.
>You may have to logic your way into it, to begin with: "My character is
>having a sword fight, and he's really impressed by his teacher. Wait. What
>is *happening*? They're fighting. The swords are hitting each other.
>They're moving around. OK, the swords are moving; I have to say something
>about the strokes. They'll make noise when they hit each other; I can put
>that in. Hmm...the POV is going to feel it in his arm when a blow strikes
>his sword; I can put that in, too. And they're moving...where? Oh, bugger,
>I need to describe the *space*, too..." And then you think about what has
>to be there, logically, in order for your scene to play out. And once you
>have your list of what has to be there, *then* you figure out how to say it
>vividly, and what order to put it in, and so on.
Oh, that's helpful, thanks.
/snip/
>your eyes see what's there; your brain processes it; and then you react to
>it emotionally. The reaction comes *really fast*, but it's still a
>*reaction* -- first, you see, *then* you react. You just need to slow down
>and register the "seeing" part *before* you get to the reaction/emotion
>part.
But stuff like "The mud had personality" is reaction, the second stage.
--
RL at houseboatonstyx com (insert one 'the')
http://www.livejournal.com/users/houseboatonstyx/
Patricia C. Wrede
And it's at the *end* of Catja's paragraph, *after* she's established that
it's there and talked about the feel of it sucking at her boots. In other
words, she saw or sensed it first, and *made the reader* sense it and feel
it, and *then* came to a conclusion or reaction about it. And in any case,
I wasn't talking here about the way you *write* a description; I was talking
about the mental process that goes on in your head *before* you write
something. How you tell what's there, so you can *decide* whether you need
to write a description or a reaction or just leave it all out entirely.
Catja's problem -- which I get the feeling isn't quite the same as yours --
is that at least 80% of the time she doesn't bother telling the reader that
there's mud around at all, much less how it looks and feels. Usually, she
just dives right into a character having an even higher-level reaction, like
"Slogging along like this is really tiring me out," which leaves the reader
going "Huh? Whut?" because they didn't know that the character was eve
walking, let alone through mud, much less through mud with _personality_.
And we've established that she really, really doesn't get the
concrete-details-in-description thing. So when I give her advice, I talk
about ways to get at doing concrete details and descriptions. If *you*
don't have a problem with that sort of thing, what I'm saying may not make a
lot of sense except by accident.
Half the time, when you respond like this, it seems to me that you're trying
to fit everything into nice, neat little boxes with hard edges -- *this* is
seeing, *that* is reaction; *this* is filtered description, *that* is not --
and never the twain shall meet. (And it's frustrating, because stuff in
writing isn't that hard-edged; the exact same sentence with the exact same
wording may work perfectly well as a reaction in one context and as pure
description in another; as filtered in one context and unfiltered in
another; as omniscient viewpoint in one context and as first-person in
another.)
I'm getting the sense, though, that the neat-boxes thing isn't actually
what's going on inside your head. I'm not sure what you're really doing
instead, though. And I could probably give you a clearer idea of how I
think things work and why, in a way more likely to be useful to you, if I
had a clearer idea of what you're thinking and wanting to know. Quite
often, I don't give the exact same advice about stuff to two different
writers, because even if they're both having, say, a similar problem writing
description, they may be having it for very different reasons, and they're
almost sure to have quite different strengths to draw on when it comes to
figuring it out.
Patricia C. Wrede
R. L.
<pwred...@aol.com> wrote:
>"R. L." <see...@no-spams.coms> wrote in message
>news:t6m7l1pvhgfs7c5jd...@4ax.com...
>> On Mon, 17 Oct 2005 08:30:14 -0500, "Patricia C. Wrede"
>> <pwred...@aol.com> wrote:
>
>>>your eyes see what's there; your brain processes it; and then you react to
>>>it emotionally. The reaction comes *really fast*, but it's still a
>>>*reaction* -- first, you see, *then* you react. You just need to slow
>>>down
>>>and register the "seeing" part *before* you get to the reaction/emotion
>>>part.
>>
>> But stuff like "The mud had personality" is reaction, the second stage.
>
>And it's at the *end* of Catja's paragraph, *after* she's established that
>it's there and talked about the feel of it sucking at her boots. In other
>words, she saw or sensed it first, and *made the reader* sense it and feel
>it, and *then* came to a conclusion or reaction about it.
Yes, it was in the 'right' order (tho I don't remember much objective about
the mud before it was suddenly pulling the boots -- but you did say
objective wasn't the point).
> And in any case,
>I wasn't talking here about the way you *write* a description; I was talking
>about the mental process that goes on in your head *before* you write
>something.
Oh.
> How you tell what's there, so you can *decide* whether you need
>to write a description or a reaction or just leave it all out entirely.
>
>Catja's problem -- which I get the feeling isn't quite the same as yours --
In a way I'm at a learning level similar to Catja's: looking for the right
(for *my current* middle grade novellas) proportion and sequence of what
Bickham calls Stimulus / Internalization / Response, and you call
Internalization and I forget what your other words are.
Catja and I may be coming at this from opposite directions. She's coming
from lots of Int and overall long, I'm coming from little Int and overall
too short, condensed, summarizing (short fairy tale style). So I need to
increase wordage in the Stimulus part (whatever you called it), and keeping
it external (and objective) is fine. So this thread and these exercises are
striking sparks to me too, tho I'm trying not to butt in except with short
comments that might fit into what you're telling her.
/snip/
>And we've established that she really, really doesn't get the
>concrete-details-in-description thing. So when I give her advice, I talk
>about ways to get at doing concrete details and descriptions. If *you*
>don't have a problem with that sort of thing, what I'm saying may not make a
>lot of sense except by accident.
I *get* it, I have those wherever they belong -- but too short, generic. I
need to increase wordage on most of them. So some of this is very helpful.
/snip/
>I'm getting the sense, though, that the neat-boxes thing isn't actually
>what's going on inside your head.
Good.
> I'm not sure what you're really doing instead, though.
What's going on in my head is more like what Goodman and Darkhawk sometimes
say about theirs. My posts are translations into some kind of sane common
terms. Imagine being in a foreign country trying to talk their language:
you'd need to stick to a few simple clear words.
> And I could probably give you a clearer idea of how I
>think things work and why, in a way more likely to be useful to you, if I
>had a clearer idea of what you're thinking and wanting to know.
My own thinking would seem very 'unclear': it's mostly feeling.
Patricia C. Wrede
>> How you tell what's there, so you can *decide* whether you need
>>to write a description or a reaction or just leave it all out entirely.
