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Writing that Moves Us

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There is an interview in Writer’s Digest of Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai, who is the Vietnamese author of nine novels, in which she talks about writing The Mountains Sing, which was published in 2020 and reviewed by The New York Times.

Born into the Việt Nam War in 1973, Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai grew up witnessing the war’s devastation and its aftermath. She worked as a street seller and rice farmer before winning a scholarship to attend university in Australia. She is the author of eight books of poetry, fiction and nonfiction published in Vietnamese, and her writing has been translated and published in more than ten countries, most recently in Norton’s Inheriting the War anthology. She has been honored with many awards, including the Poetry of the Year 2010 Award from the Hà Nội Writers Association, as well as many grants and fellowships.

Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai

What prompted you to write this book?

Then, in 2012, when I was traveling with a Vietnamese friend in a car, I asked him what it was like for him during the Việt Nam War. He told me that he was 12 years old when Hà Nội was targeted by B-52 bombers. His parents were in Russia at that time and he was living with his grandmother, who saved him from the bombing raids. His story moved me so much. When I went home that evening, after putting my two young children to bed, I sat down at my computer and googled about the bombings of Hà Nội. I heard audio broadcasts of the sirens warning citizens about bombing raids. With tears running down my face, I penned 2,000 words which eventually become the opening scene of The Mountains Sing. I wrote without knowing where the story would lead me. But I knew I had to let Grandma Diệu Lan have many children, who would be separated by historical events which in turn lead them to becoming the enemy of one another.

How long did it take to go from idea to publication? And did the idea change during the process? 

I took me seven years to write and edit. My vision for the book stayed the same, but the objectives became clearer: that I needed to write about war to highlight the value of peace, about darkness to be able to talk about light, and about desperation to be able to bring a sense of hope.

Were there any surprises or learning moments in the publishing process for this title? 

I have published eight books in Vietnamese and The Mountains Sing is my first novel and first book I have written in English. I learned English in the eighth grade so penning this novel felt like climbing a mountain barefoot. I arrived at the mountaintop and am stunned that the magnificent view of all the love which has been pouring in for The Mountains Sing. Never in my wildest dream did I dare think my book would be reviewed on the New York Times, NPR and is picked as a Best Book of the Month/Season by The New York Times, The Washington Post, O, The Oprah Magazine, USA Today, Real Simple…. Readers’ feedback on Goodreads has also been amazing and I am grateful beyond words.

Were there any surprises in the writing process for this book? 

The Mountains Sing was fueled by my wish to have a grandmother. Both of my grandmas had died before my birth. Growing up, I was very jealous of my friends who had grandmothers to tell them tales and stories of their family. So I told myself I would write a novel one day with a grandmother figure in it. And finally I found Grandma Diệu Lan in The Mountains Sing.

I have no photos of my grandmothers and as I wrote the novel, I could imagine how my grandmothers looked, I could hear their voices. Grandma Diệu Lan and her granddaughter Hương are very real to me, as well as all other characters, including Hương’ parents, uncles, and aunt.

As a writer, I used to underestimate the power of imagination. I learned that once I let go of my fears and trusted my imagination, my writing will soar and take me where it is destined to be. Of course the imagination has to be grounded in knowledge for it to be believable, so research and hard work is key.

I used to be a documentary filmmaker, and a film director once told me: “You can’t make a good film unless your hands tremble behind the camera.” Let us write stories that move us to the core, because when our pen is trembling, the reader can feel it, too.

Having Fun!

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I can particularly relate to the email which Harry Bingham sent out on Friday.

It starts out with a quote about having fun: “Benjamin Jowett was a Victorian professor of Greek, a theologian and a college reformer. Photos of him have a somewhat stern and whiskery air, but he is responsible for one of my favourite quotes ever:

We have sought truth, and sometimes perhaps have found it. But have we had any fun?

I love that. As writers, we’re not all that interested in truth, so perhaps we can rephrase: We have sought a decent story, and sometimes perhaps have told one. But have we had any fun?

That quote is in my head because it occurred to me this week that perhaps my best books are also the ones I most enjoyed writing. It’s certainly true that the ones I most laboured over ended up proficient enough, but less joyous in the reading.”

He goes on to mention several books that he has written that he enjoyed writing and people have enjoyed reading. He says, “Overall, I think it is true that a joyous writing experience leads to a better reading experience. That’s nice to know in one way. Most writers could make more money in other jobs – or indeed, use those other jobs to fund their writing time – so it definitely matters that writing is fun.

But life ain’t always easy and writing isn’t always pleasurable. What happens if you are finding the writing a slog? The joyous writing = good writing rule is a comfort if you’re having fun. But doesn’t that also mean that painful writing = bad writing? In which case, the rule seems to double your troubles.

I think maybe it does.

I do strongly believe that you should write mostly for the fun of it. If you’re not actually under contract to a publisher, then why write if you hate it? Of course, in any book, there’ll be tough patches that you just have to push through, but that’s the same as any challenging hobby. Overcoming those challenges is part of the joy.

But some books have the joy/challenge balance wrong. The joy’s never quite enough, the challenges rather too constant.

So what to do? As usual, I don’t really know the answer, but my personal cocktail of solutions includes the following:

