Writing Excuses 16.18: Poetry and the Fantastic

May. 5th, 2021 02:39 pm
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[personal profile] mbarker
Writing Excuses 16.18: Poetry and the Fantastic
 
 
Key points (and angles?):  If poetry breaks language into meaning, then fantasy breaks reality into truths. Take reality, and tip it on its side, so you can see the interconnective tissue. Puppetry, science fiction and fantasy, and poetry all do these. Consider the aesthetic, what things look like or what language is used, the mechanical, the structure and plot, or the personal, the idiosyncratic choices of a person, their narrative and message. 
 
[Season 16, Episode 18]
 
[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses, Poetry and the Fantastic.
[Dan] 15 minutes long.
[Amal] Because you're in a hurry.
[Howard] And we're not that smart.
[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.
[Dan] I'm Dan.
[Amal] I'm Amal.
[Howard] And I'm Howard.
[Amal] And we're all fantastic.
[Mary Robinette] Yes, we are.
 
[Mary Robinette] This is the final episode in our eight part poetry master class with Amal. She's going to bring us around to a coda, I believe.
[Amal] Yes. So, throughout the series, we have talked about ways to approach poetry, to make it less scary. We talked about differences between poetry and prose. We've talked about strategies and approaches for writing poetry, appreciating poetry, structuring poetry, and some of the failure modes that can come from those things. But what I'd really like to talk to you… Talk about, rather, in this last episode is just how inseparable to me poetry and the genre in which I love writing, science fiction and fantasy, are. I want to talk about the fantastic more broadly, to incorporate multiple elements and facets of our genre. But I also just want to say that these things are not separate in my head. They are so often absolutely married to each other. I wanted to just kind of dive into the why's and wherefore's of that a little bit. So there is a quote by T. S. Eliot that I often refer to. The quote specifically is that discussing poetry, the poet must become more and more comprehensive, more elusive, more indirect, in order to force, to dislocate if necessary, language into his meaning. So, I like to take that quote and break it, essentially. Do unto it, as T. S. Eliott says, the poet does in general. I like to say, to recall it as that poetry breaks or dislocates if necessary language into its meaning. I think about this a lot, because of the way that I was raised with poetry. I… So, my family is from Lebanon and Syria. I was born in Canada, but my parents were born in Lebanon. When… I lived in Lebanon for a little bit when I was little for two years when I was seven. That was where I first wrote poetry. I wrote my first poem at the age of seven when we were living in Beirut. When I did that, my parents were very moved and they told me that I was part of a sort of lineage of writing poetry, essentially. That my grandfather, my father's father, had been a celebrated poet and that poetry was part of my inheritance, essentially, and that they were very happy to see me writing poetry. I cannot stress enough how, like, the poem that I wrote when I was seven, was not a work of staggering genius.
[Laughter]
[Amal] But it was a poem, and it was recognizable as such. I absolutely still remember it. It was… It involved like a lot of playing with language, with unfamiliar bits of it, and it was also addressed to the moon. My grandfather's poetry was political, was revolutionary, was part of this kind of lineage of speaking truth to power and being a voice for the voiceless and stuff like that. My address to the moon was not that.
[Chuckles]
[Amal] But it was, nevertheless, something that showed my parents that I wanted to use language in the ways that he did as something transformative, as something that made the world different than it was otherwise.
 
