Читать книгу Script Tease - Eric Nicol - Страница 18
ОглавлениеOkay, you have now decided what kind of creative writing you want to get it on with, you have collected the technical equipment needed to convey this to a waiting world, and you’ve secured a place to write. You are ready to commence the actual process of producing organized words.
Despite all the technological advances in creative writing since the ancient Egyptians chipped out obituary notices in royal tombs, it is still defined as art. It is not a science. The writer’s mind is constantly fighting off fact in favour of fancy. He is wide open to inspiration, that magical force that causes him to leap out of bed — regardless of company — to capture the divine afflatus ere it fly into oblivion. In writing.
A close examination of our literature reveals that most writing consists of words. The words used are the product of selection (otherwise, Noah Webster would be the greatest author of all time).
The writer selects words from his vocabulary. In fact, it is impossible to exaggerate the importance of vocabulary in creative writing. The writer’s vocabulary is like a nursing mother’s breast: the larger it is, the more you get out of it.
If a person’s vocabulary consists almost entirely of words, where does he obtain these words? Some of our words may be found in a standard dictionary, while others derive from other motorists. But most of our words are extracted from books, magazines, and newspapers. Yes, reading fertilizes writing. Television, being relatively inarticulate, does little for vocabulary and even less for spelling. Radio, worse, as one can’t read lips. As for the Internet, vocabulary is in a dot coma. All menu and little nutrition.
Reading! It is a fact that reading almost always involves words, outside of China. Some of these words have more than one syllable. Read these words often enough and eventually their meaning will sink in, becoming a usable part of the vocabulary you need to keep handy for writing.
Don’t fret about spelling. Correcting spelling is your editor’s job and is the reason she makes more money than you do. Likewise punctuation. (Fussing over punctuation is donkey work and will be further ignored in the section on style. However, if you have a serious addiction to the semicolon, you may need personal counselling.)
Concern yourself with the important task of choosing, what the French call le mot juste, or the exact word, with a pickiness usually associated with selecting the right dinner wine. If you drink plonk regardless of what you are scoffing up for supper, you may carry this laxity into your writing. If we had to fight a cork to access our vocabulary, we all might be more attentive, appraising every word for its robust or subtle colour … bouquet … unique taste. It may help to think of yourself as a literary sommelier. Apron optional.
It is equally important to use active verbs rather than passive, overweight, or otherwise indolent layabout verbs. Because the verb is essential to the description of action, it is hard to write a novel, for instance, without using a verb at some point in the story. If verbs make you nervous, it may be prudent to confine your writing to government reports, greeting cards, and dinner menus.
As for nouns, their worth shouldn’t be judged on the basis of how many syllables they contain. Just because your vocabulary happens to include a word of more than two syllables isn’t reason enough to work that word into every sentence.
It is better to build a sentence with concrete nouns rather than those of the abstract variety, which should be reserved for writing philosophy, economics, or family letters. (A concrete word evokes something we can see, smell, hear, touch, or apprehend while sober.)
Nouns may also be divided — after some initial confusion — into proper nouns or improper nouns. Proper nouns are found mostly in non-fiction, improper nouns in public washrooms, along with improper verbs and improper adjectives (aka ejaculations).
A noun may also be a gerund, which is a verb masquerading as a noun. The gerund used to be a declinable noun, but now it says yes to everything. A sign of the general moral decline of society?
So what about those so-called dirty words? How do you:
1. Identify a trope as truly filthy?
2. Avoid the overuse of obscenities for their shock value?
3. Judge their suitability in a children’s book?
These shady elements of vocabulary are often called “four-letter words” because a careful audit does confirm that most, if not all, contain four letters.
Without doubt the most problematic, especially in kids’ books, is “the eff-word.” Since the eff-word is one of the most frequently used locutions — especially in heavy traffic — and demonstrates amazing versatility (“eff off,” “eff all,” “eff up,” and of course the last word in intimacy, “eff you”), it requires a conscious effort to spare your computer this phrase it has heard all too often.
However, the writer shouldn’t shrink from calling a spade a spade unless, of course, it is a shovel, which has a somewhat different shape.
STYLE
Now that you have a decent supply of words, sorted and laundered for a public appearance, how do you assemble them to provide maximum effect?
First, they gotta have rhythm.