  • KBO. This was a core part of Winston Churchill’s philosophy on life. If women were around, he expressed it as “KBO”. If they weren’t, he said it plainly: Keep Bu**ering On. In the end, an ability just to push through the tough patches is the single most important quality of any writer.
  • If possible, take a break. And the breakier the break, the better. A sharp change of routine – a holiday, a love affair – is going to work better than “everything the same, but no writing”.
  • Figure out if there’s a technical flaw somewhere. A big one this, especially for less experienced writers. So often enough, you start a project with enthusiasm. At about the 30,000 word mark, that enthusiasm starts to dissipate. Then you write more text, but it just seems pointless. You don’t like what you’ve written. You give up. And often, often, often it’s because of an identifiable and fixable technical fault. So it could be something you’re doing wrong in terms of points of view. Or your sense of place. Or your plotting. Or almost anything. Those things will make your writing seem bad (because in this one specific way, it is bad). Then, since you don’t know what the issue is or how to fix it, you just give up. That’s where a professional can help.
  • Cut. Oh my goodness, this is so simple and so powerful. If you are telling a good story in 120,000 words that you could express equally well in 90,000 words – and it’s very, very common to see such things – then you have attached a huge drag anchor to your narrative. It can never leap free because you are burdening the reader with 30,000 purposeless words. Cut, my friend. Cut more than you think you can cut. Take joy in cutting. You will feel your manuscript lift and surge forward in the water. It’ll love you for the surgery. Be ambitious.
  • The dagger in the table. And sometimes, simply enough, a narrative starts to drag because it’s a bit draggy. The set-up is great. The ending you have in mind is fantastic. But the bit in-between? It’s all a bit ho-hum. So kill someone. Or have a bank robbery. Or have someone get abducted or buried underground. Offer a mid-story incident that shatters the shape of the story that the reader was expecting. Write a novel with two climaxes. Plunge the dagger into the table and watch it quiver.
  • Ask yourself: have a nailed the basic concept for this novel? If you don’t have a stellar concept, your novel will never be stellar. If your concept – your elevator pitch – just isn’t all that strong, the novel will essentially be unsaleable no matter how many nice little plot turns you have in chapter 22, and no matter how quirky you make Aunt Maisie. And if you have embarked on a novel with too little zizz, then add it. You don’t have to scrap what you’ve written and start again. You just have to find the ingredient – a ghost, a murder, a secret letter, a splash of magic, a something – that gives life to all the rest.”

I think Harry is right: that fun can make big difference in writing. I’m working on a collection of short stories, and I’m having a lot of fun writing them. But I’ve decided to stick to some rules. First of all, my idea for a new story has to be thoroughly tested in my mind for at least a week until I’m sure that readers would enjoy the story. My second rule is if the text starts to lose momentum I stop and fix it, taking whatever time it takes. So far, I’ve had only one story that I just didn’t like after three pages. And my third rule is to look at my completed work through the eyes of a sceptical reader. I keep finding little flaws that are fixable.

Putting Emotion on the Page

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Jane Freidman’s blog has a useful post about writing believable emotion. The post was written by Susan DeFreitas, who is the author of the novel Hot Season, which won a Gold IPPY Award, and the editor of Dispatches from Anarres: Tales in Tribute to Ursala K Le Guin, a finalist for the Foreword INDIES. An independent editor and book coach, she specializes in helping writers from historically marginalized backgrounds, and those writing socially engaged fiction, break through into publishing.

Susan DeFreitas

 “At the end of the day people won’t remember what you said or did, they will remember how you made them feel.

It’s a saying that applies well to fiction: people often don’t remember the plots of the novels they love, but they absolutely do remember how those books made them feel.

I think this is such a huge part of what makes us readers—and writers—to begin with: as James Michener put it, “the swirl and swing of words as they tangle with human emotions.”

Okay, but…how do you do that, exactly? Meaning, how do you actually generate strong emotions in the reader—and how do you get the reader to feel what your character is feeling in the moment?

There are some very specific points where you’re actually writing the character experiencing emotion in the moment.

And this is something that many otherwise excellent writers get wrong, I find, by slipping into a distanced point of views, an issue that can occur whether you’re writing in first person or third.

Here’s an example of an emotion written in a distanced way from the third person:

She felt angry. “Stop that!” she shouted.

And here it is from the first person:

I was stunned. “I’m leaving,” I announced.

On the surface, there doesn’t seem to be anything wrong with either of these little snippets—but the fact is, neither is likely to generate any real emotion in the reader, even if the author has set up those other key elements of the story in such a way as to predispose that reader to care.

So what will?

Let’s address why overt statements of emotion don’t work.

Think back to a time when you really were angry, or really were sad.

Did you realize, in the moment, that you were feeling angry?

Did you realize, in the moment, that you were sad?

Chances are, you didn’t. Not right away, at least. Because those words—angry, sad—are the sort of labels we apply to our feelings after we’ve had a chance to process them. The feelings themselves are much more immediate and visceral.

To speak in the terms of brain science: Emotional labels like anger and sadness are generated by the frontal lobe, that advanced part of the human brain that can think about what it is thinking, and think about what it is feeling as well.

To truly put your reader in the emotional position of your POV character, you have to dig deeper, to the more primary thing, the feeling itself, which doesn’t occur in the frontal lobe at all, but rather in the older, more primal parts of the brain associated with our physical and social survival.

And that is best accomplished by body language and internal narration.

Tactic #1: Body language

Body language is generally the easier tactic for most of us to get a hold of, because we’re all quite familiar with the physical manifestations of emotion.

For anger, for instance, that might mean:

  • your hands balling up into fists
  • pursing your lips
  • clenching your napkin
  • feeling your jaw tighten
  • shoving something out of the way

Those are all physical manifestations of an emotion that tells us we may need to fight, to defend ourselves or others.

For feeling sad, that might mean:

  • feeling tears well up in your eyes
  • feeling heavy
  • needing to sit down
  • closing your eyes
  • taking a deep breath

Those are all physical manifestations of an emotion that tells us we may need to reveal our vulnerability to others, so we can get help—or that we may need to go to ground, conserve energy, and nurse our wounds.

Fiction is full of the physical manifestations of emotions, and writers can often go too far with it, having their characters leapfrog right from bad news to outright sobbing, with no pitstops in between for glassy eyes, a tear escaping down a cheek, and so forth.

But even so, this sort of “body language” is indispensable when it comes to really translating the emotion of the character to the reader. Because it’s this sort of language that the reader maps onto her own body, when she reads it.

This sort of thing actually helps your reader feel the emotion of the character, physically.

Tactic #2: Internal narrative

But to my mind, the more important tactic, when it comes to the generating emotion in the reader, are the thoughts that actually carry that emotion.

Feeling teary-eyed and heavy, feeling your jaw clench—that sort of body language carries emotion in a general sense. The thoughts associated with the specific emotions of a specific circumstance actually put us there, in this specific moment of the story.

