Le Guin Apprenticeship Journal IX
On exiting, perhaps pursued by a bear
A comical little thing happened to me this week. There's one writing exercise I despise above all others. I see the value of it. I don't begrudge its existence in principle. But the doing of it, not for me. Loathe it.
Drum roll, please.
Dialogue-only.
Ick.
So you can imagine my excitement when, upon turning to Exercise 9, I find the words "The goal of the exercise is to tell a story and present two characters through dialogue alone."
~Visceral shudder~
Anyway, I did it. It was like dragging my feet through other people's cold bathwater. But I did it. I'm not going to show it to you.
The funny part is what happened next.
I'd been working on a story for some other project entirely, and it had been percolating away in the back of my mind for a few days, not really coming together.
I will give you ONE guess at how it came out, in about an hour and a half, fully formed, roughly 48 hours after I did god-awful Exercise 9.
ONE GUESS. No drum roll needed.
Writing really does never let you know its next move.
And nor do I, because I'm skipping from there right to Exercise 9 Part 3.
Why?
Because if a damp, wrung-out dish towel had feelings, it would feel like me: I have POV fatigue. And Part 3 is where we finally get to focus on something other than voice.
So, onward!
Exercise Nine, Part 3: Implication
Each part of this should involve 200-600 words of descriptive prose...No viewpoint character.
Character by indirection: Describe a character by describing any place inhabited by that character...(the character isn't present at the time)
The untold event: give us a glimpse of the mood and nature of some event or deed by describing the place...where it happened or is about to happen. (The event or deed doesn't happen in your piece.)
You aren't to say anything directly about the person or the event, which is in fact the subject of the piece.
Ursula Le Guin, Steering the Craft
To which I say:
White the dawn light that breaks through the broad windows to fall in bars across the stacked and veiled paintings, and white their muslin shrouds. White the dust motes that pirouette the air, and white are the empty, patient canvases. The curtains, white also; swollen with the salt breeze that bests the smell of turpentine and walnut oil. While hidden, waiting on their artist’s absent hand, in the antique tins on the mismatched shelves, in flower pots inside apothecary cabinets, in toolboxes and jam jars, in real paint tubes and makeshift palettes. In old teacups, in bottles, and jugs, and decorative boxes, lie dormant colours numberless.
One painting stands apart, its face bare and its back straight, on an easel. The paint is gleaming, the form unfinished, and it could be, to look at it, as if the artist stepped away for no more than a moment. But it’s only the playful wind that stirs the dry brushes in their tumblers, and leafs through the pages of the sketchbooks on the paint-scarred table. And the hush is so deep that the sound of waves reaches, shushing, through the half-open window, though the beach is not so near, as if the room has taken to breathing to pass the time. That face could be to blame; half-emerged from the furious brushstrokes and stricken hues of blue polluted with grey the colour of tempests and cyclones. It reeks of grief.
I didn't find this easy, as you can see by the fact I've radically disobeyed the word count. But I'm not kicking myself too hard; the overarching theme of this chapter isn't easy either:
Infodumping.
These exercises all ask roughly the same question: how to hide slow, technical information inside plot or dialogue or "fascinating, deeply felt narrative" (no pressure). The basic premise being that no one likes to sit still for their lessons. Hide the broccoli in the pasta sauce. A spoonful of sugar...etc.
In other words: avoid at all costs the expository lump.
Modern readers, more than any before them, apparently, will avoid thick wedges of text like the plague. There's a rumour the BookTok girlies skip everything except the dialogue. Which, if true ~visceral shudder again~
Implication is a fascinating skill to practice, one I hadn't come across in this explicit way before, and one I think I'll be devoting more time to in the future. Woolf is excellent at it, even in a single sentence at times: "One fibre in the wicker armchair creaks, though no one sits there." (Jacob's Room.)
(NB. I know I said I had POV fatigue, but this exercise uses the involved author, and Le Guin suggests taking up a character's voice as an interesting extension of the exercise. Don't mind if I do.)
And I find the idea that the reader is actually late to the scene, or early, that perhaps, after all, the scene is not built for them alone, quite captivating.
It makes the reader work. I don't like to be spoonfed; that's what I watch cute K-dramas with happy endings for (which is not me talking them down, by the way; I need them to survive. Have you seen it out there in the real world right now?!). But if I'm reading, I am there to use my imagination. So what's the point of having my hand held.
So I trudge onward, toward the imaginary line that recedes as I approach it: the editing horizon that is how much to leave out, where the ending should be, what finished means.
In the meantime, a hot chocolate and the next chapter of Our Wives Under the Sea by Julia Armfield.
Goodbye for now. Maybe see you next week. (For what might be the last week!)
xx
About the Creator
Lauren Everdell
Writer. Part-time gorgon. Probably thinking about dragons right now.
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