[Howard] My father had memorized a lot of poems, and would storytell with them. One of the ones that he told a lot, because us kids ask for it a lot, was The Cremation of Sam McGee by Robert Service. Which I love. I love it because my dad… I can hear my dad saying it. My dad, when he read the poem, relied heavily on the rhyme and meter, he leaned way into it as he read it. My freshman year in college, one of my professors on an outing recited The Cremation of Sam McGee and was much more… Conversational is the wrong word, but more natural dialogue-y with the way things flowed. I remember the first couple of stanzas thinking, "Wait. Did he… Are those the right words? No, I've heard this enough, that those are the right words." Then, the whole rest of the poem, as I listened, I think poetry itself became unlocked for me. Because I realized, "Oh. The meter and the rhyme aren't the point. The story isn't necessarily the point." It's sort of this whole thing, and the poem has a life outside of what Robert Service gave it. The poem has a life that is experienced differently depending on the listener and depending on the person who says it out loud. Okay, this was 17-year-old, or maybe I was 18 at that time… 18-year-old Howard having what at that time passed for an epiphany.
[Laughter]
[Howard] But I still love that poem, and I still like sometimes reading it and hearing the different voices in my head as I scan through it.
[Amal] Do you feel like one of them has like superseded the other in your head, or that your own reading voice has sort of introduced a different natural cadence into it?
[Howard] My voice dominates all of those at this point. Because my dad passed away when I was 20, and the reading I heard from Prof. Lyons was when I was 18. I'm now 53. So the voice that's in my head at this point is my own. But I cherish… This… I think this comes back to poetry as meme. I cherish this memetic series of events because there's a whole bunch of information compressed into that poem that Robert Service didn't put in there.
[Amal] Hah! That's absolutely true. This is the way that... I feel like a lot of us talk about novels in this way, too, that you read a different novel when you come to it at a different age, or that you might have one version of this novel in your head that gains or loses elements as you grow up, and then revisit it as a different person, essentially. To me, there's a lot of fantasy in that as well. There's a lot of… Even though this is obviously a very natural and observed progress of mortality, the idea of departure and return, moving through time in these ways, or, like the kind of time travel that feels inherent in [garbled] to something that you first experienced at a different age. All of that, to me, partakes of these relationships, of this kind of sense of the fantastic. There is this beautiful, beautiful essay by Sophia Samatar called On the 13 Words That Made Me a Writer. I like all of Samatar's work. I return to her work on a bimonthly basis, basically. I just reread her essays all the time, because I always… They always speak to me in a way that I feel like I need at a given moment. What she does in this essay is she talks about how, for her, fantasy resides in language. That when she was a child… I'll say like… So the 13 words in question are
 
There was a library, and it is ashes. Let its long length assemble.
 
These words made me a writer. When I was in middle school, my mother brought home a used paperback copy of Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast…
 
And so on. So she draws these comparisons between like… So, this was a fantasy novel. So she tried to then go and find other fantasy novels that would make her feel the way that this made her feel. It became very hit or miss. She would get that feeling from some books, but not from others. She came to realize that the thing that catalyzed this very specific feeling in her of wonder and awe and marvel was more to do with the language that was being used than the plots or characters or tropes in a given story that might market it as fantasy. So she found herself finding that experience of fantasy in books that were not marketed or labeled as such. That that spirit of wonder and stuff like that she could find in lots of different places. I feel that way about fantasy, because it brings me back to this idea about what poetry does to language. So if poetry breaks language into meaning, I feel like fantasy breaks reality into truths. That what poetry does to language, fantasy does to reality. That the experience that we get from it as writers of genre fiction in so many different ways is that we are always figuring out ways to break and hack reality into a specific experience for our readers, right? And that poetry is doing that too, but at the level of language in a way that you can foreground or background as much as you like. But I also want to say that literature has been poetry for a lot longer than it has been not poetry. That we have… The novel is actually a very recent technology in terms of literature. Poetry is ancient. Similarly, fantasy is ancient. We have had domestic realism for a lot less time than we have had fantasy and the fantastic in our literature. I want to just give people this similarity because I want people who love reading science fiction and fantasy to look at poetry as as much theirs to play with, to read, to be moved and transformed by as the stunning books that they read when they were 12.
 
