Category: Writing

Some Ray Bradbury Writing Advice

by hkatz, posted in Writing

In his collection of essays, Zen in the Art of Writing, one of Bradbury’s inspiring suggestions is as follows:

Make a long list of nouns (or titles), like THE LAKE or THE CAROUSEL. Pick one of these nouns and do a freewrite on it (mix prose and poetry, fiction and essay writing, just write). Then, at some point, maybe in the middle of the page, a character will appear. Something will click and come together. You’ll discover a story that you now need to tell.

Does this always work? I’m not sure, but it’s a fun exercise anyway. It may give you something, even if only one sentence (an observation, a joke) that you wind up using somewhere.

Want to learn how to write flash fiction? A book rec

by hkatz, posted in Writing

Flash fiction, which generally refers to short stories under a 1,000 words, poses an enjoyable challenge. You need to work within the tight limits on length to create a memorable story.

If you want to learn more about the different possibilities for flash fiction, I recommend Brevity: A Flash Fiction Handbook by David Galef.

The book introduces you to different types of super short stories, including character sketches, vignettes, letters, lists, and what-if scenarios explored briefly and powerfully. It offers advice for strengthening your writing, and each section comes with its own writing exercises or prompts. Plus, it serves as a story anthology (with Steve Martin’s “Disgruntled Former Lexicographer” as one of the highlights).

Being Realistic and Entertaining: A Look at Private Investigator Fiction

by hkatz, posted in Writing

When you read or watch fiction involving private investigators, there are two main ways in which they’re unrealistic:

Illegal Activity

Most fictional PIs break the law in blatant ways. Regularly. Some examples:

  • Committing burglary.
  • Illegally hacking into people’s phones or online accounts.
  • Tampering with people’s mail.
  • Sneaking onto people’s property to take photos of them in private places.
  • Impersonating law enforcement.

While I have no doubt that there are some law-breaking PIs in real life, most are going to obey the law, because they would like to keep their license, stay out of jail, and avoid getting sued or having any evidence they provide tossed out of court.

Types of Cases

In fiction, the typical PI investigates murders. A number of them even work alongside the police. They show up to crime scenes, poke and prod the bodies, and stroll around casually dispersing their DNA everywhere.

In real life, private investigators rarely help with murder investigations. If they do, what usually happens is that the family of the victim is frustrated with the progress of the official police investigation. So the family hires a PI to review the evidence, talk to people (including people the police may have already interviewed), and use other tools in the PI arsenal to gather information. Maybe the PI will uncover a new lead or new evidence for the police to follow up on. But they won’t be hanging around the police detectives working on the investigation side-by-side with them.

Real-life cases that PIs work on often involve potentially false insurance claims and other kinds of fraud and dishonesty that are a part of white-collar crimes, civil litigation, or relationship conflicts. They may also help locate missing persons. Sometimes their work contributes to investigations of violent crime; it just isn’t as common.

Realistic Fictional Entertainment?

Are there PI stories that stay within the bounds of real-life legality – and that don’t always involve murder – while also being suspenseful and entertaining? To what extent do you need to bend the rules to keep a story gripping?

Years ago I watched Spotlight, a movie that doesn’t feature PIs but instead focuses on a group of journalists uncovering a sex abuse scandal in the Catholic Church. Something that struck me about this movie is how it depicts journalism realistically. The journalists don’t pull off any daredevil stunts, and there aren’t any wild action sequences. They do a lot of plodding investigative work, like searching through records for hours and persuading people to agree to interviews.

And yet, the movie is still suspenseful. It still has an underlying tension that carries it forward from one scene to another. You sense the high stakes that come with asking the right questions at the most opportune moment. You sense the complex emotions that the journalists feel when uncovering new information.

I’m interested in fiction that can more or less stay within the so-called boring rules of reality while still providing a great story and great characterizations. In the area of PIs, are there any fictional ones who are sticklers for the law while still pursuing complex and exciting cases?

Does the Lake in Your Story Need to Be Blue?

by hkatz, posted in Writing

When you learn how to draw, one of the things you need to resist is your brain’s desire for a shortcut.

For example, when you want to draw an eye, the brain is going to offer you an abstract version of an eye, an oval with a circle in it. This is a shortcut, something that can easily get across the idea of “eye” without much effort.

These shortcuts have their uses. If you’re playing Pictionary, the oval and circle can easily communicate “eye” to your teammates. Same goes for when you need a representation of an eye in a lecture you’re giving, a lesson you’re teaching.

But if you want to draw an eye more realistically, you realize that there isn’t one shape for it. The shape of an eye depends on an individual’s characteristics, the angle at which you’re seeing the eye, the shadows on the face. In a painting, an eye may be nothing more than a dark slash or a glimmer of light.

You have to override the brain’s bias towards a simple shortcut and instead see the eye as it is, or see new creative possibilities for it.

