Wordcraft -- Every picture tells a story

A recent workshop at the Dallas Writer’s Garret included both University of Alabama professor Michael Martone and author Robin Hemley, who co-edited the short story anthology, Extreme Fiction. I wrote previously about Martone’s half of the workshop. This week, it’s Hemley’s turn.

For his portion of the workshop, Robin Hemley asks us to bring family pictures. Since Hemley is known for his book, Turning Life Into Fiction, I suspect we will use these tangible objects as writing prompts. And, well, he doesn’t say the picture had to be of our own families -- so I raid my father’s stash of World War II-era photos of families of New Guinea natives. Aren’t other people’s stories more open to interpretation than our own?

Hemley tells us not to show our treasure trove of objects to other members of the workshop. The prompt: To write a description of our actual picture, and a picture wholly imaginary. He challenges the group to determine which description is of the “real” picture, which one fake.

Strange to say, we often find descriptions of the imaginary pictures more compelling, more evocative than the real ones. Is this because the actual picture limit us too strongly to the realm of “it really happened this way”? Are we emotionally tongue-tied at describing things too close to our hearts? At any rate, the imaginary pictures often evoke more complex descriptions. After a few tries, the degree of detail becomes a clue to which is real, which unreal.

“What do you learn?” Hemley asks.

“That memory has a different lens,” a participant says.
Writing instructors often advise us to choose “telling” details for our descriptions. But, Hemley say, “the (telling) detail could be different for me than it is for you. . . There is the emotional memory, but even when you think you’re describing it, you’re still recreating it. . . We think that fictionalizing is a taint, but we can’t help fictionalizing.”

It’s a view science supports. An interview in the March 2013 issue of Discover magazine suggests that, far from being fixed, our brains revise memories every time we remember them. In fact, one participant is slightly embarrassed to see, after looking again at her “real” picture, that she didn’t remember what it showed. She remembering a picture of Disney character Goofy when in fact, it’s a picture of Yogi Bear.

But whether we’re writing fiction or nonfiction, how can we use these photographs to enrich our writing?

“It really works to frame memory in terms of a photograph,” Hemley says. “Consider creating a kind of tableau where you extract the memory within the photograph. Thinking about the photograph is a really poignant way to extract memories. It forces you into a
real world relationship with the memory, so you‘re able to rein habit the episode.”

Even in a fictionalized setting, imagining a scene as a photograph gives us an opportunity to visualize a setting and the characters within it. “If this were a photograph, what would it be?” Hemley asks.

Already, some participants frame their photographs, both real and imaginary, as before and after versions of the same scene. Hemley applauds this for “giving the reader a sense of ambiguity but also of history before this story,” but urges us to move beyond the scene within the photograph’s frame.

“I often think,” he says, “what are the secrets the characters have? Not only the secrets they keep from others, but the ones they keep from themselves?”

For more about Hemley’s work, see www.robinhemley.com/.

For Martone’s portion of the workshop, see “A new word for writing critiques” and “New critique technique, part II,” at this site.

For more about the Dallas Writer’s Garret, see www.writersgarret.org/.

(Next Monday -- Wordcraft looks at a book built from pictures, Mark Doty’s Lost Dallas.)

Wordcraft -- New critique technique, part II

Blame my lateness this morning on the Superbowl -- and I didn’t even watch it. But after writing late at night while keeping an ear open for the grandkids I was babysitting, the computer ate my post. Really.  Stay tuned anyway, for the conclusion to last Monday’s discussion of a recent Dallas Writer’s Garret workshop with University of Alabama professor Michael Martone.

His portion of the two-part workshop introduced us participants to a method of critiquing writing new to most of us -- the cross-section approach. While the classic American (actually University of Iowa) writing critique looks at writing samples, one after another. The cross-section looks at a small portion of the whole array of writing brought to the group, for instance, all the titles, then all first lines, all first paragraphs, and so on.

Because this method was so unfamiliar to what we’d used previously, Writer’s Garret co-founder Thea Temple held a followup session last Saturday to explore its implications further. I’ll insert comments from that session as I finish this post about Martone’s method.

After looking at the layout of our pages, Martone launched a discussion of titles and their importance, urging us prose writers to think of titles as short poems rather than prose in themselves. The prose, whether essay, memoir or fiction, then becomes, he said, “a commentary on the piece of poetry that is the title.”