[Mary Robinette] So, I have… You've given me a thought that I want to dive into, but first, let us pause for the book of the week, which is Monster Portrait.
[Amal] Yes. So, Monster Portrait by Sophia Samatar, whom I adore. It's by Sophia Samatar and her brother, Del Samatar. Del Samatar is an artist. So the book, Monster Portrait, is a very slender book of fictionalized autobiography, where Sophia Samatar is responding to these illustrations, these images that Del has made with snapshots that involve interrogations of what is a monster, like, thinking about monsters and monstrosity, and when those things are valued and when they are not valued. Thinking of those in relation to race, to borders, to belonging. It's just an absolutely luminous… I know luminous is like a massive cliché in terms of talking about [garbled]
[chuckles]
[Amal] I review books for a living, I am too keenly aware of this, but genuinely, reading this book gives me an experience of light that I just don't know how to talk about otherwise. It's deeply beautiful. I just cannot recommend it enough. If you wanted to read a book that kind of could be a bridge to you between prose and poetry, I cannot recommend this one enough for doing exactly that thing.
[Mary Robinette] Oh, that sounds amazing. So, that was Monster Portrait by Sophia Samatar and Del Samatar.
 
[Mary Robinette] So, here's the thing that was running through my head as you were talking. There's a thing that longtime listeners will have heard me say before that one of the things that drew me to puppetry is the same thing that drew me to SF and fantasy, which is that it takes reality and it tips it to the side, so that you can see the interconnective tissue. As you were talking, I was like, "Oh. Okay. That's what poetry does, too."
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] But the other thing that went through my head as you were talking was about why a person picks a particular form. There's this other idea that I often talk about, usually when I'm trying to explain to people what voice means. It was in puppetry, we have these three ideas. There's the aesthetics, the mechanical, and the personal. The aesthetic is what something looks like. The mechanical is literally like what kind of puppet are you using. The personal is all of the idiosyncratic choices that you, as a person, make. The example that I use is that if you hand the same puppet to two different puppeteers, it will look like a different character. But what occurred to me as you were talking is that I can take that kind of model and think of it as the kind of thing that drives you as a writer. The story you were telling with Sophia that it was the language that called to her, it's like, "Oh, that she is drawn to aesthetic." Whereas I am… There are a lot of people who are drawn to the plot, the structural mechanics of a story. Then, other people are drawn to the kind of the personal story, the personal narrative, the message, so to speak, that's within it. That kind of knowing which thing drives you as a writer also tells you where your defaults are and where your weaknesses are.
[Amal] Yes. I completely agree with that. That's so helpful.
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] I was like, "Oh. That is part of why…" Like, Pat Rothfuss talks about the fact that he needs to get the next word right before he can move on. I've always been like, "What's the point of him polishing words if you're not going to use them?"
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] Like, if I'm going to [garbled delete them?] later.
[Howard] How do I know if I'm going to use them if they're not polished?
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] Wait. Yeah. This is exactly that thing.
[Howard] That's the dialogue.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Yeah. So it strikes me as a… That, for listeners who are not naturally language driven, that one of the really arguably most powerful reasons to dive into this is because it gives you a different way to approach story. It gives you a different understanding of the ways we communicate. It basically tips your entire narrative form on its side to allow you to see the interconnected tissue.
[Amal] I think that is a beautiful, beautiful way of approaching that. I completely agree. I'm reminded… Gosh, who was saying this? Mmm… I'm not going to get this right. I think that Vonda Lee at some point was talking about… Possibly had an article on Tor.com or something that was about exactly this kind of thing, about how writing outside of your comfort zone being to learn… Actually, I'm not… I could be totally wrong, that it wasn't Vonda Lee, either. But mostly what I'm remembering is an article on figuring out where your facility is so that you can figure out in reverse, essentially, where your lack of facility is so that you can work on those things. I love that thought of approaching… Like, the thing that interconnected tissue and stuff. Because I think, too, of how many fantasy novels can… Like, are maybe not thought of as ones that are poetry forward and stuff, but, to me, absolutely are, because… I'm thinking of something like Arkady Martine's A Memory Called Empire. Where, like it's written… It's not written in a way that is difficult to get into and stuff. It's very clear. But it's also very stylized. It's also very… And poetry is like a thematic plot-based concern. In the book, you need to know poetry in order to be able to read bureaucratic documents that end up on your desk as an ambassador and stuff like that. The crux of the novel, the climax of it, is the writing of a poem. Which is something that is unbelievably difficult to pull off. Like, this is where you absolutely do not want to miss the mark with a piece of rhyme that is not landing in a way that… Your whole plot depends on whether or not this is a good poem.
[Mary Robinette] Right.
[Amal] And she absolutely nails it. Like, I think that the phrase "I am a spear in the hands of the Sun," is like the last line of this, and on the back of that line, they build a revolution and it's this whole enormous thing… Sorry, spoilers for a book that came out two years ago.
[Chuckles]
[Amal] But, hey, it's just absolutely wonderful, and poetry is part of the texture of that book. But I… Like, I don't know if Arkady would talk about herself as having written it poetically, or of [garbled]. But, nevertheless, there's this sensibility, I guess, to that style, to that aesthetic, that is truly wonderful to me.
[Mary Robinette] This has been fantastic. We are, I'm afraid, at the time which we need to wrap things up with our time with poetry. Do you…
[Howard] I would love… Dan, you remember that thing that I read from Robert Service at the very beginning to you? The…
[Dan] Yeah.
[Howard] That feels like closure. I'm just going to go.
[Mary Robinette] Okay. I have no idea what you're talking about. So you say that thing.
[Amal] Do you want to do it after the homework or before the homework?
[Howard] Have we done the homework yet?
[Amal, Mary Robinette] No.
[Howard] No. We did not do… Okay. Do the homework.
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] Thank you.
[Dan] Someone was looking up a poem instead of paying attention.
[Chuckles]
 