In writing too there’s a tendency to default to the brain’s shortcuts. You’re writing about a lake, and you automatically decide to describe it as blue. This is your brain’s default color for water and the way you picture it.

There’s nothing wrong with a blue lake per se. The lake you’re writing about may be a brilliant blue color. But it’s worth stopping and thinking about whether blue is the best description for your lake, or just what your brain had the easiest time coming up with.

Maybe the lake is gray or black, because the day is overcast. Or maybe it’s blanketed in neon green algae. There may be patterns to the colors of the lake, like the fact that it’s reflecting trees in autumn.

Ultimately, you may decide to stick with blue as a description of your lake. Even then, if you’ve given your blue lake some thought, it will more likely have a unique quality. You’ll make it your own lake and not just the generic result of a brain taking the path of least effort.

Sensitivity Reading and the Aim for Thoughtfulness Versus Inoffensiveness

by hkatz, posted in Writing

From what I’ve read and from how some people have explained it to me, it seems the purpose behind sensitivity readers is a noble one. If, for example, you’re writing a story that features a Chinese-American character growing up in NYC, then you work with a sensitivity reader from a similar cultural background, and they’ll give you feedback about potential biases and thoughtless stereotypes in your writing.

At best, the process may be similar to any sort of useful feedback you receive on your book, especially if the sensitivity reader understands the qualities of good writing. Sensitivity reading may help you spot things you’ve missed or haven’t thought about. But it also has its pitfalls, especially when the aim is to make your book “less offensive.” These potential problems include the following:

  • A sensitivity reader is one person. They may be part of a larger group in some demographic sense (race, sex, sexuality, etc.) but they’re still one person sharing their own viewpoint on what may or may not be offensive, and they’re subject to their own biases and ignorance. They aren’t a spokesperson for millions of people.
  • There’s always a strong element of subjectivity to what’s offensive. Yes, there are occasions when most people can agree that a character is written as a grotesque stereotype. But other times, there’s much more disagreement, especially when you consider the complexities of literature. Books contain irony and satire, and they convey real-life observations, such as the unpalatable things said or done by people (including individuals who are part of minority groups). When characters reflect how contradictory, flawed, and complex people can be, the results may prove offensive to some, but the writing is often better for the messiness.
  • The recommendations of sensitivity readers don’t occur in a vacuum. There’s a temptation to minimize subtlety, ambiguity, and humor, to not leave room for misinterpretation and the possibility of offense, especially in our charming age of social media, when mobs form over excerpts taken out of context, and influential people act as if they’re on patrol for offenses. The collective result is writing that’s more flat, more homogenous in opinions, and more timid, with characters sanitized to the point of dullness, and with authors tempted to sermonize to prove that they’re attuned to certain fashionable attitudes.
  • Hiring sensitivity readers may make authors feel complacent, even though sensitivity reading isn’t a guarantee that your work is good from a literary standpoint, free of mistakes, or a palatable offering to the most influential self-appointed judges of what’s offensive and what isn’t. It doesn’t guarantee you zero offensiveness. (Nothing does.)
  • Sensitivity readers aren’t a substitute for actual research and fact checking.

This last point is what I want to build on further. When people write about past eras or different cultures or socioeconomic groups, a critical problem is lazy writing. This includes falling back on popular myths or stereotypes instead of making an effort to get to know your subject matter better and think of your characters as three-dimensional people.

Feedback from a sensitivity reader may catch some of the problems of lazy writing, but getting your book vetted by a sensitivity reader isn’t the same thing as conducting research or giving your characters greater thought. A well-researched and thoughtful book may still be considered offensive, for various reasons; and it can remain a worthwhile book to read.

A lot of times, what jars me in the middle of a book is an obvious fact that an author has gotten wrong – like the meaning or practice of a holiday, or a technological anachronism. Other times, it’s a historic character who sounds like they’re a 21st century transplant (something I just wrote about) and has the same values and concerns; the character may be less offensive that way, at least in certain respects, but they’re also less convincing.

I can be forgiving of mistakes in a book, especially if the book as a whole has many good points, but I think it’s important to invest more resources in fact-checking and research, which includes talking to people thoughtfully about their experiences. These activities do, in certain ways, overlap with the purported aims of sensitivity reading – catching laziness or thoughtlessness. And the result can be fiction that’s richer and more complex. But you aren’t promised inoffensiveness.

Inoffensiveness isn’t the main aim of writing anyway, I hope.

(Also, let’s face it, there’s never going to be a book that gets it all right. Even with an enormous amount of research, there are probably things you’ll miss, like little period details you may get wrong. You can still tell a good story with characters worth reading about. Will people criticize your work? Of course, but that’s part of sharing your writing.)

Problems With Making Historical Characters Relatable

by hkatz, posted in Writing

How relatable does a historical character need to be to a modern audience?