Just because today’s poets have rejected rhythm as a vestige of giving the reader pleasure, there’s no reason for other writers not to make it an element of their style. In moderation. But not the rhythm of the lullaby. Excessive rhythm should be confined to church service homilies and company boardroom reports.
Remember: the message travels from the eye to the brain via the ear, possibly with a pit stop at the genitals.
Today the sonorous rhythms of the Victorian novelist — and even Charles Dickens could be pure Ovaltine — have given way to those of faster-paced prose and staccato verse. The violin section has been turfed in favour of the percussion. Think of your pen as a jackhammer. If it helps, write wearing a hard hat.
Some literary analysts believe that rhythm is something a writer is born with in lieu of common sense. If you can dance, you can waltz through a compound sentence.
The pleasurable pacing of your prose — a phrase demonstrating that alliteration can be a sedative — depends very much on your cunning use of punctuation.
Punctuation is like the neighbourhood pub: it can be either “open” or “closed,” and is often a factor in alcoholism.
Although it is best not to become a fanatic about your punctuation, there have been ugly scenes resulting from arguments about abuse of the exclamation mark (!), aka “the schoolgirl shriek,” as emphasis rather than exclamation (“‘Shit!’ cried the Duchess”). But certain rules do apply:
1. Reserve the question mark (?) for completed interrogation. It should not be used internally. (“My friend [?] ran off with my wife”). Cute punctuation is largely responsible for the high suicide rate among editors.
2. The assertive sentence has its period (.) regardless of whether it is pregnant with meaning.
3. No one uses the semicolon (;) anymore. The difference between a pause (comma) and a full stop (on the dot) has become too subtle for today’s faster-paced writing.
4. Italics may add emphasis and a dash of Chianti but could cause your computer to overheat.
Remember: “the style is the man himself” (Buffon, a certified eighteenth-century count). Your writing style says a lot about you as a person. It can reveal you as a Scrooge (closed punctuation), or demonstrate that you are a generous soul in whose mouth butter would refuse to melt (the vowels of compassion).
Don’t count on your computer to sweeten your style. That bitch is just waiting to demonstrate that, with you, the style is the monster.
FIGURES OF SPEECH
Despite the name, we don’t need to be speaking in order to use figures of speech. They can work equally well in writing. In moderation.
Excessive use of simile or metaphor can slow a novel down to a snail’s pace. (See? that one snuck in right there.) This can be absolutely fatal to a screenplay, let alone a financial report.
The two most abused figures of speech are the simile and the metaphor. “Quick as a flash” is an example of a simile that has gone into menopause. (A metaphor there, possibly offensive, for demonstration purpose only.)
The difference between a simile and a metaphor is that a simile says that something is like something else, whereas a metaphor says that something is something … else. (That definition may be clear as mud — right? [Another simile ready for burial.]) And here we have a demonstration — fully deserving of a footnote, if this work had feet — of how brackets and parentheses may be used to titillate the reader who relishes confinement.
Both similes and metaphors have been used by writers for centuries in order to create a picturesque style. This method of creating pictures has gone into decline with the arrival of television, which of course conveys pictures without having to hold a book while strumming one’s lip.
Today’s writer leaves more to the reader’s imagination, which is normally more lurid than anything the writer could picture without having his work banned by school libraries.
Instead of graphic description the writer may turn to hyperbole. Hyperbole is very effective for humour. Woody Allen is a master of comedic hyperbole: “… her figure described a set of parabolas that could cause cardiac arrest in a yak.”
Hyperbole is used almost exclusively for fun, but may cause an allergic reaction in a reader who is unfamiliar with exaggeration.
A safer tool for humorous effect is understatement. This is an English, rather than American, device and should be served with a cup of tea with lemon.
GRAMMAR
This is not, as most of us know, Grandpa’s wife.
But what of the questions: Does correct grammar interfere with creativity? Or, may grammar itself be creative, introducing novel relationships between subject and verb?
Certainly, the rules of grammar are now more flexible than in the days when Fowler was ordering stiffer sentences than a criminal court judge with a toothache. In his Modern English Usage, Fowler is especially hard on the dangling participle. He verifies that this pendulous construction can induce more gratuitous hilarity in a reader than perhaps any other blooper: “The girl grabbed the steering wheel from him and, causing a loss of control, he was killed in the crash. ”
This kind of unattached construction results from trying to cram more into a sentence than it can reasonably accommodate. This is another reason why successful writers today mostly adopt a simple style that avoids the participle as a grammatical land mine, primed to blow up an otherwise dignified paragraph.