[Amal] So, as the… As sad as I am to leave things here, I… We have come to the homework part. Talking about novels and about prose and poetry, and to bring this all full-circle, the homework I want to leave you with is I want you to find a favorite line from a novel or a short story, one that moves you really, really deeply, one that you kind of keep in your head every now and then. I want you to take that line and use it as the epigraph for a poem. So, essentially, if you see a poem and there's like a single line in italics at the start, before the poem actually starts, that's what I mean. I want you to use that line from a novel or a short story, and I want you to write a poem following it, I want you to write a poem sparked by it. A kind of poetic tribute to whatever that line did to you.
 
[Howard] The reason I brought this up is that it feels like a poet's version of "you're out of excuses, now go write." It's from Robert Service.
 
Lone amid the café’s cheer,
Sad of heart am I to-night;
Dolefully I drink my beer,
But no single line I write.
There’s the wretched rent to pay,
Yet I glower at pen and ink:
Oh, inspire me, Muse, I pray,
It is later than you think!
 
[Mary Robinette] Oh, that's lovely. Also, so painful and so true. I'm… As we send folks away, I'm going to also share my father's favorite poem by Ogden Nash. Further Reflections on Parsley.
 
Parsley is gharsley.
 
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] Dan, do you want to share a poem, too?
[Dan] That poem reminds me of the time that someone auditioned for our high school musical by singing Minimum-Wage by They Might Be Giants.
[Laughter]
[Dan] The only words in the song are minimum-wage. He just shouted it and left the room. It was great.
[Amal] Beautiful.
[Mary Robinette] That's the only thing you want to share before we wrap?
[Dan] Yes. I am going to share a poem with you. This is one of my all-time favorites. By Brian Turner, who was a medic in Afghanistan and wrote a lot of poetry, and then came home and he was, for a while, the poet laureate of the US. His most famous poem is called Here, Bullet.
 