>>
>>Catja's problem -- which I get the feeling isn't quite the same as
>>yours --
>
> In a way I'm at a learning level similar to Catja's: looking for the
> right
> (for *my current* middle grade novellas) proportion and sequence of what
> Bickham calls Stimulus / Internalization / Response, and you call
> Internalization and I forget what your other words are.
Internalization isn't my term. It's Catja's. I've been using it because
she understands it.
> Catja and I may be coming at this from opposite directions. She's coming
> from lots of Int and overall long, I'm coming from little Int and overall
> too short, condensed, summarizing (short fairy tale style). So I need to
> increase wordage in the Stimulus part (whatever you called it), and
> keeping
> it external (and objective) is fine.
I'd thought I understood what you meant by "Bickham's
Stimulus/Internalization/Response", but the way you use it is...foreign to
the way I think. First you say you have little internalization and overly
condensed, summarized prose (which are two completely separate problems, not
related to each other). Then you say you have to increase wordage in the
"stimulus part" (that's the only part that's condensed? Nothing else could
or should be expanded?) and that increasing your word count for "external
and objective" stuff is fine (but I thought you'd said you didn't have much
internalization; does this mean you don't think you need or want more, after
all?).
>So this thread and these exercises are
> striking sparks to me too, tho I'm trying not to butt in except with short
> comments that might fit into what you're telling her.
I didn't think you were trying to butt in. I got more the impression that
you were trying to get hold of something yourself, and were therefore
interpreting things from a different angle. Which is sometimes useful.
>
> /snip/
>
>>And we've established that she really, really doesn't get the
>>concrete-details-in-description thing. So when I give her advice, I talk
>>about ways to get at doing concrete details and descriptions. If *you*
>>don't have a problem with that sort of thing, what I'm saying may not make
>>a
>>lot of sense except by accident.
>
> I *get* it, I have those wherever they belong -- but too short, generic. I
> need to increase wordage on most of them. So some of this is very helpful.
Well, I hope so. :) But it seems to me that you occasionally get
sidetracked by things that aren't about the stuff you need. Like all the
stuff I'm doing because Catja *doesn't* get it (which is likely to be
confusing or annoying because you *do*).
Um. I can talk in a sort of general way about various ways of going from
condensed fairy-tale style to fully-dramatized, but it'd be easier if you
could narrow it down more specifically, or maybe post a paragraph or two
that you think could use expanding. Unless that sort of example doesn't
work for you?
>
> /snip/
>
>>I'm getting the sense, though, that the neat-boxes thing isn't actually
>>what's going on inside your head.
>
> Good.
>
>> I'm not sure what you're really doing instead, though.
>
> What's going on in my head is more like what Goodman and Darkhawk
> sometimes
> say about theirs. My posts are translations into some kind of sane common
> terms. Imagine being in a foreign country trying to talk their language:
> you'd need to stick to a few simple clear words.
Ah. Is that a general analogy, or are you strongly kinesthetic, too?
>> And I could probably give you a clearer idea of how I
>>think things work and why, in a way more likely to be useful to you, if I
>>had a clearer idea of what you're thinking and wanting to know.
>
> My own thinking would seem very 'unclear': it's mostly feeling.
Well, what you're feeling about your prose, then. If you've been struggling
with our language all this time, the least I can do is try to learn more
about yours. And perhaps Dan and Darkhawk can help with translation now and
then, if we run into problems.
Patricia C. Wrede
Catja Pafort
> >> How often and how frequently do you want to repeat the exercise?
> >
> > On current form? <snarls>
>
> The stuff that's really most useful and helpful always seems to be the
> hardest, at fist.
I'm glad you don't have anything more helpful, in that case...
> > I want to do the others first.
>
> Ah--do note that they aren't cumulative. That is, having given up
> adjectives in the first one, you don't need to keep avoiding them in the
> second one. I started with the no-adjectives one (which is from Ursula le
> Guin's STEERING THE CRAFT, slightly personalized) in order to get that at
> the front of your mind.
And most useful it was, too.
Interesting. I've got Steering the Craft, and I've read it a couple of
times, but _in isolation_ that exercise made no sense to me at all. It's
having a _context_ for it, and a *reason* as well as coming at the right
time that made iit into a very valuable tool indeed.
> Theoretically, when you do the other three, you'll
> have that experience to remind you to think about alternative nouns and
> verbs before you default to adjectives in *all* cases.
A... greater scope, overall, you mean?
> >> looking up synonyms for "house" and "wind" and "rock" about every three
> >> words, and then sort of juggle those around until I got something.
> >
> > That, err, didn't even occur to me. I thought I had to get it right. The
> > concept of creeping up on it sideways, so to speak, was not in my mental
> > space.
>
> The goal isn't to be able to come up with concrete nouns and verbs out of
> absolutely nothing; it's to train yourself to see the stuff that *isn't*
> concrete, that's a general or even generic noun depending on adjectives and
> adverbs, so that you can figure out which ones to look for substitutes for.
> You *do*, eventually, start to come up with more specific choices
> automatically -- it becomes more of a habit. But you aren't required to
> start out with the high-level skills that you will eventually develop.
As I said, the thesaurus never occurred to me. I guess I should go out
and buy one. (I've got an electronic widget, but that's not the same)
> >> Ah -- it was *supposed* to have no characters in it: omniscient or
> >> camera-eye, remember?
> >
> > Oh, I read the specs - but every time I tried to describe something
> > belonging to one of the novel, people crept into the scene and I was
> > relating things back to my characters.
>
> I hope you don't have too much trouble with that in the last two exercises.
> I put them last on the list because they have people in them, at least by
> implication, but maybe I should have made the whole first set of exercises
> be doing stuff that had no people, just to give you a little more practice.
We'll see.
> >> It's interesting that you did something real, in both cases, and that you
> >> had a hard time sticking with the exercise the first time (where there
> >> is, I
> >> take it, some considerable emotional involvement...), and succeeded much
> >> better the second time. Was the second piece as difficult as the first?
> >
> > It was easier because I could look up/listen/walk around (I did a fair
> > bit of walking around for it) and I could find an arc for it, I didn't
> > feel as if I was staring against a brick wall. Also, birds and trees and
> > mud were all things I could find actions for.
>
> When you are describing a place in a story, your *character* is walking
> around in it/listening to it/looking at it. What he sees and hears and
> feels -- all the outside input -- is what you have for your descriptions.
Only the damn bastards won't shut up trying to tell me all about their
lovelives (dreams, hopes, what they ate laste night...)
> You may have to logic your way into it, to begin with: "My character is
> having a sword fight, and he's really impressed by his teacher. Wait. What
> is *happening*? They're fighting. The swords are hitting each other.