For instance, here are some thoughts that might carry the emotion of anger in a specific circumstance:

Julie couldn’t believe it—her best friend had betrayed her, and hadn’t even had the decency to try to hide it. How had Julie so disastrously misjudged her? And here Julie had thought they’d still be friends when their kids were grown, when they were two old biddies getting up early to hit the estate sales…

And here are some thoughts that might carry the emotion of sadness in a specific circumstance:

Maybe I should have seen it coming, but I hadn’t. In fact, I hadn’t had the slightest idea that anything was even wrong until the moment she said it. And now everything I’d worked so hard to build was crumbling down around me…

These sorts of thoughts are part our internal narration—the story we tell ourselves about ourselves, and about what’s going on in our life. These sorts of thoughts help us formulate and preserve our identity, and to negotiate our social environment.

Internal narration  does a lot to show the reader the meaning the character takes from the event being related, which helps to keep us clearly in that person’s point of view—and helps us to feel exactly what they’re feeling.

Combining tactics

Now here’s the body language and the thoughts conveying anger combined:

Julie could feel her hands balling up into fists as she clenched the napkin in her lap. Her best friend had betrayed her, and hadn’t even had the decency to try to hide it. How had Julie so disastrously misjudged her? And here Julie had thought they’d still be friends when their kids were grown, when they were two old biddies getting up early to hit the estate sales…

Here’s the combined body language and thoughts conveying sadness:

I could feel tears prickling in my eyes, so I squeezed them shut. Maybe I should have seen it coming, but I hadn’t. In fact, I hadn’t had the slightest idea that anything was even wrong until the moment she said it. And now everything I’d worked so hard to build was crumbling down around me…”

This is a good little tutorial.

Page One

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Last Friday’s email from Harry of Jericho Writers was about writing that first page of a book.

“The start of your book is a delicate, beautiful thing.

It has a joyous quality for sure. Something like cracking open an egg, the peep of new sun, climbing on board a train, feeling the flap of a sail, a rope straining at its mooring. You only get that feeling once per book, and it’s worth relishing.

You can go big, if you want to. You can start in the middle of a bar-room brawl, with bottles flying and chairs thwacking. Or you can start with something apparently small, except that the wriggle of a little story-worm catches the reader’s attention and, dammit, they find they’re hooked.

But, of course, there’s another issue with beginnings, a bothersome one. Because agents, blast them, start books from the beginning too and they are very unusual readers indeed. Partly, yes, they’re unusual in that they’re professionals looking for work they can sell. But also, they start reading literally thousands of novels a year. How many first pages does an average agent read? Maybe two thousand. How many actual books does an average agent read? Well, probably roughly as many as you do – or a few more, because they’re pros.

Because agents read so many opening pages, they are deeply – horribly – familiar with the clichés of the genre. That means, they are exquisitely sensitive to badness in openings.

What’s worse is this: the opening of your novel may well be the first thing you’ve ever written. It’s where you’re at your least experienced, not your most. That’s true in general, but it’s also true of this particular story. Midway through your book, you’ll know your characters better, your story better, your themes better, your voice better – everything better.

Which means that when an agent picks up your book it’s effectively an encounter between a Story Opening Super-Analyser and a scarily undercooked Story Writer. Not fair, right?

And look: nothing I go on to say in this email is absolute. You could pick some horrible cliché to open your novel with but, if you deliver that opening in a confident and well-written way, then any sane agent will read on, with interest. For everything I say below, you should bear in mind that there’s almost certainly a classic of world literature that takes the cliché and rebuilds it into something wonderful.

At the same time, clichés feel wrong for a reason. If you can avoid them, you probably should. And with that said …

Dreams

There’s something horribly schoolchildish about any story that starts with a dream, before, two or three paragraphs later, admitting, “Then I woke up.” It feels cool, but cool in much the same way that my kids think that making pots of green goo out of ordinary kitchen ingredients is cool. Once your age hits double-digits, it’s time to move on a bit.

I think there are also two more specific reasons for concern. One is that dreams are totally unboundaried. Not rule-governed. And that doesn’t just break the laws of life, but of stories too. Even kids’ fantasy fiction has rules that govern its fictional world. Opening without rules feels disappointing – the difference between a park kickabout and a World Cup tie.

The other is that, once you get two or three paragraphs in, you play that limp trick on the reader: ha, ha, fooled you, it was only a dream. That yields a feeling akin to disappointment. “You made me read this, on the premise that it mattered, but it didn’t matter. Oh.” I’d gently suggest that this is not a feeling you want anyone – still less an agent – to encounter on the first page of your novel.

Beds

More generally, one agent once told me that a stunning proportion of all manuscripts she read – she reckoned well over ten per cent – opened with a character in bed. She reckoned she’d almost never, perhaps literally never, offered representation for such a book.

There’s nothing obviously wrong with that. You could imagine some Beckettian novel that opens with a character in bed and keeps that character in pyjamas for most of the story. But … again, I think there are two specific issues here.

One is that you don’t want to bracket yourself with the ten per cent of novels that an agent is most inclined to reject. The other is this: why is it that so many authors start with a character in bed and (usually) waking up?

I think it’s that the writer themselves are warming up. They are aware of embarking on something new. Of introducing a new character to the world. So they start at the beginning: the opening of the day. As they move their character through toilet / shower / coffee / conflakes, they limber up, like your pre-gym warm-up.

And: don’t warm up. Or, if you do, don’t do it on page. Don’t do it anywhere that the reader is going to see it.

Poetry & prologues

The fantasy manuscripts we see start with a snatch of poetry by way of prologue. Or if not poetry, then myth, or incantation, or something similar.

And again, you’re going to tell me that Tolkein did this all the time, and maybe he did. But poetry (and myth and the rest of it) is, almost by definition, harder to penetrate than prose. An opening needs to gently lift the reader into your story vehicle and get them drifting away from the bank, the train gliding away from the platform.