If a body is what you want,
then here is bone and gristle and flesh.
Here is the clavicle-snapped wish,
the aorta’s opened valves, the leap
thought makes at the synaptic gap.
Here is the adrenaline rush you crave,
that inexorable flight, that insane puncture
into heat and blood. And I dare you to finish
what you’ve started. Because here, Bullet,
here is where I complete the word you bring
hissing through the air, here is where I moan
the barrel’s cold esophagus, triggering
my tongue’s explosives for the rifling I have
inside of me, each twist of the round
spun deeper, because here, Bullet,
[Whoof]
here is where the world ends, every time.
 
[Amal] Wow.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. So, with all of that, my dear listeners, you are out of excuses. Now go write.
 
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Writing Excuses 16.16: Poetic Structure: Part II

Apr. 22nd, 2021 02:59 pm
mbarker: (Me typing?)
[personal profile] mbarker
Writing Excuses 16.16: Poetic Structure: Part II
 
 
Chestnuts to chew on: implicit structures instead of explicit. Organizing principles, logic, instead of a schematic or blueprint. Instead of fitting your meaning into forms, let the topic suggest a form. Take a structure, embroider it, build outwards from it, elaborate on it, explode it! Instead of a single external large structure, look at microstructure, chunks of forms used on the inside. Invent a form. Transpose it!
 
[Season 16, Episode 16]
 
[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses, Poetic Structure: Part II.
[Dan] 15 minutes long.
[Amal] Because you're in a hurry.
[Howard] And we're not that smart.
[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.
[Dan] I'm Dan.
[Amal] I'm Amal.
[Howard] I'm Howard.
 
[Mary Robinette] So, last week, in part I of this, Amal led us through talking about poems that had structures. This week, she has promised to talk to us about things that do not have a structure. Which is very exciting to me, because I see words in your outline that make me so happy, like the words short story. So, talk to me about this.
[Laughter]
[Amal] Right. So, last week, I was talking about essentially explicit structures. The structure that you have a form, it's kind of like a container, and you are pouring your poetic genius into that container and it's taking on that shape. So something that has a rhyme scheme, something that has a specific meter, or something like that. These are received structures that you are using to shape your poem. They can be very useful and they can be paradoxically very liberating, because once you have eliminated the need to kind of figure out the shape of the thing, sometimes it can be easier to just write a thing. But that said, there are tons of ways to structure poems that don't actually involve following a specific schematic for the poem. That's what I want to talk about this week. So, it's not so much that things don't have a structure as much as that the structure is implicit instead of explicit, and that the structure is more of an organizing principle, more of a logic, than it is an actual schematic or blueprint for producing a poem. The way that we talked about memes last week. So I want to talk about this a little bit the way… The thing that Mary Robinette was saying was exciting. To me, this is how I think about short stories a lot of the time. That I… If I think to myself I want to tell a story about someone who is experiencing a kind of fracturing of identity. Or something that is breaking them up inside in some way. I might want to take that theme and reflect it in the form of the story. I might want to tell the story itself in fragments. That's the kind of logic that I'm talking about here for a poem. Where, instead of fitting your meaning into a received set of forms, you instead let the thing that you want to talk about suggest a shape, suggest a form. That may or may not actually interact with the way that you're writing the poem. I don't know if you guys actually write short stories this way, though.
[Chuckles]
[Amal] Is that actually familiar or is that a totally off-the-wall?
[Mary Robinette] I mean, it depends, for me, on the short story. Which is, I suspect, like, so is that the way you write poetry? That it depends on the poem? And the constraints and the mood of the moment?
[Amal] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] So, sometimes I'm extremely structured with my stories, and sometimes I am… Much more explorational.
[Amal] Sometimes you can take the form that one thing tends to have… I find that a lot of the time when we teach short stories, or when we teach short story structure, we end up reaching for the structure of other media. We might reach for the three act structure of a film, or at least use it to kind of bounce different structures off of and stuff like that. Similarly, like, there are a couple of poems that I want to share with people. Not by reading them out on the podcast specifically, but perhaps in show notes. There's a poem by Sofia Samatar called Girl Hours which is stunningly beautiful. I adore it completely. It's about Henrietta Swan Leavitt, who I'm sure Mary Robinette knows about.
[Mary Robinette] Yes.
[Amal] So, about the fact that girl hours was a way of talking about the length of a project, essentially, because women were computers who were crunching numbers all the time, so any kind of project that involved doing that was reckoned in girl hours. So, Samatar has written this tremendous poem about Henrietta Swan Leavitt and her life and her work. But the form that she's chosen to do that in is the form of a standard essay. So the way that an essay would have an introduction, a body, a conclusion, and notes. She has taken those elements of an essay and use them to structure this poem instead. So, but she's also turned it around. She's also made it backwards. Which… For reasons that are in the poem. It opens with notes that start in prose, saying, in the 1870s, the Harvard College Observatory began to employ young women as computers to record and analyze data. One of them, Henrietta Swan Leavitt, discovered a way to measure stellar distances using the pulsing of variable stars. Then it goes into the conclusion. And instead, the shape of it is totally transformed.
 