> They're moving around. OK, the swords are moving; I have to say something
> about the strokes. They'll make noise when they hit each other; I can put
> that in. Hmm...the POV is going to feel it in his arm when a blow strikes
> his sword; I can put that in, too. And they're moving...where? Oh, bugger,
> I need to describe the *space*, too..." And then you think about what has
> to be there, logically, in order for your scene to play out. And once you
> have your list of what has to be there, *then* you figure out how to say it
> vividly, and what order to put it in, and so on.
I don't think that will work, although I couldn't right now say _why_.
> >> Possibly doing without adjectives and adverbs was too advanced for the
> >> very first thing.
> >
> > It was a brilliant exercise because it proved just how big a skillgap
> > there was. I'm not used to tasks that I can't fudge, and this one was
> > impossible to do without at least thinking about the skills I was
> > missing.
>
> Well, good. But you did quite well with the second paragraph; the bit about
> the mud was really good (and quite memorable). So it's obviously not as big
> a problem as you might think.
I need to get my head around it.
> > I think what I need is to come up with mental shapes for everything I'm
> > trying to describe; _and then_ to use the thesaurus to find more
> > interesting ways of saying it. I like the idea of the mug squatting or
> > perching or hunkering - so even if I can only come up with 'sit', that
> > should give me some variety.
>
> Now, see, there -- I said squat and perch, but you came up with "hunkering"
> all on your own. And it's a really good choice. So you can do it; it's
> just a matter of practice and habit.
Probably.
Synchronicity strikes again. Having struggled with the description of a
mug of tea, another appeared in my life.
Until a moment ago, I had a mug on my desk that attempted to defy
description - *it whines*. It is a mug of Earl Grey tea that should not
arouse suspicion at all, made by a process that has supplied me with a
thousand cups of tea. I mean, it has a twin. (Blame thrift and lazyness
in the 'run up and down stairs to operate the kettle' department.) One
of the pair behaves like a cup of tea ought - it's sitting in patience,
enticing me with the smells it emanates, promising a foretaste of
Elysium - and the other whines.
No, that is not a figure of speech - it emits a whining noise in the
highest register. And bubbles that only a person cursed with
short-sightedness appreciates. On examination, it contains a fleck that
could well be an insect trapped - and if it is, I'm thanking a Pantheon
of gods that swatting stands a chance to kill it.
Sometimes stingyness pays off, since at least I *do* have a nice cup of
tea. It whined long enough for me to notice while in the kitchen
downstairs, continued while I carried my loot up the stairs, puzzling
over the sound (translated to 'but mugs don't *do* that'), whinged while
I held it up to the light and observed its deviation from teaishness,
and did not cease when I carried it downstairs again and deposited it,
once more, in the kitchen.
You will notice that I did not rush to free it of it's prison. Anything
that survives total immersion in a scaldingness of water for several
minutes should not, IMHO, be encouraged to breed.
I'm a Science Fiction writer. We _take care_.
[a smear of red against wood -- my mug, perched on the corner of my
desk]
> > I'm not sure I can manage that level of abstraction.
>
> It's not really abstract; it's just slowing down.
All the fancy ways of saying 'the mug sits on the table' are in one
category, but 'smear of red against wood' needs unpacking, needs
explaining, and if that explanation isn't forthcoming, I won't parse it.
> You walk into a room;
> your eyes see what's there; your brain processes it; and then you react to
> it emotionally. The reaction comes *really fast*, but it's still a
> *reaction* -- first, you see, *then* you react. You just need to slow down
> and register the "seeing" part *before* you get to the reaction/emotion
> part.
Consciously seeing is hard work. One reason I'm such a lousy artist.
> > I'm finding even the simple form difficult, but then, I'm not very
> > visual at all, and half the time, I don't *see* what's there, I have a
> > mental image that's made up of other things, an assurance of tea-ness,
> > if you like.
>
> It doesn't have to be visual, though the visual component is important to
> many people and you probably ought not to leave it out of your descriptions
> entirely. But one of the things that's really hard for many people is
> getting the *non*-visual bits of description in -- the sounds and smells and
> sensations -- and I noticed that when you did your description of the scene,
> you *started* with sounds. I thought that was really cool, and very
> effective.
Thank you.
> And in many, many cases, using sounds and smells and sensations
> as the basis for a description gives a more vivid picture to the reader than
> using visuals.
>
> I'm guessing that the exercise where you describe something *without* using
> any visual cues is going to be a lot easier for you, if I give it to you,
> than this one? :)
Probably. I'm not making any predictions at this stage.
> >> But if I take the easy route, I don't stop to think about what *else* I
> >> could say that would convey the image more vividly
> >
> > That might well be the key point about description. Mug-on-desk blends
> > into the background, and sometimes you want that-
>
> Yes. But if it's the default, and you don't think about it, then you get
> mug-on-desk even when you need *more* than that.
I quite often stop at 'tea'. Or 'no longer thirsty.'
> >> -- the steam rising
> >> against the light from the window, visible as a ripple in the air; my cat
> >> wrinkling his nose and backing away from the heat and the scent of the
> >> tea
> >> (or circling in frustration as he waits for it to cool, if the tea is
> >> catnip); the stains on the desk-top that record weeks and months of mugs
> >> that landed hard and sloshed tea over their rims.
> >
> > - and those are the bits that make *this* mug special and rememberable.
> > I guess... they tell a story in themselves, a hint of _many_ hours spent
> > at the desk, of carelessness or preoccupation, and of course in relating
> > the mug to the environment - daylight, cat, stains - you're providing
> > more background and characterisation; and in a way avoid thinking 'why
> > is this mug described? Who'll get brained with it?'
>
> Yes. And all those specifics provide the background and characterization by
> *implication*. (And I was trying hard to do all of them without using any
> adjectives or adverbs, just in case you didn't notice that part. :)
I didn't in the first round. I just noticed that they were very vivid,
and very precise.
> > That's actually one of the principles of learning I know from other
> > contexts. If you have one solution to your problem, your mind will drift
> > towards it automatically. If you establish that there are alternatives,
> > you'll stop and *think* about it - because there is no 'default' way,
> > the mind will actually be adrift a little. It's great for panic
> > situations, but can be helpful under any circumstance.
>
> Exactly. In your case, you found one solution and used it and used it and
> used it, for four or five books' worth of writing. That makes you end up
> with some pretty well-ingrained habits to get around, hence (in all
> probability) some of the trouble you're having figuring out how to do all of
> this.
I'm not sure how I could have avoided it, though. If someone had
demanded of me at the time that apart from doing everything else I
should _also_ get description right and think about micro level etc etc,
I'd probably have found it disheartening. It was a big enough step for
me anyway.