Forcing the reader to wade through a couple of pages of (often quite dodgy) poetry is the opposite of that gently lifting model. It’s like you’ve built a low wall in between the reader and the railway carriage you want them to get into.

Too much, too soon

My least-favoured story opener is with highly extreme emotion of any sort. Often some horrible situation (a prisoner under torture), but really any sort of extreme emotion, conveyed with a plethora of emotional superlatives.

The reason why this doesn’t work is that stories have the quality of new social situations. You’re meeting characters for the first time. If your best friend had a terrible heartbreak sob story, you’d be prepared to listen to the whole thing, dishing out biscuits and tissues as needed. But if you had just for the very first time met a new parent at the school gate and you got the same excessively tearful download, you’d just want to pull away.

A reader doesn’t care about an emotional drama for its own sake. They care because they care about a character. And that means learning them, building them, creating the knowledge that will generate sympathy.

That’s the ‘too much’ error, and it’s a particular bogeyman of mine. But there’s a ‘too soon’ error as well.

That error is giving away your punchline much too early. You have a world where gravity can be rubbed away via a smartphone app? Or memory works only for twenty-four hours? Or your character, a woman, is working, disguised as a man, on board an old three-master?

Then great! I love it! What great ideas!

But don’t tell me about them. Not on the first page, nor even the third, nor anywhere in the first chapter. Yes, of course, you scatter tantalising clues. A coffee machine that has to be pulled down from the ceiling. Reminder post-its on the mirror. Some odd piece of behaviour by a ‘seaman’ apparently remembering a husband.

The clues are what tantalise. They’re what drag a reader through the story. Once you deliver your punchline (“An anti-gravity app! 24 hour memory!”), that particular sequence of clues carries no more force. For sure, other things will come along – you’ll start introducing the full Technicolor complexity of your story – but we’re talking about openings. If you want to get the reader into your story-vessel and pulling happily away from shore, then those tantalising clues are a brilliant way to maintain engagement. In time, as the reader bonds with your character, you won’t need the clues any more. But during this first chapter, don’t give the game away too early. Use the clues, delay the punchline.”

For me, on the first page – in fact in the first paragraph – I try to stick to these rules:

  • A character is introduced
  • An important theme of the book is revealed (what the book is about), and
  • An uncertain, but important issue or event is presented

Here, for example, is the opening of Seeking Father Khaliq:

“May I ask you, honoured Professor al-Busiri, if you will go to meet Princess Basheera?” 

I looked up reluctantly from the student essay I was reading, and considered the bearing of the woman who had entered my office unannounced.  She was tall and slender, graceful; she was motionless, but there was a suggestion of incipient mobility.  She was dressed in a black naqib and a jilbab so that I could see only her dark eyes.  Her voice, however, had an optimistic lilt to it.  She must be about thirty, I thought.

Deliberately, I pushed the essay to one side.  “Who, may I ask, is Princess Basheera?”

“She is my employer, sir.”

“And what does this Princess Basheera want with me?”

“She has an assignment that only you can fulfil, Professor.”

Are Publishers Becoming Censors?

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There is an article by Anita Singh in Yesterday’s Daily Telegraph in which Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is quoted as saying that it is unlikely that Salman Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses would have been published had Rushdie written it today. Adichie goes on to say that it is unlikely that Rushdie would have decided to write it today.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie was born in Enugu, Nigeria in 1977. She grew up on the campus of the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, where her father was a professor and her mother was the first female Registrar. She studied medicine for a year at Nsukka and then left for the US at the age of 19 to continue her education on a different path. She graduated summa cum laude from Eastern Connecticut State University with a degree in Communication and Political Science. She has a Master’s Degree in Creative Writing from Johns Hopkins University and a Master of Arts degree in African History from Yale University. Her first novel, Purple Hibiscus (2003), won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, and her second novel, Half of a Yellow Sun (2006), won the Orange Prize. Her 2013 novel Americanah won the US National Book Critics Circle Award. Her most recent work, Notes On Grief, an essay about losing her father, was published in 2021. She was named one of TIME Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People in the World in 2015. In 2017, Fortune Magazine named her one of the World’s 50 Greatest Leaders. She is a member of both the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

The article says, “In the first of this year’s BBC Radio 4 Reith Lectures, Ngozi Adichie spoke about freedom of speech.

She said: “Here is a question I’ve been thinking about: would Rushdie’s novel be published today? Probably not. Would it even be written? Possibly not.

“There are writers like Rushdie who want to write novels about sensitive subjects, but are held back by the spectre of social censure.

“Literature is increasingly viewed through ideological rather than artistic lenses. Nothing demonstrates this better than the recent phenomenon of ‘sensitivity readers’ in the world of publishing, people whose job it is to cleanse unpublished manuscripts of potentially offensive words.”

Ngozi Adichie said that publishers are also wary of committing “secular blasphemy”.

She claimed that the issue went far beyond the publishing world, with young people caught in an “epidemic of self-censorship” because they are too afraid of being cancelled.

The author faced her own backlash in 2017 after stating in an interview: “When people talk about, ‘Are trans women women?’ my feeling is [that] trans women are trans women.”

In her lecture, Ngozi Adichie said: “We now live in broad settled ideological tribes. Our tribes demand from us a devotion to orthodoxy and they abide not reason, but faith.

“Many young people are growing up in this cauldron afraid to ask questions for fear of asking the wrong questions. And so they practise an exquisite kind of self-censorship. Even if they believe something to be true or important, they do not say so because they should not say so.”

Ngozi Adichie said the alternative to this “epidemic” of self-censorship was people stating their beliefs and as a result facing a “terrible” online backlash of “ugly personal insults, putting addresses of homes and children’s schools online, trying to make people lose their jobs”.

She said: “To anyone who thinks, ‘Well, some people who have said terrible things deserve it,’: no. Nobody deserves it. It is unconscionable barbarism.

“It is a virtual vigilante action whose aim is not just to silence the person who has spoken but to create a vengeful atmosphere that deters others from speaking. There is something honest about an authoritarianism that recognises itself to be what it is.