How much should a creative writer depend on an editor to correct his grammar? Answer: as little as possible. Most editors are writers in need of gainful employment. They don’t edit just for the joy of salvation; they are in a correction facility. They can’t wait to get out the minute another editor finds their work publishable. (See section on Editors.)
INVENTION
No, we are not talking here about the latest technical gizmo to accelerate your Internet consumption. You are probably already spending too much of your morning deleting yesterday’s stroke of genius, or forming attachments less than lifelong.
Inventive writing is that which says something new. An impossible goal, you may protest, given the sheer volume of verbiage being discharged into the atmosphere. How, you ask, do I know for sure that what I am writing hasn’t already been done, possibly better, by someone with a creative lawyer?
“Great minds think alike” won’t satisfy a judge.
The best way to avoid subconscious plagiarism is, of course, to read nothing. But don’t depend on the belief that pinching material is hard to prove if you have taken the precaution of changing the punctuation.
All’s fair in love and war, but in writing you need to be careful. And to resort to that more estimable source of creativity: imagination. Even if the author has led a remarkably adventurous life, crowded with incidents and relationships that provide a bushel of grist for the mill, this will need to be leavened with imagination for it to make real dough. (Note the example of an extended metaphor that may strain the reader’s patience.)
IMAGINATION
Imagination is the mind’s eye. For too many writers it’s an optical illusion. So how does the writer come by a lively imagination?
Is it something he is born with? Or is it the product of a sheltered childhood? Does it grow, like the pearl in the oyster, as a result of a confined and irritating social environment? Or is it just a way for the mind to compensate for what the body is missing? Nature’s reward, for example, for remaining a virgin while normal people were having fun?
Are you a naturally shy person? Yes? Congratulations! You have met the first requirement of writerly imagination. You have been keeping all your sex fantasies in your head rather than in motels. At first blush this may not seem as exciting as meeting a really charming nymphomaniac in a bar, or a nice naval officer on the beach. But on the plus side you have reduced your chances of contracting a quite tedious venereal disease.
Imagination is less of a factor if we are writing non-fiction (which may include autobiography). Most other literary genres do depend on the author’s imagination, something harder to measure when sober.
Imagination is especially vital if the writer has been leading a cloistered life. Very few fictional bestsellers are written by nuns or monks.
“Living it up, so that you can write it down” is a formula that requires examination before leaping — in the larger context of avoiding arrest on charges of illicit sex with a minor while operating a vehicle under the influence of an illegal substance.
With due respect to poet Dylan Thomas, literary invention isn’t a genie in a bottle. Or a brothel. The trick is to live a full life without spilling any. Female authors seem to be better at this than the guys, who tend to prefer not to draw on their sexual experience unless writing comedy.
AIDS TO INSPIRATION
One genre that is especially dependent on personal experience is the travel book. It is very difficult to write an effective travel book without, at some point, getting out of the house. Casanova’s memoirs take him all over Europe, affording him international access to women and phenomena he would never have experienced had he stayed in the Italian jail.
(Note: memoirs are a special category of writing, less popular today than in the days when people wanted to record what they were doing with their lives. Also, the laws of libel constrain public recounting of romantic adventures. In fact, you can’t even narrate an amusing episode from a Tibetan guest house without expecting a formal letter from a Lhasa law firm.)
Now, if you don’t have much imagination (especially on Monday mornings), you may be tempted to enhance the modicum by using a controlled substance. Luckily, most substances (alcohol, pot, Italian coffee) are out of control these days in the Western world. But certain hard drugs serve as an accelerant of imagination only at considerable risk to other parts of the brain that may be needed for essential services, such as tying your shoelaces or operating a vehicle.
Far too many writers buy their imagination at the liquor store.
“Solitude is as needful to the imagination as society is wholesome for the character,” wrote James Russell Lowell. Solitude isn’t hard to come by, especially if the writer lacks access to a bath. But, like other stimulants, solitude can be overdone. Being alone all the time, and depending on cable television for the raw material of your sex scenes or for really anything but a catalogue of cooking recipes, can severely limit creativity.
RAW MATERIALS
Essential to every creative writer is some experience of life. This usually means getting out of the house for longer than to pick up the newspaper from the porch. Very little happens on the porch, in most neighbourhoods, with which to flesh out a novel.