Now that I've proven I can come up with novel-length ideas and maintain
them, and come up with interesting setting and characters and story etc,
I'm a lot readier for it.
Catja
Marilee J. Layman
<ang...@vaxer.net> wrote:
>On Thu, 13 Oct 2005 19:21:38 GMT, djh...@kithrup.com (Dorothy J
>Heydt) wrote:
>
>>In article <qr5tk11n63dip9eae...@4ax.com>,
>>R. L. <see...@no-spams.coms> wrote:
>>>
>>>Open purses at 20 paces? That should take care of the "what it is that has
>>>to be described".
>>>
>>><gets purse>
>>
>>[schnipp much detailed description]
>>
>>Let's try mine, smaller and simpler.
>>
>Let's try another take.
>
>I've kind of got into the habit of not carrying an actual PURSE, in
>the sense of a handbag, for a while.
I don't carry a purse. I put my wallet in my right pocket and my
cellphone and keys in my left pocket. (When I'm home all day and
might wear a pair of pants without pockets, the wallet and keys are on
the dining room table and I tuck the cellphone in my bra.)
Cons are one of the times I add things to my pockets -- badge when I
don't need to wear it, kleenex, Pep-O-Mint lifesavers, room card.
--
Marilee J. Layman
Marilee J. Layman
<pwred...@aol.com> wrote:
>"R. L." <see...@no-spams.coms> wrote in message
>news:02c2l1d18v1n4va6o...@4ax.com...
>> On Sat, 15 Oct 2005 15:39:15 +0100, use...@greenknight.org.uk.invalid
>> (Catja Pafort) wrote:
>
>>>But take any ordinary object -
>>>the metal mug that sits, full of cold tea, on my desk, and I'm
>>>completely stumped as to what it could *do* - mugs, like bricks, don't
>>>have an internal dynamic to me, they just _are_.
>>
>> Exactly. A mug described as /action verbing/ is not a realistic mug.
>
>Metaphor.
>
>But even apart from metaphor, my thesaurus lists three more vivid verbs as
>synonyms for "sit" -- squat, roost, and perch -- and eighteen others (mostly
>not appropriate, but still) under "seat" (to which the first entry refers);
>it
>has even more under the verbs "to stand" and "to place." And if a mug
>can sit and stand, it can perch, settle, roost, repose, lodge, or squat as
>well. If using an action verb in such a context bothers you just absolutely
>desperately, you can use passive voice to imply an actor other than the mug
>or the bricks.
Sulk! I think the mug should sulk.
--
Marilee J. Layman
Dorothy J Heydt
Catja Pafort <use...@greenknight.org.uk.invalid> wrote:
>
>Until a moment ago, I had a mug on my desk that attempted to defy
>description - *it whines*. It is a mug of Earl Grey tea that should not
>arouse suspicion at all, made by a process that has supplied me with a
>thousand cups of tea. I mean, it has a twin. (Blame thrift and lazyness
>in the 'run up and down stairs to operate the kettle' department.) One
>of the pair behaves like a cup of tea ought - it's sitting in patience,
>enticing me with the smells it emanates, promising a foretaste of
>Elysium - and the other whines.
>
>No, that is not a figure of speech - it emits a whining noise in the
>highest register. And bubbles that only a person cursed with
>short-sightedness appreciates. On examination, it contains a fleck that
>could well be an insect trapped - and if it is, I'm thanking a Pantheon
>of gods that swatting stands a chance to kill it.
Well, this doesn't help much with the writing part, but it sounds
as if the musical mug has a crack in it and the bubbles and the
whine are made by air escaping into the liquid as the liquid
seeps out through the crack. (Is there a puddle under the mug?)
Sounds as if you're going to have to toss it, and acquire another
second mug that isn't quite so psychoceramic.
Dorothy J. Heydt
Albany, California
djh...@kithrup.com
Brian M. Scott
<use...@greenknight.org.uk.invalid> wrote in
<news:1h4lmje.11wp2qm8qzck7N%use...@greenknight.org.uk.invalid>
in rec.arts.sf.composition:
[...]
> Sometimes stingyness pays off, since at least I *do* have
> a nice cup of tea. It whined long enough for me to notice
> while in the kitchen downstairs, continued while I
> carried my loot up the stairs, puzzling over the sound
> (translated to 'but mugs don't *do* that'), whinged while
> I held it up to the light and observed its deviation from
> teaishness, and did not cease when I carried it
> downstairs again and deposited it, once more, in the
> kitchen.
Not to be a subversive influence, but this passage almost
begs for a WIP to be part of!
[...]
Brian
R. L.
<pwred...@aol.com> wrote:
>"R. L." <see...@no-spams.coms> wrote in message
>news:27t7l11qqu810bo48...@4ax.com...
>> On Mon, 17 Oct 2005 13:43:10 -0500, "Patricia C. Wrede"
>> <pwred...@aol.com> wrote:
/snip/
>> In a way I'm at a learning level similar to Catja's: looking for the
>> right
>> (for *my current* middle grade novellas) proportion and sequence of what
>> Bickham calls Stimulus / Internalization / Response, and you call
>> Internalization and I forget what your other words are.
/snip/
>> Catja and I may be coming at this from opposite directions. She's coming
>> from lots of Int and overall long, I'm coming from little Int and overall
>> too short, condensed, summarizing (short fairy tale style). So I need to
>> increase wordage in the Stimulus part (whatever you called it), and
>> keeping it external (and objective) is fine.
>
>I'd thought I understood what you meant by "Bickham's
>Stimulus/Internalization/Response", but the way you use it is...foreign to
>the way I think. First you say you have little internalization and overly
>condensed, summarized prose (which are two completely separate problems, not
>related to each other).
True, sorry.
>Then you say you have to increase wordage in the
>"stimulus part" (that's the only part that's condensed?
Usually.
>Nothing else could or should be expanded?)
The Int and Response seem to me ok, tho they'll probably grow a bit if I
expand the Externals/Stimulus, ie description etc.
>and that increasing your word count for "external
>and objective" stuff is fine (but I thought you'd said you didn't have much
>internalization; does this mean you don't think you need or want more, after
>all?).
I don't think I need much increase in internalization; I want a balance
heavy on the external stuff (scenery, cool stuff observed). I expect more
external stuff will suggest some more internal reactions to it, without a
problem.
Hm, maybe that's a key. Maybe more Internals, short ones, to break up a
block of description, would help.
/snip/
>I got more the impression that
>you were trying to get hold of something yourself, and were therefore
>interpreting things from a different angle. Which is sometimes useful.
I'm finding it helpful.
/snip/
>> I *get* it, I have those wherever they belong -- but too short, generic. I
>> need to increase wordage on most of them. So some of this is very helpful.