“Such a system is easier to challenge because the battle lines are clear. But this new social censure demands consensus while being wilfully blind to its own tyranny. I think it portends the death of curiosity, the death of learning and the death of creativity.”

Ngozi Adichie called for a raising of standards on social media, and reforms including the removal of anonymous accounts.

She suggested that “opinion sharers, political and cultural leaders, editors [and] social media influencers” across the political spectrum should form “a coalition of the reasonable” to moderate extreme speech.

I agree with Ngozi Adichie that social media needs drastic reform to stop harmful misinformation, libel and threats. She seems to believe that the ‘tech’ owners of the social media platforms will not regulate properly because of the cost. She is right, but the cavalry is coming in two regiments. One regiment is government regulation and legislation which is starting to be announced and enacted. This will say ‘reform or pay billions’ and if social media platforms want of survive, they must change their business models. The other regiment is the digital advertisers, who, as the defunding of Twitter shows, do not want to be a part of their customers’ misery.

Publishers and authors are different kinds of problems. Publishers have historically had to navigate a fine line between capturing the public interest on the one hand and not causing public outrage on the other. Some authors face a similar set of choices. But neither publisher nor author has an incentive to lie or cover up the truth. On the contrary.

It seems to me that The Satanic Verses is a special case that has nothing to do with current truths or falsehoods. Most Muslims would regard passages in Verses as blasphemous, though is seems doubtful that Rushdie actually intended such severe criticism of Islam. To me, it seems that he intended the dream sequences featuring Mohammad (the Messenger), the polytheistic deities, the devil and the Prophet’s companion as a demonstration of how absolutist systems can go horribly wrong – one of the themes of the book. But the author framed the example with fictional characters and action which are completely contrary to Islam.

In September 2012, Rushdie expressed doubt that The Satanic Verses would be published today because of a climate of “fear and nervousness”. I agree that it wouldn’t be published even today, in 2022, but I wouldn’t attribute the decision to ‘fear and nervousness’. Today, most publishers would look at the manuscript and think, Muslims won’t like it and there will be mass protests. If he wants us to publish it, the dream sequences have to go.

You can call it the ‘sensitivity reader effect’, but really it’s a question about what’s good for the business.

Edgar Allen Poe on Vivid Writing

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The http://www.writerswrite.co.za website has a compilation of advice from famous writers on writing.

“Edgar Allan Poe was an American author, poet, editor, and literary critic. He was born 19 January 1809, and died 7 October 1849.

Edgar Allen Poe

He was one of the first American short story writers. He is known as the inventor of the detective fiction genre, and for contributing to the emerging science fiction genre. His works include classics like The Raven and The Fall of the House of Usher.

Poe was ahead of his time in his writing. He understood that less is more and he had a critical plan for each piece that he wrote.

In his essay, ‘The Philosophy of Composition’, he explains the elements that make up a good story. Poe takes us through the creation of his poem, ‘The Raven’. He says he selected this well-known work to show that nothing is in it by accident. He writes ‘…that the work proceeded, step by step, to its completion with the precision and rigid consequence of a mathematical problem.’”

“Here are five tips that Poe gives on vivid writing:

  1. The work should have a vivid, original effect. He writes ‘Of the innumerable effects, or impressions, of which the heart, the intellect, or (more generally) the soul is susceptible, what one shall I, on the present occasion, select?’ He says that tone and incident should be worked together to have the desired effect (mood) on the reader, ‘whether by ordinary incidents and peculiar tone, or the converse, or by peculiarity both of incident and tone’.
  2. Do not overwrite. To have the desired effect, it should be read in one sitting. He says, ‘if any literary work is too long to be read at one sitting, we must be content to dispense with the immensely important effect derivable from unity of impression.’ Obviously, novels do not necessarily fit this rule, but he believed this was essential for effect. Perhaps our modern unputdownable novels with shorter chapters have the same effect on the reader. The ideal length for a poem, he says, is one hundred lines.
  3. Know the ending before you begin. He believes you need to know this to be able to plot effectively. He says, ‘Nothing is more clear than that every plot, worth the name, must be elaborated to its dénouement before any thing be attempted with the pen. It is only with the dénouement constantly in view that we can give a plot its indispensable air of consequence, or causation, by making the incidents, and especially the tone at all points, tend to the development of the intention.’
  4. Choose a setting that works for the story. Poe first decides what he wants to say in the poem, or rather what he wants the characters to say, and only once that is in place, does he decide where to set the poem. He says he needed to bring the lover and the Raven together in a specific way, ‘— and the first branch of this consideration was the locale. For this the most natural suggestion might seem to be a forest, or the fields — but it has always appeared to me that a close circumscription of space is absolutely necessary to the effect of insulated incident: — it has the force of a frame to a picture.’
  5. The tone should reflect the theme. He says the choice to allow the raven, a bird of ill omen to repeat one word, ‘Nevermore’, in a monotonous, melancholy tone at the end of each stanza allowed him to ask: ‘Of all melancholy topics, what, according to the universal understanding of mankind, is the most melancholy? Death — was the obvious reply.’ The melancholy tone echoes the theme of death.”

Writing Sex Scenes

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Sharon Short’s final segment on Point of View hasn’t been published yet, so let’s look at writing sex scenes. Jessica Martin has a piece in Writer’s Digest titled ‘How to Write a Sex Scene Like Nobody Is Watching’.

Jessica Martin is a lawyer by trade, a writer by choice, and a complete smart ass by all accounts. Based in the suburban wilds of Boston, Jess shares her life with a finance geek, a small sass-based human, and a pair of dogs named after Bond characters.

Jessica Martin

Ms Martin writes, “There are some key scenes in your typical rom-com that writers have to nail. Chief among them is the sex scene. But writing one can stir up all sorts of feelings: anxiety, excitement, a bone deep certainty that if you write a bad one, no one will ever let you live it down. It runs the gamut and while every writer has a different strategy, here’s mine.

The name of the game is distance.