You were not the only deaf woman there.
Annie Cannon, too, was hard of hearing.
On the day of your death, she wrote: Rainy day pouring at night.
 
And then it just kind of goes on from there. It's this tremendous poem that I cannot enough recommend. But it takes as its structure something that is very much not a poem, and then incorporates it into the poem to reflect on many of the themes that are present in the poem.
 
[Howard] I had a fun experience about a week ago as of the time of this recording. Sandra and I sat down to watch a movie called Along with the Gods, which is a Korean film that sort of a fantasy afterlife epic thing. We were about 15 minutes in… It's subtitled, not dubbed. We were about 15 minutes in. I don't speak a word of Korean. We were about 15 minutes in when suddenly I realized, "Oh, wait a minute. None of the cadence of the voices tells me this. None of the subtitles tell me this. But this is about 15% comedy." Suddenly I had to rewrite in my head all of the receipts… All of my receipts for lines of dialogue and it completely changed my understanding of what was happening. So, this idea that an implicit form can change the message. The person receiving the poem has to know the form. You have to have that piece. I'm not regretting my experience at all. It was great fun. But I love the idea that form is that important, and that sometimes we rely on it without knowing it.
[Dan] So, here's what I hope is a really great example of what you're talking about. Amal, if I'm totally off base, just shut me up. But the TV show WandaVision…
[Yes!]
[Dan] Is doing this, and doing this brilliantly. Because what they are trying to tell is a story about a woman who is searching for a family, and trying to build and find a family. So they are using these received forms of sitcom structure and they're going through out… Every episode is a different kind of sitcom model from a different period of history, but they are very specifically doing detailed pastiche of family sitcoms, like Bewitched, and like The Donna Reed Show, and Dick Van Dyke, and Brady Bunch, and all these things. Because within that form, they are able to tell all of these extra facets of family life and what is perceived as normal, what we expect to have, because we've seen it on TV, and there's all these layers because of the form they're using.
[Amal] I'm literally covered in full body chills as you brought that up, that example, because it is everything that you said, and I'd argue it's even more than that, in that one of the things about WandaVision… Zero spoilers, obviously, because it's magnificent and really should be experienced in the form that it has chosen, which is the weekly episode. It is doing something extremely brilliant, which is that it's not just about a woman wanting a family, it's about a woman processing enormous grief.
[Dan] Yes.
[Amal] Within the context of the past year that we've all lived through, one of the ways that people have been managing their situation, reckoning with their grief, has been through binge watching television.
[Howard] Wait! What?
[Amal] I know…
[Mary Robinette] Shocking. So confusing.
[Amal] But this is the… For it to be about a relationship between grief and television, but also to forestall the ability to binge it. You can't binge this show, unless you wait for it to be over and then binge it. You have to actually experience it one week at a time, the way that the sitcoms that it is engaged with are doing, is a brilliant use of the form to both, like, to engage and transform the thing that it's about, and to use things like commercial breaks to explore these different elements of everything that the meat of the show is about. It is doing… That show genuinely feels like poetry to me, in the way that it has layered meaning on meaning on meaning.
[Dan] Yes.
[Amal] Within the structure it has taken for itself.
[Dan] Well, the moment for me when it moved from a thing I really loved to a thing that I consider to be genius is when Wanda wants to avoid an argument, and so she rolls credits.
[Yah!]
[Dan] And Vision has to chase her into the next room. He's like, "No. This isn't over. You have to talk to me." And the way that it uses that form. Although, to go back to what Howard was saying about how you kind of have to know the form, my children completely bounced off of this show.
[Ha!]
[Dan] Because they did not grow up with the Dick Van Dyke show. So episode one meant nothing to them.
[Mary Robinette] So, harking back…
[Dan] Yeah. Go for it.
[Mary Robinette] To last episode, they were missing the meme.
[Dan] Yes. Exactly.
 