>
>Well, I hope so. :) But it seems to me that you occasionally get
>sidetracked by things that aren't about the stuff you need.
Any interesting tool is likely to be useful later.
>Like all the
>stuff I'm doing because Catja *doesn't* get it (which is likely to be
>confusing or annoying because you *do*).
I have no problem skimming stuff I don't like or need (tho I feel a bit
pushy for listening in, sometimes). But sometimes an interesting
distinction turns up, like between 'internal' and 'subjective'.
I'll look for a sample of my own in need of expansion, and work on the
exercises (or some adaptation of them). Real life is very demanding this
week.
/snip/
>>>I'm getting the sense, though, that the neat-boxes thing isn't actually
>>>what's going on inside your head.
>>
>> Good.
>>
>>> I'm not sure what you're really doing instead, though.
>>
>> What's going on in my head is more like what Goodman and Darkhawk
>> sometimes
>> say about theirs. My posts are translations into some kind of sane common
>> terms. Imagine being in a foreign country trying to talk their language:
>> you'd need to stick to a few simple clear words.
>
>Ah. Is that a general analogy, or are you strongly kinesthetic, too?
I call myself 'kinesthetic', or as the NLP people said, 'derived kino',
meaning thinking in muscle patterns, movement, etc in reaction to things
read or described.
/snip/
>Well, what you're feeling about your prose, then. If you've been struggling
>with our language all this time, the least I can do is try to learn more
>about yours.
Thanks, but thinking with one's muscles is something not many people do;
and those who do it, seem to use different muscles and come out with
different images. I doubt if many of them can use such images to
communicate directlly even with each other. Charles Williams may have come
close, in PLACE OF THE LION.
What you could do, is be a bit more patient with my use of tech terms etc,
and my elaborate metaphors, and look for what reasonable meaning they might
be adding up to in any particular post. They're really the best I can do.
Here's a pidgin sample; my language and 'objective' mixed.
[Speaking of passages of about 100-200 words, not scenic action, and what
my process seems to need for each such passage]
"[My process begins with finding a ] 'slant' or 'angle'.... Some might say
'the focus of the passage'.
"When something like that clicks for me, then suddenly I get the
words, the sentences, the shape and flow of the passage -- quite quickly.
And it all hangs together when looked at later. There was a *point* to it
(whether spelled out or not, whether definable or not*).
"Mostly I've been looking to form for this point, this hang-together. But
(thanks to the subthreads with Patricia and Catja and Helen about
'unforeseen difficulties', and 'topic sentences', and 'theme of the
transition) now I'm getting a glimmer of how content might provide this
hang-together also.
"Maybe part of my feeling of a 'click' is when a form meets the right
content.... Or when the content point is strong enough to hold it together
regardless of form, just so the form doesn't distract from the point...."
--
RL at houseboatonstyx com (insert one 'the')
http://www.livejournal.com/users/houseboatonstyx/
"Transition scene" and "action scene" and
"descriptive scene" tell you what kind of scene.
http://tinyurl.com/7px68
Patricia C. Wrede
"R. L." <see...@no-spams.coms> wrote in message
> On Mon, 17 Oct 2005 17:53:48 -0500, "Patricia C. Wrede"
> <pwred...@aol.com> wrote:
>
>>"R. L." <see...@no-spams.coms> wrote in message
>>news:27t7l11qqu810bo48...@4ax.com...
>>> On Mon, 17 Oct 2005 13:43:10 -0500, "Patricia C. Wrede"
>>> <pwred...@aol.com> wrote:
> /snip/
>
>
>>"stimulus part" (that's the only part that's condensed?
>
> Usually.
That's...unusual. OK, why do you think you're skimping on your stimulus
part? Is it that you have as much as you feel you need, or is it that the
other parts are more interesting to write, or are your characters mouthing
off and distracting you, or is it something else, do you think?
>>and that increasing your word count for "external
>>and objective" stuff is fine (but I thought you'd said you didn't have
>>much
>>internalization; does this mean you don't think you need or want more,
>>after
>>all?).
>
> I don't think I need much increase in internalization; I want a balance
> heavy on the external stuff (scenery, cool stuff observed). I expect more
> external stuff will suggest some more internal reactions to it, without a
> problem.
>
> Hm, maybe that's a key. Maybe more Internals, short ones, to break up a
> block of description, would help.
Sounds as if you're more interested in the "Internals" -- as if you need to
give them to yourself as a treat to make doing the external descriptions
more fun. Which is fine, but implies a preference for a heavily filtered
viewpoint, because that's what gives you the excuse to sprinkle them in like
that. I have the impression, from what you've said, that you usually write
third-person; have you ever tried first-person? If so, how did you like it?
>>Like all the
>>stuff I'm doing because Catja *doesn't* get it (which is likely to be
>>confusing or annoying because you *do*).
>
> I have no problem skimming stuff I don't like or need (tho I feel a bit
> pushy for listening in, sometimes). But sometimes an interesting
> distinction turns up, like between 'internal' and 'subjective'.
>
> I'll look for a sample of my own in need of expansion, and work on the
> exercises (or some adaptation of them). Real life is very demanding this
> week.
Yeah, me, too. Cats went to the vet today, everyone is now very cranky and
upset with me. And the dryer seems to have broken. And there's revisions,
and trip preparations...it's just busy.
>
> /snip/
>>Well, what you're feeling about your prose, then. If you've been
>>struggling
>>with our language all this time, the least I can do is try to learn more
>>about yours.
>
> Thanks, but thinking with one's muscles is something not many people do;
> and those who do it, seem to use different muscles and come out with
> different images. I doubt if many of them can use such images to
> communicate directlly even with each other. Charles Williams may have come
> close, in PLACE OF THE LION.
>
> What you could do, is be a bit more patient with my use of tech terms etc,
> and my elaborate metaphors, and look for what reasonable meaning they
> might
> be adding up to in any particular post. They're really the best I can do.
I'll try.
> Here's a pidgin sample; my language and 'objective' mixed.
>
> [Speaking of passages of about 100-200 words, not scenic action, and what
> my process seems to need for each such passage]
>
> "[My process begins with finding a ] 'slant' or 'angle'.... Some might
> say
> 'the focus of the passage'.
>
> "When something like that clicks for me, then suddenly I get the
> words, the sentences, the shape and flow of the passage -- quite quickly.
> And it all hangs together when looked at later. There was a *point* to it
> (whether spelled out or not, whether definable or not*).
>
> "Mostly I've been looking to form for this point, this hang-together. But
> (thanks to the subthreads with Patricia and Catja and Helen about
> 'unforeseen difficulties', and 'topic sentences', and 'theme of the
> transition) now I'm getting a glimmer of how content might provide this
> hang-together also.