First up physical space. To actually write a sex scene like nobody is watching it helps if nobody is actually watching. For me, this means leaving my house because although I have a perfectly good writing space, there’s a six-year-old beastie who likes to barge in and demand to know why caterpillars don’t eat meat. Or whether you can hear a fish fart under water. Kid, I have no idea how to answer that.

This house I speak of is also occupied by two scheming dogs who lie in wait until I’m in a writing groove. They drop their heads on my leg and drool until I have no choice but to submit to the world’s most devastating puppy dog eyes, bursting with longing that only translates into one thing: Hey human, go fetch me a snack, will you?

And then there’s the husband.

I hope this isn’t shocking to anyone here, but I’ve had sex with him. I don’t want to think about him when writing a sex scene, because I’m pretty sure that violates the sanctity of the marriage pact or something—I don’t know, it’s just weird.

In any event, I vacate the house when I need to write a scene that involves the words thrust, pant, or moan. During COVID, there weren’t a ton of options for non-germy solitude, so I wrote the majority of these scenes in the front seat of my car parked in a state forest. Wearing a ratty hoodie and sucking down tea from a thermos for warmth. Hey, I live in New England and the nights are chilly. You know what else the nights were like in that state forest? Decidedly, not private.

What I didn’t realize is that after the park shuts down for the day, it’s apparently a hotbed of illicit activity. As teens swarmed the woods armed with their flashlights and pilfered booze, they would sometimes comment on the weirdo sitting alone in her car and wondering if I was a NARC. So, I’d need to wait until they’d dispersed into the woods like horror movie cautionary tales before I could get down to the good stuff.

OK, so now I’m physically alone. Now I need to be mentally alone.

Recently, I was out to dinner with my boss, who casually mentioned he’d bought 50 copies(!) of my book for our entire legal team. I was incredibly touched but also momentarily panicked as I sputtered that it was a rom-com … and when the room went silent, I blurted out, “There’s a sex scene.”

As every eye in the room turned to regard me, a colleague asked, “What kind of sex scene we talking here?”

“A tasteful one,” I replied archly (or at least nonchalantly. Please let me be remembered as being calm and cool in that moment).

It wasn’t like I hadn’t thought about it before, it was just that interaction finally drove home that someday, somewhere, my husband, parents, kid brother, my actual kid (when she graduates to books without pictures), friends, neighbors, coworkers, former classmates whose Instagram accounts I follow but otherwise wouldn’t recognize, my incredibly bendy yoga instructor and a whole host of others might one day pick up my book and wonder, SO THAT SEX SCENE, IS SHE DRAWING FROM PERSONAL EXPERIENCE?

While I freely admit to stealing snatches of conversation (especially insults, I love standing behind teenagers in lines), character traits I admire in my friends, and sometimes wholesale shenanigans from my free-wheeling law school days, I draw the line at digging into my own personal cache of sexcapades. Why? Frankly, because I’d like to look that subset of people in the eyes again. Call me a prude, but I like to have a bit of an air of mystery about me. That and I don’t want anyone thinking about my sex faces.

But I’ll peel back the curtain and allow you a peek into my process.

There I am, sitting alone in a car in a dark forest (OK, that sounds creepy, but bear with me) and I warm up by watching YouTube compilations of my favorite on-screen couples. You know the ones, set to angsty music where beloved characters eye each other across a room, a shared smile passing between them. Or maybe it’s that near brush of the lips or a finger tracing a bare collar bone, a shirt goes up and over the head. For me it’s less about what the characters are actually doing and more about that delicious moment of mutual (and completely consensual) commitment to the path of no return, no going back to being friends or enemies or indifferent strangers—it’s on.

Once I’m there, then I imagine my characters, their expressions, their voices, their sex faces (not mine, thank you very much) and what the timbre of their sex scene is. Is it slightly humorous, two people fumbling around knocking stuff over in their jubilant haste to get to one another? Is it full of murmured teasing as one character deliberately seduces the other? Is it rushed but somehow decadent because it’s going down somewhere where any moment our lovers could be discovered?

That’s the feel part.

Then comes the mechanics. I cannot remember where this nugget of wisdom originated, but someone once told me that sex scenes are like fight scenes. Watch the hands. I love this, because it makes me go back and smooth out the scene once I’ve finished with the heady feeling part to make sure it all syncs up. For example, if his pants were carelessly discarded like caution to the wind on the floor a moment ago, as he slides up her body, his hands worshipfully tracing the topography of her hips, then he shouldn’t be reaching for protection in his pocket, right? It has to be in the bedside table or if they’re outside, maybe she’s the resourceful one who still has pants on and whips out the foil packet with a triumphant cry? Details count.

Once I’ve nailed the feeling and true up the details, I break the veil of solitude, I leave the deep dark woods (I’m sure you psych majors are having a field day). I slip back into being a lawyer, a wife, a mother, that person who almost always uses a turn signal when changing lanes. I send the sex scene to my beta readers, then my agent and my editor. I’ll ask them, “This isn’t gross, right?” and that’s usually all I need to feel confident that it’s there.

At least until someone tells me they bought fifty copies of it and they’re giving it to all my coworkers.”

Point of View: How Close?

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This is the second in a three part series written by Sharon Short for Writer’s Digest.

Sharon says, “Just how “into” your narrator’s head and heart do you want your readers to be? Do you want them to feel emotionally embedded with your narrator(s)? Or observe your characters’ experiences from afar? What emotional distance (close, far, or a mix) should you strike to achieve the best point of view for your story, novel, or memoir?

The answer, of course, depends on the type of story you’re telling as well as the experience you want your readers to have.

Luckily, you don’t need to know the answer before you begin writing—though it’s fine if you do. Somewhere in the process of drafting and revising, you’ll need to figure out the emotional distance that’s right for your story’s point of view (POV)—and your readers.

Deep POV—or Not?

A common pearl of wisdom is first person is more personal and immediate than third or omniscient—after all, the narrator is telling their story directly to the reader.