With historical fiction, one of the problems is when characters sound like 21st century transplants. (Like when you’re watching a show set in small-town 1950s England, and the protagonists neatly share the viewpoints of a liberal Twitter commentator.)

I understand why writers don’t want to create protagonists who heartily endorse all the common prejudices of their era. But you don’t have to do this in order to write a good piece of historical fiction. You don’t need to go out of your way to make a character (especially a heroic character) deeply bigoted or hateful. You can also write about harsh historic realities without resorting to slurs or lazy stereotypes (for example, you can write a servant as a more well-rounded character and not a caricature with a Cockney accent).

But you don’t need to use characters as a vehicle for preaching certain opinions. Or soothe modern audiences by promising them that they won’t encounter anything truly different in fiction – they’ll see themselves or people just like them wearing historic costumes, like at a Renaissance fair. Reassuringly familiar, even if it’s also more boring and the story loses some truth, becomes flattened.

Why does every character need to be completely relatable anyway? Humans have always been humans, but thoughts, beliefs, and emotional expressions are all shaped by culture and historic period. I can enjoy a story from the 19th century and gain insight from it without needing to pretend that the protagonists would see eye-to-eye with me on everything (or even most things). In many ways, including how they think of words like “honor,” they’re drawing on different conceptions, different interpretations. It’s possible to find some common ground with these characters without pretending at sameness. 

As for showing a protagonist’s relative lack of prejudice or greater compassion, it’s best to use actions rather than preachiness. Even subtle actions can convey understanding, humanity, and good-natured humor, and there’s less risk of the character sounding like they time traveled.

Eliminating cliches through careful observation

by hkatz, posted in Writing

I previously posted a version of this piece on a defunct blog of mine, so I’m sharing it here.

Cliches often result from inattentiveness or from indifference. They’re readymade and easy to grab at as you write.

While they save you effort or time, they cost you in other ways. If you use too many cliches, your writing becomes less memorable. Your voice seems more dull, your thoughts less worthy of attention.

One of the ways to limit cliches in your writing is to carefully pay attention to the world. Specific details and concrete examples can deepen your writing. Observations of texture, shape, and color enrich the text and give it more flavor.

As an example, let’s consider Sightlines, a collection of essays by Kathleen Jamie. Her book inspired this post, because of how present she is in the world of each essay. From “The Gannetry,” on a colony of gannets in Scotland:

The cliffs were south-facing, full in the sun, and five hundred foot high. They formed promontories and bowls, so we walked out onto the broadest promontory and from there looked back into the cauldron the birds had commandeered for themselves.

And from “Moon,” an observation of an eclipse:

The moon does us a great service, metaphorically and literally, and this is part of it – occasionally she allows us to appreciate the shadow cast by our own planet. She shows us that the earth, for all the cacophony of life on its surface, is firstly an object, bigger than we are, magisterial enough to cast a shadow thousands and thousands of miles into space.

In this piece, she describes the moon ripening like fruit, even as the Earth becomes more strikingly rock-like. Although people have compared the moon to food before, she constructs the imagery with delicacy and care, and in a way that’s unique to her. She doesn’t make a lazy comparison. It’s borne of observation and imagination.

Before describing people as having nerves of steel or being weak as a kitten, study them. Reflect on who they are in a specific moment. Do you want to say something about emotions or economics or how beautiful your backyard looks at dawn? Don’t lean too hard on the readymade phrases. What are you really trying to say?

Reading good writing reminds you to observe the world more carefully. So does being present in the moment as you write or edit your work. Think about what you’re trying to write and how to write it precisely and memorably.

Emma (2009) vs. Emma (2020)

by hkatz, posted in Writing

It’s interesting how the same novel can give rise to multiple screen adaptations that are strikingly different in tone and their approach to the characters. Neither of them is really like the novel either, because you’re not going to capture the experience of reading Austen in a screen adaptation.

Overall, I prefer the 2009 Emma, but there were things I liked about the 2020 one too. I haven’t watched either of them recently, so I’m working from memory here.

In both versions, Emma is conscious of her social rank and needs to become more mature, considerate, and perceptive. The 2009 version brings out something a little vulnerable and lost in her, connected to the fact that she’s led a sheltered life and seen little of the world; also, the acting is more informal in that one, so her mannerisms come across as younger and even childish sometimes. In the 2020 one, she’s steelier and more sophisticated (even though her readings of social situations can be wildly inaccurate, which is part of the humor).

The 2009 version has beautiful pastoral imagery, and the interiors are both grand and soft; they have an earthy palette, lovely furnishings, and a lived-in feel. The 2020 version takes grandeur to another level. The interiors look pristine and lavish. Emma and the other characters are like dolls in a bejeweled dollhouse. This also fits the sense of Emma living in a bubble; nothing exists in the world outside of the dollhouse. (There are similar differences in the outfits – the 2009 adaptation gives Emma some lovely gowns, but the 2020 one takes the fashion to a whole other level.)