>
> "Maybe part of my feeling of a 'click' is when a form meets the right
> content.... Or when the content point is strong enough to hold it together
> regardless of form, just so the form doesn't distract from the point...."
I think I missed this the first time you posted it. (My server suddenly
tossed up a bunch of posts from three weeks ago this weekend; it may have
been one of those, that never got here before.)
It sounds like a very intuitive approach, with fits with your other
descriptions of how you work. Are you trying to analyze it in order to get
more of a boost to your approach -- to be able to sort of goose your
intuition so that it comes up with the stuff you need?
As a description of process, it's at least no more impenetrable than anybody
else's. I do get a feeling from it, but I've no idea if it's the right
feeling (i.e., the one you were trying to convey). Still, it's a place to
start.
Patricia C. Wrede
Patricia C. Wrede
> Patricia C. Wrede <pwred...@aol.com> wrote:
>> Ah--do note that they aren't cumulative. That is, having given up
>> adjectives in the first one, you don't need to keep avoiding them in the
>> second one. I started with the no-adjectives one (which is from Ursula
>> le
>> Guin's STEERING THE CRAFT, slightly personalized) in order to get that at
>> the front of your mind.
>
> And most useful it was, too.
>
> Interesting. I've got Steering the Craft, and I've read it a couple of
> times, but _in isolation_ that exercise made no sense to me at all. It's
> having a _context_ for it, and a *reason* as well as coming at the right
> time that made iit into a very valuable tool indeed.
She gives the reasons in the book; I think you just weren't ready to see
them. Or possibly the way she phrased it wasn't something that got it
across for you; that happens, sometimes.
>> Theoretically, when you do the other three, you'll
>> have that experience to remind you to think about alternative nouns and
>> verbs before you default to adjectives in *all* cases.
>
> A... greater scope, overall, you mean?
Yes, that's the effect. Broadening your horizons.
>> When you are describing a place in a story, your *character* is walking
>> around in it/listening to it/looking at it. What he sees and hears and
>> feels -- all the outside input -- is what you have for your descriptions.
>
> Only the damn bastards won't shut up trying to tell me all about their
> lovelives (dreams, hopes, what they ate laste night...)
They can *tell* you all they want. You don't have to write it down. Or, if
you have to write it down to get them to shut up, you don't have to end up
putting it in the book.
>> You may have to logic your way into it, to begin with: "My character is
>> having a sword fight, and he's really impressed by his teacher. Wait.
>> What
>> is *happening*? They're fighting. The swords are hitting each other.
>> They're moving around. OK, the swords are moving; I have to say
>> something
>> about the strokes. They'll make noise when they hit each other; I can
>> put
>> that in. Hmm...the POV is going to feel it in his arm when a blow
>> strikes
>> his sword; I can put that in, too. And they're moving...where? Oh,
>> bugger,
>> I need to describe the *space*, too..." And then you think about what
>> has
>> to be there, logically, in order for your scene to play out. And once
>> you
>> have your list of what has to be there, *then* you figure out how to say
>> it
>> vividly, and what order to put it in, and so on.
>
> I don't think that will work, although I couldn't right now say _why_.
OK, what do you think *would* work?
> [a smear of red against wood -- my mug, perched on the corner of my
> desk]
>
>> > I'm not sure I can manage that level of abstraction.
>>
>> It's not really abstract; it's just slowing down.
>
> All the fancy ways of saying 'the mug sits on the table' are in one
> category, but 'smear of red against wood' needs unpacking, needs
> explaining, and if that explanation isn't forthcoming, I won't parse it.
So it's not the sort of thing you do -- it's very visual, for one thing.
But there has to be something you *do* do, and when you figure out what it
is, you'll do that instead.
>> I'm guessing that the exercise where you describe something *without*
>> using
>> any visual cues is going to be a lot easier for you, if I give it to you,
>> than this one? :)
>
> Probably. I'm not making any predictions at this stage.
Well, there's a ways to go before we get to that.
>> >> But if I take the easy route, I don't stop to think about what *else*
>> >> I
>> >> could say that would convey the image more vividly
>> >
>> > That might well be the key point about description. Mug-on-desk blends
>> > into the background, and sometimes you want that-
>>
>> Yes. But if it's the default, and you don't think about it, then you get
>> mug-on-desk even when you need *more* than that.
>
> I quite often stop at 'tea'. Or 'no longer thirsty.'
Yes, well, "no longer thirsty" is why you have readers like me whinging at
you "Why is he suddenly not thirsty? Is it magic? Did somebody bring him a
glass of water? Is it a metaphor? I didn't see him drink anything!"
>> > That's actually one of the principles of learning I know from other
>> > contexts. If you have one solution to your problem, your mind will
>> > drift
>> > towards it automatically. If you establish that there are alternatives,
>> > you'll stop and *think* about it - because there is no 'default' way,
>> > the mind will actually be adrift a little. It's great for panic
>> > situations, but can be helpful under any circumstance.
>>
>> Exactly. In your case, you found one solution and used it and used it
>> and
>> used it, for four or five books' worth of writing. That makes you end up
>> with some pretty well-ingrained habits to get around, hence (in all
>> probability) some of the trouble you're having figuring out how to do all
>> of
>> this.
>
>
> I'm not sure how I could have avoided it, though. If someone had
> demanded of me at the time that apart from doing everything else I
> should _also_ get description right and think about micro level etc etc,
> I'd probably have found it disheartening. It was a big enough step for
> me anyway.
Oh, I'm not saying you ought to have tried to do it all at once. How you got
to this point is over and done with. I brought it up mainly as a reminder
that, rolling forward, it's likely to be difficult to retrain all those
habits, so you shouldn't get discouraged if, gosh, it turns out to be
difficult.
>
> Now that I've proven I can come up with novel-length ideas and maintain
> them, and come up with interesting setting and characters and story etc,
> I'm a lot readier for it.
And you know that you can succeed with some aspects of writing, which means
that very likely you can learn the others. Confidence is a wonderful thing.
Patricia C. Wrede
Helen Hall
Catja Pafort wrote:
> Patricia C. Wrede <pwred...@aol.com> wrote:
> >
> > When you are describing a place in a story, your *character* is walking
> > around in it/listening to it/looking at it. What he sees and hears and
> > feels -- all the outside input -- is what you have for your descriptions.
>
> Only the damn bastards won't shut up trying to tell me all about their
> lovelives (dreams, hopes, what they ate laste night...)