Consider this example:

I had to stay late for work, and as I was driving home, I wondered whether mac ’n’ cheese from a box would be OK for dinner, and I hoped that tonight I could finally get my 12-year-old daughter, Stacy, to open up to me. I was distracted and didn’t notice the pickup truck slowing down in front of me until it was too late and I rear-ended it.

Hmm. This feels a bit flat and distant, doesn’t it? The use of linking verbs (“was”), past progressive tense (“was driving”), and verbs that describe emotional and mental processes (“wondered,” “hoped,” also known as filter words) all hold the reader at bay.

Revise into what’s often called “deep POV” with active verbs and emotions to pull your readers into your narrator’s head and heart:

At first, I relaxed as I drove home; traffic was light, an unexpected boon of working late on another set of expense ledgers. But that also meant dinner would be late—again. Would everyone be OK with mac ’n’ cheese—again? Maybe I could get Stacy to help me—she always opens up when we’re doing a task together. I’d rather hear her prattle on about seventh-grade drama than worry about the water heater repair bill … Boom! Oh, crap. I hit the back of the pickup truck in front of me. If only I could stay focused on what’s right in front of me—whether ledgers or red brake lights.

Same information and then some—we know more about the narrator’s relationship with her daughter and financial worries, get a sense of her personality, and are right there with her when she rear-ends the truck.

This works just as well with third person:

At first, Donna relaxed as she drove home; traffic was light, an unexpected boon of working late on another set of expense ledgers. But that also meant dinner would be late—again. Would everyone be OK with mac ’n’ cheese—again? Maybe she could get Stacy’s help—the kid always opened up when they did a task together—and Donna would rather hear her daughter prattle on about seventh-grade drama than …

Notice how this deep POV and third person combination feels more distant than the deep POV and first person combination, but a lot closer than the initial example of first person.

But what if you want the reader to feel distant from Donna? Perhaps she’s a stiff, uptight character who doesn’t let anyone easily into her feelings. That’s fine—but it doesn’t mean you need to revert to verbs and filter words that describe, rather than show, experience. A less distracting way to create distance is to use active verbs, eliminate immediate thoughts and feelings, and stick to the facts of the narrator’s situation:

Reviewing another set of expense ledgers meant I left work late, but by then, traffic was light. Dinner would be late. Mac ’n’ cheese would be sufficient. Stacy could help make it. That would mean listening to the kid talk about seventh-grade drama. Suddenly, I crashed into the back of the pickup truck in front of me …

Every writer I know finds that being a writer is an emotional experience. Oh, we all try to be practical when talking about our experiences in public—focusing on craft techniques or business practices.

But when talking with trusted writer friends, we admit writing is an emotional endeavor—both as we create, and as we put our work out into the world.

While creating, you might get so into your work that the characters and situations become real. I’ve both burst out crying while writing a particularly moving scene and laughed aloud at my characters’ hijinks. (I’ve had family members catch me in such moments and ask, with some worry, for reassurance that I do know I’ve made up these characters and their situations. Well, sure. But, that’s beside the point. They feel real to us!)

That’s a great kind of emotional closeness to your work. It’s part of the joy of creation, after all, and though experiencing this as you write won’t ensure that every reader will feel the same way, it surely shows you’re on the path to creating something that is visceral and authentic.

On the other hand, when it’s time to revise, emotional distance becomes your ally. That hilarious scene that had you in stitches as you wrote it? If it’s slowing the pace of your story, it may need to be shortened—or even cut altogether. (But save it in a different file! Outtakes can be bonus material for readers in the future, or worked into new pieces.)

Then, dear writer friend, there’s the emotion of putting our work out into the world—perhaps sharing it with a trusted writer group, or submitting to agents or editors, or having it published for readers to enjoy (or, alas, sometimes not.)

Depending on our personalities and the reactions our work receives, emotions can run the gamut from joy and excitement (woo hoo, I have a request for my writing or my writing group loves my new scene!), to despair (I’ll never find a home for this story), to anger (how could a reviewer or writing group member say that about my work?).

Let yourself process all of those emotions but discipline yourself to hold back on expressing them. (Well, except if you have great news. That you can shout from the rooftops!)

Remember that setbacks are temporary. Not every piece of writing will please every reader; you’re not writing to please everyone anyway. Remind yourself that if you receive a pass on your work that it’s the work that’s being rejected—not you.”

Point of View Myths 1

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Sharon Short, a Writer’s Digest columnist has three pieces on Point of View (POV). Her first is choosing the right point of view for your story.

Sharon Short is the author of 12 published novels, most recently in her Kinship Historical Mystery series, which she writes under her pen name Jess Montgomery. The Hollows is the most recent title in the series, published by Minotaur Books and inspired by Ohio’s true first female sheriff in 1925. Set in the Appalachian region, the series draws on themes of workers’ rights and women’s roles, and has garnered several awards.

Sharon Short

“POV is the principle that pulls together every other element of your prose. You might have a compelling premise, interesting characters, beautiful writing, and great pace. But if the POV is not right, the reader will sense something is off as if it’s ice cream curdling in the bowl.

Intimidating? Yes. But this and the next two “Level Up” columns will focus on POV: busting myths, exploring emotional distance, and examining the element of time for first, third-limited, third-multiple, or omniscient POVs. (Though it’s often used in advice columns such as this, second is rarely used in prose, so I’m setting it aside.) My hope is that the three columns will give you a mini POV tool kit to apply to your project.

POV Myths—Busted!

First-person POV is the easiest!

In first-person POV, the weight of the entire piece rests in the voice of the narrator—for 300 pages or longer for book-length works! Don’t do yourself, or your work, the disservice of thinking of first POV as easy simply because of the “I” pronoun. Each POV has its own challenges. And sustaining a distinctive, strong voice for the narrator’s POV for the entire work is the challenge in first. Of course, if done well, this is also the charm of first.

But … First-person POV is simply the narrator telling the story!

No, you, as the writer are always the invisible narrator in any work of prose—even first-person POV. You are always in control of the story. In first-person POV, you allow one character (at a time—even working in first, you can still have multiple narrators) to narrate the story in his, her, or their voice.