The 2020 one plays up the social comedy more, especially with the introduction of the quiet, long-suffering servants who try to iron out every inconvenience in the lives of the wealthy people having fits of drama around them. (The servants’ facial expressions subtly reveal what they dare not say.) 

As for Knightley… overall, I prefer the 2009 one (Jonny Lee Miller), but Johnny Flynn was also good in the 2020 adaptation. I think each Knightley is a good Knightley for the adaptation he’s in.

The 2009 Emma is a mini-series, which makes it feel more expansive and gives the scenes more breathing room. The 2020 one is a regular movie, more constrained in time with a faster pace, and so the humor also has a more staccato feel.

Watching different Austen adaptations is an interesting way to study filmmakers’ choices. What do they try to emphasize from the books? How do they try to communicate a different social world to a modern audience, or bring out a novel’s humor (which in some scenes comes down to a turn of phrase or an ironic tone)? If you’ve watched either of these, share your own opinions on what worked for you.

In Fiction You Don’t Have to Show Everything

by hkatz, posted in Writing

Years ago, I watched Laura, a film noir that came out in the 1940s. At the start of the movie, you learn that a young woman has been found murdered in an apartment. The police assume that she’s the tenant, Laura Hunt. Why is there any ambiguity? Because the murderer fired a shotgun at her face.

Even though the murder happens offscreen, we don’t need to be told explicitly why a shotgun blast to the face would render someone unrecognizable. We understand why, and we understand how gruesome the scene must have been.

When contemporary novels, movies, and shows depict graphic violence or sex, explicit portrayals are common. These days, it’s much more likely that the murder or at least its aftermath would be shown onscreen. We’d see the bits of brain and bone and the splashes of blood, maybe a closeup of the ruined head. Would that make the story better?  

What are your preferences when it comes to graphic portrayals? My own, especially for movies and shows, is to not show everything. I have more tolerance for graphic descriptions in text, but even then, I think there can be immense power in hinting at things or at least being more careful about what to depict and what to conceal. There’s power in letting people strain with their imagination towards the shadowed corners, the dark rooms where a horror is unseen but still very much present.

I’m reminded of a scene from Ivanhoe, a novel published in 1819 and set in the days of Robin Hood and Richard I. One of the main characters, Rebecca of York, gets captured by a rapacious knight and brought to a castle. There, Rebecca meets an older captive, Ulrica, a Saxon princess who has been enslaved for years. None of the horrific crimes against Ulrica are described explicitly, but what she tells Rebecca is still dreadful:

Thou wilt have owls for thy neighbours, fair one; and their screams will be heard as far, and as much regarded, as thine own.

What would a contemporary adaptation of Ivanhoe look like? Would it show flashbacks of Ulrica’s captivity with explicit portrayals of her abuse, with her body positioned in a way that an audience might find more titillating than terrifying? It would likely be gratuitous and desensitizing. Nothing like the excerpt from the book.

I won’t say that there’s no room ever for explicit descriptions. They can be done well; they can have a place in a story. I just see so much that isn’t thoughtful. Explicit portrayals often come across as a knee-jerk choice, included because they’re expected, not because they’re the best way to tell the story.

Ella Minnow Pea: Anti-Censorship and Prompts for Creativity

by hkatz, posted in Writing

I just read Ella Minnow Pea, a novel set on a fictional island where the High Council has begun to ban the use of different letters.

Along with its humor, there are two main reasons I like the novel:

Its Anti-Censorship Theme

One of the strengths of Mark Dunn’s novel is how it portrays the psychological costs of censorship. The mental tiptoeing around the language, the fact that letters have become minefields, the way neighbors begin to inform on each other for verbal slip-ups. One of the island’s residents, a teacher, says the following:

In the sanctuary of my thoughts, I am a fearless renegade. Yet in the company of the children I cringe and cower in a most depreciating way.

When the letter ‘D’ falls prey to the power-hungry and zealous Council, how do you teach kids grammar? (Never take the word “and” for granted.)

Semicolons are simply not an option. These youngsters are only seven! Young people of such age can’t fathom semicolons! Nor can I employ an “or” when I want the other one – the one that brings together, not separates.

The Way It Inspires Writing Creativity

Unlike the island’s residents, you don’t have any penalties hanging over your head for illegal letter usage. So you can use this novel as a creative writing exercise. Try writing a piece of flash fiction without the letter ‘V.’ Or a haiku without ‘O.’

The island’s residents have to scramble for synonyms and to find new terms for things. “Sun-to-suns” (as a substitute for “days”), and “learny-house” instead of “school.”

How well would you do during a letter purge?