>
"No" then either listen sympathetically without writing it down or (if
the itch to write it down it too great) start a file for each character
and jot the information down there. You (as author) need to know far
more about your characters than actually makes it onto the page. This
will make a useful reference resource for future scenes.
If the stuff *is* relevant to the story then you have to press your
characters for detail. Pretend you're the ace reporter on their local
equivalent of a newspaper or current affairs radio programme. Pin them
down as to exactly what they ate, what was the room like, who exactly
was there, what were they wearing, who said what, what was so-and-so's
expression when he said such-and-such. Alternatively, if you can't
converse in this manner with your characters, you have to thank them
for the information and then get into your authorial time machine and
nip back in time in order to be a fly on the wall at the dinner
party/council meeting/battle/ceremony and observe it yourself. Either
way, what you want is detail. Concrete detail.
>
> > You may have to logic your way into it, to begin with: "My character is
> > having a sword fight, and he's really impressed by his teacher. Wait. What
> > is *happening*? They're fighting. The swords are hitting each other.
> > They're moving around. OK, the swords are moving; I have to say something
> > about the strokes. They'll make noise when they hit each other; I can put
> > that in. Hmm...the POV is going to feel it in his arm when a blow strikes
> > his sword; I can put that in, too. And they're moving...where? Oh, bugger,
> > I need to describe the *space*, too..." And then you think about what has
> > to be there, logically, in order for your scene to play out. And once you
> > have your list of what has to be there, *then* you figure out how to say it
> > vividly, and what order to put it in, and so on.
>
> I don't think that will work, although I couldn't right now say _why_.
>
Some people do it intuitively. Some apply logic. I'm not sure what
other way there is, but you need to find *a* way to do it. Somehow.
> [a smear of red against wood -- my mug, perched on the corner of my
> desk]
>
> > > I'm not sure I can manage that level of abstraction.
> >
> > It's not really abstract; it's just slowing down.
>
In fact it's the opposite of abstraction. It's reporting precisely what
the eye sees; it's the brain that interprets a pattern of colour as
being a mug sitting on a wooden desk.
> All the fancy ways of saying 'the mug sits on the table' are in one
> category, but 'smear of red against wood' needs unpacking, needs
> explaining, and if that explanation isn't forthcoming, I won't parse it.
>
If you want the reader to know that the red smear is a mug, then yes,
you need to make it clear at some point, but at the moment Patricia and
I are just trying to poke you into looking at things in a different
way.
>
> Consciously seeing is hard work. One reason I'm such a lousy artist.
>
It's a skill that can be learned. You don't need the level of accurate
seeing that an artist needs. You can fake a lot in writing, but you do
need to be more aware of the concrete fictional world than you seemto
be at the moment.
> >
> > It doesn't have to be visual, though the visual component is important to
> > many people and you probably ought not to leave it out of your descriptions
> > entirely. But one of the things that's really hard for many people is
> > getting the *non*-visual bits of description in -- the sounds and smells and
> > sensations -- and I noticed that when you did your description of the scene,
> > you *started* with sounds. I thought that was really cool, and very
> > effective.
>
> Thank you.
>
Use of sound can make a description really come alive, likewise smell.
Would it help to approach scenes from that angle?
> If someone had
> demanded of me at the time that apart from doing everything else I
> should _also_ get description right and think about micro level etc etc,
> I'd probably have found it disheartening. It was a big enough step for
> me anyway.
>
> Now that I've proven I can come up with novel-length ideas and maintain
> them, and come up with interesting setting and characters and story etc,
> I'm a lot readier for it.
There is such a lot to novel writing -- it's a careful blend of many
different skills -- that people often get one right before the other. I
got mine in a different order to you. My micro level writing came right
before I had a proper grasp on structure and pacing. The WIP is the
first novel where I think I've made a decent shot of everything.[*]
(Not that there isn't room for improvement, of course).
Helen
--
Helen Hall
http://www.baradel.demon.co.uk
[*] Actually I think I more or less got it right in the fantasy
whodunit, but only after many drafts and lots of wrestling. And then
the overall idea wasn't original enough to catch an editor's eye and
convince them that it would sell sufficient copies.
Catja Pafort
[Patricia]
> > > You may have to logic your way into it, to begin with: "My character
> > > is having a sword fight, and he's really impressed by his teacher.
> > > Wait. What is *happening*? They're fighting. The swords are hitting
> > > each other. They're moving around. OK, the swords are moving; I have
> > > to say something about the strokes. They'll make noise when they hit
> > > each other; I can put that in. Hmm...the POV is going to feel it in
> > > his arm when a blow strikes his sword; I can put that in, too. And
> > > they're moving...where? Oh, bugger, I need to describe the *space*,
> > > too..." And then you think about what has to be there, logically, in
> > > order for your scene to play out. And once you have your list of what
> > > has to be there, *then* you figure out how to say it vividly, and what
> > > order to put it in, and so on.
> >
> > I don't think that will work, although I couldn't right now say _why_.
> >
> Some people do it intuitively. Some apply logic. I'm not sure what
> other way there is, but you need to find *a* way to do it. Somehow.
It's a question of shifting my conscience [1], and-
Patricia will probably feel a little uneasy with it, but I think I might
have found a workable solution.
"How can I show that"?
Because apart from being internalisation, 'Geflan felt nervous about the
fight' _functions_ as narrative summary. We don't see anything that
could make him nervous, we don't see his knees knocking, we're just told
that he's nervous with no external proof that would allow the reader to
validate that claim. Nor do we see the surroundings for the fight - all
the little hints that this is a fencing salle (large, well-lit room, no
direct light, heaps of fencing gear in a corner, people dressed to fence
dotted about).
Maybe the problem is as simple as needing to show more - not necessarily
'dramatize', *show*.
External grounding for the action to take place in.
> > [a smear of red against wood -- my mug, perched on the corner of my
> > desk]
> >
> > > > I'm not sure I can manage that level of abstraction.
> > >
> > > It's not really abstract; it's just slowing down.
> >
> In fact it's the opposite of abstraction. It's reporting precisely what
> the eye sees; it's the brain that interprets a pattern of colour as
> being a mug sitting on a wooden desk.
I remain unconvinced. From where I'm sitting coming from concrete 'mug'
and 'desk' and arriving at 'smear of red' *is* an abstraction process.
And none that comes naturally to me, and not even one that comes
supernaturally.
Catja
[1] That's the term I'm using when Rhailed shifts his mind to 'see'
wizardry. I did at one point have a dictionary that allowed 'conscience'
as alternative to 'consciousness', and somehow, it's the better term.
