Self and World 13

Welcome

Welcome back. Today, we’re going to spend one more session working on the mid-term. I’ve now had a chance to read all of your mini-assignments, and give you quite a bit of feedback.

A: Writing Scenes

Think about topic / scenes / form. We talked about this in session 6. If you remember, Marion Roach Smith gives the following ‘formula’ for understanding the art of the memoir.

It’s about x (a topic) as illustrated by y (scenes) to be told in a z (form).

In the homework, sometimes I had a sense that you were talking about a lot of different things mashed together, but I didn’t get individual scenes. You were referencing events that you had experienced without telling the story so that other people could see these events unfolding.

B: Generalising

Related to this, was the problem of generalising. Individual scenes are specific, sharp and clear. Too much generalisation tends to blur the pictures you are putting in the reader’s head. Think also about whether you are making claims that are so general that they are meaningless: things like “there are lots of different people in the world”, or “people all have different ideas.” You can do this sometimes, for a sentence or two, but good memoir is rooted in specificity.

On Editing

Several years ago, I wrote a children’s book. It had 600 words. But it was the most intensive editing I have ever done. I spent hours with my editor arguing over every word. It was a long and difficult process, and I think I must have edited it about 20 or 30 times, some of these times taking hours or even days. But when you are writing something so small, you have to get every single word right.

The temptation when writing is to always move on to the next thing. But editing allows you to make your words really sing, to really communicate precisely what you want to communicate. And the best editing is a really complicated and creative activity. So we’re going to explore this today.

Editing is about taking your writing, and making it better. So, as we edit, we may have all kinds of ideas in our heads about good writing. Some of these ideas are helpful, and some are not, so let’s get some of these ideas out into the open.

Posting Your Work in Progress

Post your work in progress on the new post on the discussion board. This may be the scene you wrote for homework. Or it may be something else. Either way, you need to post something (and you get a participation grade for it).

Discussion

Now I’m going to ask you to respond to at least one other piece. I’ll put you in breakout groups. DO NOT JOIN THE BREAKOUT GROUPS. Instead, go to the discussion board, and respond to the pieces posted by the other members of your breakout group. Leave notes on the following:

1. One question that you have (something that is not clear, or something that you want to know more about)

2. One thing that interests you about the piece.

Try and be as specific as possible. This will help your fellow writers.

Klinkenborg: The Noises in Our Heads

Let’s talk more about editing. One thing that you notice when you start to edit is that your head is full of questions: am I allowed to do this? Can I do that?

The writer Verlyn Klinkenborg has something interesting to say about this. He teaches at Yale University. His book, Several Short Sentences About Writing (2013) is a superb guide not only to the art of writing, but also to the art of learning to trust your instincts and develop your own voice. Klinkenborg argues that when you sit down to write, there is often a lot of “noise in your head” that gets in the way of what you want to say. Here’s the extract:

Pay attention to all the noise in your head as you go about writing.

Much of it is what you already know about writing, which includes: The voices of former teachers, usually uttering rules.

Rules like, “Don’t begin sentences with ‘and.’ ”

(It’s okay. You can begin sentences with “and.”)

The things everybody knows or assumes about writers and how they work, Whether they’re true or not.

The things you feel you must or mustn’t do, without really knowing why. The things that make you wonder, “Am I allowed to …?”

(Yes, you’re allowed to. Not forever and always, but until you decide for yourself what works and what doesn’t.)

Write these things down—the contents of the noise in your head as you write. You can’t revise or discard what you don’t consciously recognize.

These assumptions and prohibitions and obligations are the imprint of your education and the culture you live in. Distrust them.

So this noise is made up of things that have been told about writing, or things that everybody assumes to be true about writing.

Klinkenborg’s advice about what to do with all this noise is that you should first externalise it. You should make explicit all these internalised ideas you have about writing. Then you should distrust it. Maybe some of this is good advice. Maybe some of it isn’t. But, until you’ve had a chance to think through it, this noise gets in the way of developing your own voice as a writer. It gets in the way of you writing with the same naturalness with which you speak.

So in this exercise, do as Klinkenborg suggests. Write down all the noise in your head, all the ideas about what makes writing good that crowd into your head as you write.

Make a list of all those things your teachers told you, or those rules that you think must be followed, or the other rules that you don’t understand but nevertheless feel oppressed by.

Then we’ll put you into breakout groups to discuss what you have written down.

(After the class, as a small purification ritual (if you like) you can go through your list, and strike through all the rules that make you feel bad. Then you can go and have a cup of tea!)

Short Sentences

For Klinkenborg, good writing communicates effectively and precisely. And we can often achieve this with shorter sentences than we think. Training ourselves to write in short sentences is a good way of developing our awareness of what we are saying, and what we are not — which is the essence of communication. Here’s the extract from the book:

Here, in short, is what I want to tell you. Know what each sentence says,

What it doesn’t say,

And what it implies.

Of these, the hardest is knowing what each sentence actually says.

At first, it will help to make short sentences,

Short enough to feel the variations in length.

Leave space between them for the things that words can’t really say.

Pay attention to rhythm, first and last.

Imagine it this way:

One by one, each sentence takes the stage.

It says the very thing it comes into existence to say. Then it leaves the stage.

It doesn’t help the next one up or the previous one down. It doesn’t wave to its friends in the audience

Or pause to be acknowledged or applauded.

It doesn’t talk about what it’s saying.

It simply says its piece and leaves the stage.

This isn’t the whole art of writing well.

It isn’t even most of it.

But it’s a place to begin, and to begin from again and again.

Editing Exercise

For the next editing exercise, bear this advice in mind, and return to one piece you have written over the previous weeks. It may be your assignment, or it may be another piece.

Now start thinking working on editing it. Your task is to produce a radically new version that more effectively communicates what you want to communicate. Don’t just change one or two things. But make big, bold changes.

Here are some questions to think about as you edit. They mirror the five criteria on the rubric. But think of them as general questions to ask not just about the piece as a whole, but about every single sentence.

1. Logic: What is happening? Do we know where, who, what, when, how and why?

2. Clarity: Are the sentences — each one of them — saying something precise and clear? Does this need to be said? Does it follow from the last sentence, and lead to the next one?

3. Concreteness: Are you being specific? Are you talking about concrete details? Can the reader picture in their mind what you are picturing in your mind? Are you avoiding falling into vagueness and abstraction?

4. Storytelling: Do you have a story to tell? Are you keeping aware of your audience? Are you drawing them in? Is what you are saying relevant to the story?

5. Creativity: Are you experimenting with how to communicate more effectively?

I’ll give you 15 minutes, and then ask you to post the edited version below your original version, so everyone can see the changes you have made.

Homework

For your homework, here’s an essay from Kathleen Jamie to read.