Le Guin Apprenticeship Journal V

A break from our regularly scheduled programming this week; I didn't have my foolish, confident little dreams shattered. In fact, it was rather the opposite. The miracles, will they never cease.

Le Guin prepared me for the challenges ahead as follows: "...because it is difficult and may take a while." Something she had never said before, of exercises that had all but melted my brain. What then, could she have in store for me this time!

Suitably perturbed and filled with dread, if not quite quaking in my boots, I began.

And you can imagine my gleeful surprise when the whole endeavour was a blast!

The worst part, honestly, was revisiting my little Seely Oxford Grammar, an object which is rapidly becoming a nemesis of mine. Drier than a week-old rice cake, it's still so useful I can't toss it; I've never been actively mocked by a small book before, but I guess this is what it feels like.

Why did I have to consult the demon book, you ask? Allow me to show you.

Exercise Five: Chastity

Write a paragraph to a page (200-350 words) of descriptive narrative prose without adjectives or adverbs. No dialogue.

The point is to give a vivid description of a scene or an action using only verbs, nouns, pronouns, and articles.

Adverbs of time (then, next, later, etc) may be necessary, but be sparing. Be chaste.

Steering the Craft, Ursula Le Guin

Le Guin recommended trying this out on the next paragraph or page of whichever long pieces we happened to be working on, and I happened to be working on a story about an enchanted garden. So, with her warning ringing in my head and my grammar refreshed, I set out to... well, prune my prose. (Sorry.)

And here is what came of it:

Recently, I've been complaining to my family that The Matrix has taken over my life: a series of spooky repetitions befalling me. My dad made a joke I'd heard in a TV show that same afternoon. I did an exercise for this project, then read a short story the next day that perfectly exemplified it (that's happened more than once). I spoke aloud about renewing my passport to travel abroad, and the next day England's airports all had a spontaneous technological infarction, grounding all the flights.

Well, one day, a day like any other, I was stopped in my tracks by a line from A Room of One's Own.

The river reflected whatever it chose of sky and bridge and burning tree, and when the undergraduate had oared his boat through the reflections they closed again, completely, as if he had never been.

A Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolf

Obviously, technically, this has some adjective-y bits and a few adverbs in it, but look how chaste, as Le Guin would put it. Even before knowing I'd be challenged to this exercise in the near future, I caught my breath at how vivid an image could be built with such simple language, and privately resolved to strive for that kind of crystalline work.

The next day, I met Exercise Five.

Now you tell me someone isn't playing cat's cradle with my puppet strings.

The point of all this guff, I guess, is control. I'm talking about control. Maybe I'm not in control of whatever jokes the universe is playing on me, but I can work for control of my medium, the kind of fine motor control Woolf exhibits here, and Le Guin encourages in this exercise. Because what she's really encouraging is for us to be careful with each word and to notice how the removal of some options forces agency in others. The verbs have to work harder, carry more, and drive the story in new, exciting ways.

Which is why I had so much fun!

See how the inability to say "a beautiful, old garden" has led me to fill that garden with Grandma's moving ghost, her working hands, which gives the garden not only its beauty, through what has become now a passing mention of flowers, but also history and grief, and a sense of the uncanny. The verbs do more for me than adjectives would have in their place.

Look, some parts of writing are horrible. The part where you sit at a blank page and feel like your nail beds are going to bleed. When you reach for that creative muscle, and there's that moment, always that moment, where you don't know if it will respond, or even still be there at all.

But some parts of writing are almost silly in how small and thrilling they are.

Take this line, for example: Lichen scabs the wood, and I graze my fingertips along the grain as I breathe that smell of peaches. It went through a few shapes to get to this point, and I went so far as to choose that over the: that smell of peaches. Why? Because I couldn't use the word familiar, but still I wanted it to feel like a smell she knew. Maybe no one notices, but maybe they do. Either way, I will know.

So, in the spirit of Le Guin, here's my challenge to you: take something you're working on and strip it. Pull the adjectives. Banish the adverbs. See what your verbs do when you make them work for a living. Then come back and tell me all about it!

That's it for me today, I'm off for a bit of light Sunday afternoon reading (where I'll probably find a short story with no adjectives!)

Bye for now. Maybe I'll see you at the next one.

xx