“Living it up in order to write it down,” as I mentioned, is a formula that should involve buying accident insurance. Which may not be tax-deductible. But grist to the mill is not a closet harvest.
True, some fiction writers — not many, but a noteworthy few — have achieved literary success without looking for material outside their study. Virginia Woolf, for instance, by all accounts didn’t get out much socially, but lived inside her own head, probably a contributing factor in her ending up afloat in the river, sadly deceased.
On the other hand, it is easy to excuse an extravagant social life as a source of raw material. During the 1930s, swarms of American novelists descended on Paris, a site believed to be the motherlode of uninhibited sexual adventure. Later, after Hitler had cooled off Paris as the horny pilgrimage destination, some North American writers made the hegira to Mexico, where the siesta is institutionalized as a major element of the workday. This mecca has since waned in popularity, however, as the peso woke up and started acting like real money.
More recently, the Far North (anywhere not south of Toronto) has attracted travel writers who have an independent source of thermal underwear. Inuit no longer bother hunting seals, finding it easier to skin the writers herding poleward in search of frostbite.
For the neophyte novelist, the terra incognita lies in troubled relationships with other mammals. Especially people. But how can you be sure the other person isn’t just using you as the basis for a character given to weird sexual behaviour? Some ominous signs:
• Your subject asks to borrow your pen while you are engaged in intercourse.
• She, or he, insists that your romantic camping trip won’t be complete without a tape recorder.
• You have reason to suspect that your subject calls you “darling” because she is unable to remember your name.
All things considered, there is good reason for concentrating on some other species as novel material, even at the risk of being suspected of bestiality. Very few dogs can afford to hire a lawyer.
WHAT’S NOT APPROPRIATE
Whatever it is that you are writing — novel, newspaper editorial, in fact, anything but a shopping list — it is essential to maintain the same tone throughout. Many a person voicing the eulogy at the funeral of a loved one has yielded to the impulse to tell a funny story. Very rarely does this aberration succeed, the yarn joining the deceased.
Reason: the interjection was inappropriate. Like wearing sneakers with a tuxedo, the attention it draws is negative. This is why good writing is as much resistance to impulse as it is response to inspiration. Yes, it takes a strong will to reject the pun that begs for admittance to your article on male impotence. But writing is not for those who, like Oscar Wilde, can resist anything but temptation.
Another shallow in the stream of consciousness is imitation.
Which, sayeth the old saw, is the sincerest form of flattery. But if what we write imitates the work of someone else, particularly a person who isn’t deceased and has access to a lawyer, the flattery may get lost in litigation.
Plagiarism. This is an offence to be avoided at all (including legal) cost. Yet it is easy, nay, natural, to borrow entire sentences, if not paragraphs, from another’s work and forget to grace them with quotation marks. Not all of us have a photographic memory, Your Honour. We remember some things better than others. And sometimes the subconscious mind rides roughshod over assiduity so that before we know it we have written deathless prose that has already joined the immortal.
JARGON
Word-wise, not every sentence serves the writer, but too often the writer should be serving a sentence. For committing jargon.
Jargon — words used to impress rather than inform — corrupts non-fiction more than stories. If you are a doctor writing a book about your adventures in people’s internal organs, you have to avoid medical jargon — one of the most potent narcotics a reader can take.
The writer is particularly susceptible to this vice if he judges his output by the number of words he has written in the day. This is called the quota syndrome. If one day he fails to write his quota — because of some nuisance like a sudden death in the immediate family, or his computer going into menopause — the writer suffers guilt. And will try to compensate the next day by doubling that day’s quota, even though this severely depletes his supply of adjectives.
Using a computer compounds the risk of jargon by documenting how many words, total, the author has written in the workday. It is right there, accusingly, at the bottom of your screen: “19.” Which is another argument for writing everything first in longhand: no blabbermouth word count.
Another consort of jargon cited by Quiller-Couch: the case of “in the case of.” Nothing should be in the case except your bottles of lager. This is why legal briefs — the underwear of justice — are 90 percent jargon, 10 percent substance. Without jargon our system of jurisprudence would be accelerated to a pace inimical to the income of lawyers and magistrates.
However, if the writer wants to produce material for the average reader not wearing a wig, she or he will check every word to ensure that it is pulling its full weight of meaning.
