Fiction Tips: Can Writing Be Taught?

... courtesy of Henry Cruz.

Since back when I was a Wee Lad I've always had the bug to tell stories -- had this dream that someday I might get paid to write them...

That brings me to my recent Novel Writing Workshop (run by the talented author Jennifer Belle) which ended on Tuesday -- I've often asked myself the question on here...can good writing be taught?

Read the full piece here.

Narrative Fall Fiction Contest

Open to short stories, short shorts, and novel excerpts.

• First Place $3,000
• Second Place $1,500
• Third Place $750
• and ten finalists will each receive $100
• All entries will be considered for publication

Entry deadline: November 30.

• Guidelines
• Submission Form

Thinking about Writing

Although people who participate in the IWW's Creative Nonfiction Discussion list might tire of my supposition, I think sports writing -- no, better said as writing about sports -- provides some of the best examples of the genre.

Why? I think because there sport provides real-life examples of the same dynamic that drives the best of fiction -- character, conflict, loss, and redemption.

A renowned political columnist touches on this issue in a column today printed in the Washington POST.

Charles Krauthammer's summation is this:

"Ronald Reagan, I was once told, said he liked The Natural except that he didn't understand why the Dark Lady shoots Roy Hobbs. Reagan, the preternatural optimist, may have had difficulty fathoming tragedy, but no one knows why Hobbs is shot. It is fate, destiny, nemesis. Perhaps the dawning of knowledge, the coming of sin. Or more prosaically, the catastrophe that awaits everyone from a single false move, wrong turn, fatal encounter. Every life has such a moment. What distinguishes us is whether -- and how -- we ever come back."

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Reading sports as literature and art ...

The Silent Season of a Hero by Gay Talese
Esquire, July 1966
The Hammer of God by Charles P. Pierce
Esquire, June 2001

Free Will, Writer's Will

An Essay on Writing
by Robert Zumwalt

Recently, a morning television news segment featured Stanford professor Philip Zimbardo promoting his book, The Lucifer Effect: his premise, that in the right situation good people do bad things.

He recounted his Stanford Prison Study from 1971 where a prison-like environment was populated by student volunteers who were randomly parsed into roles of prisoners and guards. He noted "the guards quickly became so brutal that the experiment had to be shut down after only six days." Serious casualties left Mr. Zimbardo wondering about his role as warden. Thirty-plus years of research since the aborted study prompted comparisons to contemporary prison-abuse scandals: Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, etc., with implications that one should, using his metaphor, look beyond the bad apples to the bad barrel.

I read The Lord of the Flies several years before the Stanford study took place. I would hope that Mr. Zimbardo had read it, as well. People are easily led astray and civilized norms are fragile. Environment and long buried experience often override moral teachings.

The cultural assumption that good must triumph frames the discourse on the way life should be. Writers face this tradition -- readers demand it -- but does morality guide our choices, or is it merely the judge of past actions? Mr. Zimbardo's student subjects presumably had average moral training. Did they choose to brutalize their fellow students or was their behavior unleashed by circumstances? Did the barrel spoil the apples?

Contemporary theories echo older cosmologies, suggesting fate may not be in our stars, but in our biochemistry and subconscious mind. A recent article in the New York Times, by Dennis Overbye tackled the subject:

"A bevy of experiments in recent years suggest that the conscious mind is like a monkey riding a tiger of subconscious decisions and actions in progress, frantically making up stories about being in control.

"As a result, physicists, neuroscientists and computer scientists have joined the heirs of Plato and Aristotle in arguing about what free will is, whether we have it, and if not, why we ever thought we did in the first place. "

Whether the monkey is riding the tiger or telling his own tale, the characters we create in our stories are driven by their personal gods and demons. To reduce those forces to the DNA double helix merely substitutes one set of forces with another. The dynamics remain the same. Our stories are created from the known and the hoped for, all wrapped up in whatever language and metaphor of the moment that moves the story along and has meaning for our audience.

To dramatize: a child born in a remote village in Guatemala is not likely to worry about his prospects for Stanford. At least he won't worry about it in the same way that children in my neighborhood and their parents do, with their learning centers and SAT coaches. The boy's poverty is determinism of the existential sort. If the jungle around him instills a passion that leads to a quest to do biological research, it may eventually pit him against a minuteman at the US border who believes the boy should know his place in the world order and stay on his own side of the fence. Where he belongs. The boy's passions and the minuteman's own flavor of determinism, the nativist version of the "elect of God" syndrome, are in conflict.

Here are two flavors of determinism in the same story premise, with two paths taken -- chosen or driven doesn't matter. The first is based on physical circumstances; the boy is born into poverty. The latter is based on acculturation; the man has been taught from childhood that America is for those of European descent and sensibilities. Both sets of circumstances pre-exist as the backstory for these individuals and, as history, cannot be changed. This basic scenario can generate at least two stories: one about the boy and one about the minuteman. In either case, the social and political context would have to be brought in to satisfy my sense of drama. Otherwise, it would become a shallow paean to a hero quest or a diatribe against rednecks. Both individuals have much more to reveal about themselves. They have mothers and friends and lovers, and just as critical to their actions, their own perspective of their worlds: the way they have processed all that they have acquired over their lifetimes.

While the heroic nature of the boy's quest for an education is compelling, the xenophobia in which the antagonist was raised is raw material for the kind of noirish tales I construct. In my story I would be inclined to balance the boy's struggles with the minuteman's interior journey where he uncovers the dark corners of his own
assumptions.

Mine is a Left Coast perspective with heroes and villains to satisfy my sense of truth. I'm sure Rush Limbaugh, Don Imus, or followers of Jerry Falwell would tell the story differently.

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• Zimbardo, Philip. "The Lucifer Effect." 2007
• Overbye, Dennis. "Free Will: Now You Have It, Now You Don't" New York Times. 2 Jan. 2007.

Constructing Our Own Narrative

Each time I access the Web, each time I remember that the Internet Writing Workshop has participants from the US, Canada, South America, Australia, Great Britain, South Africa, India, and assorted other places, I think about the English language, its influence on the world community, and the effect on culture point-of-view in fiction and nonfiction.

There was recently an interesting article (at least to me as an admirer of creative nonfiction) in the New York Times -- "This Is Your Life (And How You Narrate It) -- that addresses the issue. The thesis, generally, is that "Researchers have found that the human brain has a natural affinity for narrative construction."

The studies discussed focused on research here in the United States, and it was noted that, "In broad outline, the researchers report, such tales express distinctly American cultural narratives, of emancipation or atonement, of Horatio Alger advancement, of epiphany and second chances."

If the tendency to think in narratives is universal -- which would mean the narrative dynamic of works like One Hundred Years of Solitude, War and Peace, and Kenzaburo's A Person Matter rests in the cultures of Colombia, Russia, and Japan -- there must be an underlying element within either the work itself or human nature that permits each of us to see ourselves in those diverse works.

Benedict Carey's article also focuses on how we perceive our self-constructed narratives depending on whether we relate them in the first or third person, which may be of more interest to fiction writers than those who write creative nonfiction.

It is a thoughtful piece exploring ramifications of the human pysche, and it is worthwhile read for any writer exploring the craft.