In Temple’s session, we looked at our array of titles, searching for those that invited further reading. The hardest part, as at each step of the cross-section critique, was to prevent ourselves from launching into discussion of the rest of the piece. What intrigued us most? Titles that worked against our expectations, that implied a reversal of expectations, as in the title of memoir, “Raising My Father.” We found ourselves wanting titles capable of tying a story together, without being heavy handed. Perhaps Martone would have said, we wanted poetic titles.

Martone next discussed first sentences. “Another thing that the title does is pivot to the first line,“ he said. “It’s almost like a virus. You want it to infect the readers.”

But how fast should the infection spread? In Temple’s session, we found ourselves facing the difference in pace between first sentences of short stories and those of book length works, whether novels or narrative nonfiction such as memoirs. The opening sentence of a long work may need to develop enough sympathy for a character to propel readers through the level of conflict involved in a novel-length plot. The first sentence of a short story, in contrast, often must be an immediate conflict.

Because several of the participants were writing memoirs, Martone concluded his
workshop with a discussion of plot structure, particularly its effect on nonfiction works. To be a story in most senses, the main character’s initial state of being -- her ground state -- must change through the course of the work, ending on a significantly different ground.

A fiction writer can isolate a train of events that will produce this change. But how can a memoir writer, still immersed in her own evolving life, determine when she has achieved a different state of being?

“In memoir, one of the strategies is to draw a kind of ‘fake’ parentheses around the life,” Martone said. This is often done by limiting the memoir to a particular period or event in the writer’s life, such as a memoir of childhood. His parting caution -- “You start a story with a coincidence, but you can’t end a story with a coincidence.” Memoirists beware -- the conclusion you draw must be your own.

(Robin Hemley asked us to bring a family photograph and a series of small objects to his half of the workshop. Next Monday, I’ll tell you what we did with them.)

Wordcraft -- A new word in writing critiques

I drove to the Writer's Garret workshop Saturday in a drizzling rain wondering why, oh, why, I’d signed up for a writing critique. Because however necessary rain and critiques are, neither of them are usually spirit-lifting. Little did I know that I would emerge from the morning workshop feeling with a new attitude toward writing critiques.

It helped, of course, that the instructor taught us a new naughty word. In French.

Co-editor with the day’s second workshop leader, Robin Hemley, of Extreme Fiction, University of Alabaman professor Michael Martone opened with a brief lesson on the history of writing critiques. The classic University of Iowa creative writing critiques, he informed us, could ultimately be blamed on the GI bill, the post-World War II legislation that flooded American colleges with “twenty-two year old guys who’d just fought a war.” Twenty-two year old guys who devised writing critiques with the same methods they’d used successfully to fight Germans, post D-Day, through the hedgerows of Normandy.

“The workshop became tactical, to use a military term, instead of strategic,” Martone said, based on the belief that “everybody knew what a good story was and thinking the purpose was to make your bad story good.”

Considering it unlikely we’ll have to defend our stories from Nazi gunners, however, Martone prefers a method called the cross-sectional workshop, a method more like coaching than fighting. I’ll provide a synopsis of the first part of his -- and our -- discussion today, with more to follow.

In the first slice of the cross-section, Martone asked us to contemplate the physical appearance of our papers without regarding the words. They looked eerily similar -- black 12-point serif type on 8 x 11-inch white paper. Did it have to be that way?

“Crots,” he said.

Before we wondered whether we’d heard him correctly, he explains. It’s a term French printers used to describe the appearance of printing on a page, similar to the view of a print preview on a computer screen. “What printers were saying is, this is a white road and there are ‘plops’ on it left by the horses.”

(My high school French dictionary defined “crotte” as, among other things, an animal dropping.)

Then on to the cross-section of titles. Honestly, I can’t remember ever encountering a discussion of titles in a workshop. And I usually hate thinking up titles, wishing I could do the musical thing -- opus number so and so. But I’d be missing an opportunity, in Martone’s thinking.

“You want to suggest to the reader what kind of game you’re playing,” he said. “Any time you can use two words that are contradictory, there’s almost a fight between the two ideas, which is useful for drawing people in. If you’re a prose writer, this might be the only time you’re asked to think in a more poetic way -- a kind of poem that introduces a prose piece, or the prose is a commentary on the piece of poetry that the title is.”

A short poem for a title. Perhaps a poem with only two words? Only one. Or many? Martone teased us with a tale of a flash fiction piece whose title was longer than the story itself. Yes, maybe I can do that.

For more about the Writer's Garret, see www.writersgarret.org/.

(Next Monday -- more cross-sections, and a peek at Hemley’s writing prompts.)