Catja Pafort
> "Catja Pafort" <use...@greenknight.org.uk.invalid> wrote in message
>
> > Patricia C. Wrede <pwred...@aol.com> wrote:
>
> >> Ah--do note that they aren't cumulative. That is, having given up
> >> adjectives in the first one, you don't need to keep avoiding them in
> >> the second one. I started with the no-adjectives one (which is from
> >> Ursula le Guin's STEERING THE CRAFT, slightly personalized) in order to
> >> get that at the front of your mind.
> >
> > And most useful it was, too.
> >
> > Interesting. I've got Steering the Craft, and I've read it a couple of
> > times, but _in isolation_ that exercise made no sense to me at all. It's
> > having a _context_ for it, and a *reason* as well as coming at the right
> > time that made iit into a very valuable tool indeed.
>
> She gives the reasons in the book; I think you just weren't ready to see
> them. Or possibly the way she phrased it wasn't something that got it
> across for you; that happens, sometimes.
I have to say I looked at most of the book thinking 'and this is it'?
There was no 'wow' moment involved anywhere at all. It just did not
click.
> >> When you are describing a place in a story, your *character* is walking
> >> around in it/listening to it/looking at it. What he sees and hears and
> >> feels -- all the outside input -- is what you have for your descriptions.
> >
> > Only the damn bastards won't shut up trying to tell me all about their
> > lovelives (dreams, hopes, what they ate laste night...)
>
> They can *tell* you all they want. You don't have to write it down. Or, if
> you have to write it down to get them to shut up, you don't have to end up
> putting it in the book.
I think I need to squash it from the get-go if I want to get anywhere.
> >> You may have to logic your way into it, to begin with: "My character
> >> is having a sword fight, and he's really impressed by his teacher.
> >> Wait. What is *happening*?
<snip>
> > I don't think that will work, although I couldn't right now say _why_.
>
> OK, what do you think *would* work?
'Show, don't tell.' (I've explained it in a post answering Helen's).
And, ahem, slowing down, and doing this thing about casting about for
another way of expressing something, particularly when the first thing
is an [often internal] summary. So
"As Vegren moved closer towards him, Geflan had the strong impression
that Emprith was trying to warn him."
becomes
"As if sensing his inner turmoil, Vegren sidled even closer.
Behind them, Emprith began to whistle under his breath, a queer, thin,
slightly out-of-tune whistling that forced Geflan to listen intently for
a moment before he recognised it, and then it was all he could do not to
laugh aloud. 'Sweet Nephys lured a soldier boy' was more than a good
tune to march to or the obvious warning; it was a favorite of all of
Geflan's family. He was certain that he had never whistled it in
Emprith's company, which left Kaleia as the culprit."
We were both right, by the way. You because I needed to *slow down* to
write that, and me because I can't do it in my head, and I can't do it
with pen and paper, I need to be sitting at the computer to get to that
level of writing.
Branching out is a good mental 'picture' for me to hold, more like
spreading out roots, casting about sideways for something nutritious and
stabilising.
> >> I'm guessing that the exercise where you describe something *without*
> >> using any visual cues is going to be a lot easier for you, if I give it
> >> to you, than this one? :)
> >
> > Probably. I'm not making any predictions at this stage.
>
> Well, there's a ways to go before we get to that.
Uh-oh.
(Just kiddin', I love it, really, I do.)
> >> >> But if I take the easy route, I don't stop to think about what
> >> >> *else* I could say that would convey the image more vividly
> >> >
> >> > That might well be the key point about description. Mug-on-desk blends
> >> > into the background, and sometimes you want that-
> >>
> >> Yes. But if it's the default, and you don't think about it, then you get
> >> mug-on-desk even when you need *more* than that.
> >
> > I quite often stop at 'tea'. Or 'no longer thirsty.'
>
> Yes, well, "no longer thirsty" is why you have readers like me whinging at
> you "Why is he suddenly not thirsty? Is it magic? Did somebody bring him a
> glass of water? Is it a metaphor? I didn't see him drink anything!"
Before this round of things I never consciously thought of that. I
wasn't _aware_ enough. Time to shape up, I suppose.
> > I'm not sure how I could have avoided it, though. If someone had
> > demanded of me at the time that apart from doing everything else I
> > should _also_ get description right and think about micro level etc etc,
> > I'd probably have found it disheartening. It was a big enough step for
> > me anyway.
>
> Oh, I'm not saying you ought to have tried to do it all at once. How you got
> to this point is over and done with. I brought it up mainly as a reminder
> that, rolling forward, it's likely to be difficult to retrain all those
> habits, so you shouldn't get discouraged if, gosh, it turns out to be
> difficult.
Have no fear. I'm far too thoroughly hooked to be discouraged at this
stage.
> > Now that I've proven I can come up with novel-length ideas and maintain
> > them, and come up with interesting setting and characters and story etc,
> > I'm a lot readier for it.
>
> And you know that you can succeed with some aspects of writing, which means
> that very likely you can learn the others. Confidence is a wonderful thing.
It is a habit, I suppose, as much as anything else. I had a time in my
life where people very successfully tried to take the confidence out of
me. I don't ever want to go there again.
(Have I mentioned lately what a fantastic teacher you are? I cannot
thank you enough for the time and effort you are investing)
Catja
Catja Pafort
> Well, this doesn't help much with the writing part, but it sounds
> as if the musical mug has a crack in it and the bubbles and the
> whine are made by air escaping into the liquid as the liquid
> seeps out through the crack. (Is there a puddle under the mug?)
I didn't give it a chance to weep all over the office desk, hence the
'take it down to the kitchen' part. I've had a mug come apart on me
before, which was rather spectacular, and I couldn't see whether it was
_just_ the glaze or not. Particularly as the mug had been silent for the
first cup of tea, hours earlier.
The idea of a heat-resistant insect appealed much more to the writer in
me.
> Sounds as if you're going to have to toss it, and acquire another
> second mug that isn't quite so psychoceramic.
That, on the other hand, is the kind of sentence that makes me swoon.
Psychoceramic. Wow.
Catja
Aqua
>>[a smear of red against wood -- my mug, perched on the corner of my
>>desk]
>>
>>>>I'm not sure I can manage that level of abstraction.
>>>
>>>It's not really abstract; it's just slowing down.
>>
> In fact it's the opposite of abstraction. It's reporting precisely what
> the eye sees; it's the brain that interprets a pattern of colour as
> being a mug sitting on a wooden desk.
It's my understanding that that isn't necessarily true: the eye is not a
camera and does not record images that way. There's already a fair bit
of pattern detection before the signal leaves the eye, and those
patterns are turned into objects as quickly as possible by the brain so
that emergencies can be dealt with promptly. So there is a sense in
which artists are learning to see in a new way, not just "what's there".
Aqua