To this end the writer may be tempted to coin words (neologism) as a surrogate for coining money. Words are minted mostly in the popular media such as newspapers or TV, or by drug companies. A bit presumptuous, therefore, for the amateur.
As a general rule, one should avoid using a word, or phrase, that draws too much attention to itself. Cuteness. It is sadly easy for the writer — like the party show-off who dons a lampshade — to win attention while losing respect.
Finally, words are cheap, yet are one commodity that can cost the writer dearly if not chosen with the economy of a Dutch housewife.
EMPHASIS
Not to be confused with the disease contracted from smoking tobacco or other field produce, emphasis is very important! Even if it requires the exclamation mark, aka “the schoolgirl shriek,” every writer wants his work to have impact. The all-too-common devices (besides “!”) to achieve this emphasis are:
1. putting certain words in italics
2. putting other words in CAPITALS
3. underlining whole passages
These contortions may be appropriate in certain literary milieus, such as the warning labels on drugs, but they rate as overkill in prose or verse aimed at adults with an IQ superior to that of a gerbil.
Other writers seek emphasis by keeping their sentences very short. Like this. Staccato. Sometimes called “Chicago style.” The reader has no chance to get bored with those rapid-fire periods peppering his attention span. This terseness does have the virtue of helping to keep the reader from dozing off — one of the reasons for the drying up of the stream-of-consciousness novel.
However, there are less jerky ways of achieving emphasis. One of these, cited by Quiller-Couch, is the judicious placement of words in a sentence. Sometimes this is a matter of saving the most important word (like dessert) to the end. “The wages of sin is Death” — despite the singularity of the verb — makes mortality more final than “Death is the wages of sin.”
Can this verbal skill be taught? Is it possible that, just as some folk (mostly black) seem to be born with a better sense of rhythm than people who inhabit northern parts of the Earth, timely words come more easily to writers for whom climax comes naturally, whether in bed or at the desk?
This is a matter that warrants further study, in this case by someone else. The main point: avoid prematurely ejaculating the important word. Your partner (the reader) will be better satisfied, unless of course you have contrived a very long sentence, such as this, from which it is difficult to emerge before your reader has dozed off.
The Good Book puts it succinctly: “How forcible are right words!”
THE EFF-WORD
Some writers — usually of the older generation — wonder whether they should use the eff-word in their novels or short stories. Even if they are writing dialogue as part of the scene of an auto collision or marital dispute, they still may hesitate.
Bite the bullet, ma’am.
To be true to real life, dialogue will include the eff-word in just about every sentence. It is very difficult for a character to display emotional disturbance — even that caused by a minor crisis such as a flat tire — without uttering the eff-word.
Yet it can be done. The downside: you may be restricted to writing drama for daytime television. Or a newspaper opinion column. But there is a market for work devoid of eff-less monosyllables, if these are selected with care. (Fudge as a surrogate is too cute to be borne.)
However, some writers pepper their work with the eff-word as a token of artistic integrity — and blame rejection on the craven media. But the hard, not to say tumescent, fact is: the eff-word has lost its shock value even for the reader who has lived a remarkably sheltered life.
Also, it would be a shame to discard a virile verb that displays such conjunctive versatility, coupling with a variety of prepositions — “eff off,” “eff up,” etc. — as well as being singularly onomatopoeic.
The eff-word may, in fact, be the most versatile, as well as the most popular, verb in the English language. It just needs to be used where and when appropriate and should never serve as the mainstay of the writer’s vocabulary.
This lets the writer blunder, in all good conscience, into pornography. The vogue of print porn has suffered greatly from the surrender of civilization to the Internet. Smut dot com has pretty well deleted the market for raunchy novels. Not only is a picture worth a thousand words, but we live in a time when, verbally, anything goes, as long as it doesn’t affect the drinking water.
(Note: the word pornography derives from the Greek words porne [prostitute] and grapho [write], so that pornography literally means the writing of harlots. Apparently, the floozies of ancient Greece found time to write, but as yet nothing too noteworthy has emerged from Las Vegas.)
(Another note: Just as a woman can’t be somewhat pregnant, a book can’t be a bit pornographic. In for a shilling, in for a pound. That was the secret of the success of the Marquis de Sade, who wrote the randy novels that earned him more or less permanent residency in the Bastille. Which had pretty good room service for those who, like the count, were living off the avails of prosecution.)