Well, first is the only way to use a deep POV.

It may seem easiest to have a deep POV (sharing of thoughts, emotions, reactions) in first, but the drawback of that seeming simplicity is the temptation to overshare. Or to share in a way that feels either false or overwrought. And you can certainly have deep POV in third as well. (More on deep POV in the upcoming column on emotional distance.)

That’s all right. Third-person POV is more high concept anyway!

Every novel, story, memoir, or essay must be driven by a guiding concept—the heart of the piece. High concept simply means the premise of the piece can be described succinctly (in a few sentences) in a way that intrigues and incents readers to want to read the full work. Fulfilling that promise depends on getting all the elements just right—including POV. Of course, examples of high concept third-person POV novels abound, but high concept first-person POV novel examples include The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald) or The Hunger Games (Suzanne Collins) or the bestselling thriller The Last Thing He Told Me by Laura Dave. It’s hard to imagine those first-person POV examples working as well in third person.

You can only have multiple POVs in third person, though.

Again, that depends on the story. Hank Phillippi Ryan’s novel Her Perfect Life alternates between third-person limited and first-person POVs. This works because the main character (third-person limited POV) needs to keep her distance from the public, while the first-person POV character, who works for the main character, has many opinions that we might have—until we get to know the main character. In Heather Webber’s South of the Buttonwood Tree, two first-person POV characters trade off narration of the story—and third-person POV anecdotes are interspersed throughout. By the end, the narrative lines all braid together to create a complete story tapestry.

No one writes omniscient anymore, and besides, isn’t it the same as head hopping?

Omniscient differs from multiple POV in that the latter strictly relegates each POV to a section or chapter. And it differs from head hopping—the confusing effect of jumping from one character’s thought to the next character’s thought—by switching perspectives based on which character’s reaction is the most important in a given moment. Usually, that also means that we stay in one character’s POV for a sentence or paragraph, rather than hopping from one character’s head to the next in the same sentence. An excellent example of omniscient POV mastery is Louise Penny, who uses this POV in her Chief Inspector Gamache novels.

Changing POV is as simple as changing pronouns.

This is a common myth—that if somehow first-person POV isn’t working, then switching to third-person POV is as simple as replacing all the “I’s” with “She, he, they,” or a name. But it’s not that simple. Proper POV depends so much on emotional distance and time—more on those elements in the next two columns.

What’s Your POV, Dear Writer?

Now, take a moment and consider your POV about your own work—and your writing life.

What are the myths you might have given into?

  • This is my first novel—so it has to be in first-person POV.
  • I’ve never written in third POV before because it feels too hard. (Or similar fear for first or omniscient POVs.)
  • I’m used to this particular POV, so I’d better stick to it.

Part of the joy (and yes, pain, but hopefully more joy than pain!) of any creative endeavor is experimenting and pushing yourself to grow.

If you’ve always written in first-person POV, try a short story or flash fiction in third. Or if you’ve always written in third, try writing an essay in first.”

J K Rowling on Writing

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On her website, J K Rowling has a page in which she answers the question, “Do you have tips for others trying to write?”

Ms Rowling says, ” I have to say that I can’t stand lists of ‘must do’s’, whether in life or in writing.

I haven’t got ten rules that guarantee success, although I promise I’d share them if I did. The truth is that I found success by stumbling off alone in a direction most people thought was a dead end, breaking all the 1990s shibboleths about children’s books in the process. Male protagonists are unfashionable. Boarding schools are anathema. No kids book should be longer than 45,000 words.

So forget the ‘must do’s’ and concentrate on the ‘you probably won’t get far withouts’, which are:

Reading

This is especially for younger writers. You can’t be a good writer without being a devoted reader. Reading is the best way of analysing what makes a good book. Notice what works and what doesn’t, what you enjoyed and why. At first you’ll probably imitate your favourite writers, but that’s a good way to learn. After a while, you’ll find your own distinctive voice.

Discipline

Moments of pure inspiration are glorious, but most of a writer’s life is, to adapt the old cliché, about perspiration rather than inspiration. Sometimes you have to write even when the muse isn’t cooperating.

Resilience and humility

These go hand-in-hand, because rejection and criticism are part of a writer’s life. Informed feedback is useful and necessary, but some of the greatest writers were rejected multiple times. Being able to pick yourself up and keep going is invaluable if you’re to survive your work being publicly assessed. The harshest critic is often inside your own head. These days I can usually calm that particular critic down by feeding her a biscuit and giving her a break, although in the early days I sometimes had to take a week off before she’d take a more kindly view of the work in progress. Part of the reason there were seven years between having the idea for Philosopher’s Stone and getting it published, was that I kept putting the manuscript away for months at a time, convinced it was rubbish.

Courage

Fear of failure is the saddest reason on earth not to do what you were meant to do. I finally found the courage to start submitting my first book to agents and publishers at a time when I felt a conspicuous failure. Only then did I decide that I was going to try this one thing that I always suspected I could do, and, if it didn’t work out, well, I’d faced worse and survived.

Ultimately, wouldn’t you rather be the person who actually finished the project you’re dreaming about, rather than the one who talks about ‘always having wanted to’?

Independence

By this, I mean resisting the pressure to think you have to follow all the Top Ten Tips religiously, which these days take the form not just of online lists, but of entire books promising to tell you how to write a bestseller/what you MUST do to be published/how to make a million dollars from writing.

I often recommend a website called Writer Beware (https://accrispin.blogspot.com) to new and aspiring writers. It’s a fantastic resource for anyone who’s trying to decide what might be useful, what’s worth paying for and what should be avoided at all costs. Unfortunately, there are all kinds of scams out there that didn’t exist when I started out, especially online.

Ultimately, in writing as in life, your job is to do the best you can, improving your own inherent limitations where possible, learning as much as you can and accepting that perfect works of art are only slightly less rare than perfect human beings. I’ve often taken comfort from Robert Benchley’s words: ‘It took me fifteen years to discover I had no talent for writing, but I couldn’t give it up, because by that time I was too famous.’”