[Mary Robinette] Let's take a moment to pause for our book of the week, which is The Space Between Worlds by… Which Amal has recommended.
[Amal] Yes. So, I apologize if I'm mispronouncing her name. It's Micaiah Johnson or Micaiah Johnson. I'm not sure because I've never heard it spoken. I apologize if that is not correct. But, The Space Between Worlds is a magnificent book. Talking of pandemic stuff and our processing thereof, this was the first book that really enabled me to read again last year. I've observed that lots of people fell into different camps of either reading a lot more than they normally did or reading a lot less than they normally did to manage the situation. For me, I basically lost the ability to read for about three months. The book that snapped me out of that was The Space Between Worlds. It is about… It's high concept science-fiction. It is… The premise is that someone has figured out how to access hundreds of alternate realities, but the… In order to go to that alternate reality, in order to actually be there, you cannot have a version of yourself alive there. So people who… The people who become traversers, as they're called, the people who are actually able to do this, are people whose lives are so contingent and vulnerable and volatile that the fact that they have survived into adulthood is basically a miracle, and they can go to all of these other worlds. So the protagonist, Cara, is someone who is only alive in seven worlds out of… Eight worlds… Seven or eight worlds, I can't remember, out of like over 300. So as a consequence, she's able to go to these other worlds.
[Mary Robinette] Wow.
[Amal] It is so pacey and action-packed and also gorgeously written. Is that it basically just lit me on fire from within. It flooded me with gasoline and struck a match. It just… Suddenly, I could experience color and heat and wonder again. I just love this book so, so much. I really want everyone to read it.
[Mary Robinette] That sounds amazing. So that's The Space Between Worlds by Micaiah Johnson.
[Amal] Yes.
[Mary Robinette] Ah. So good.
 
[Mary Robinette] So, I have a question. I hope this doesn't take us to far off course. But one of the things as you've been talking that I was thinking about is the poem that we have all just heard, which is Amanda Gorman's The Hill We Climb that she read on the inaugural… The day of the Inauguration. Like, I'm in awe of that kind of poetry, because it is not a structured poem. I… The only poetry that I have really written as an adult has generally been in service of a novel, one of which was in Valor and Vanity. Lord Byron was a character. I needed him to recite some poetry that he had written about glamour, which is clearly not a poem he has ever written. So to do that, I took one of his poems and I used that as my structural template. I understand how to do that. I understand how to interrogate the text and figure out why he was placing the linebreaks where he placed them, why he was…. I don't understand, when we're looking at this implicit form with poetry, how to articulate and go after the structural goals of the language. Like what… So when we're talking about this implicit structure, like, how do we… What are we… What am I doing?
[Laughter]
[Amal] So, like with a short story… Obviously there are lots of variables there, right? But I love what you're describing about what you did with a Byron poem. Because… So… I mean… Can I ask, how did you choose the Byron poem that you chose?
[Mary Robinette] I looked for something that was at least thematically linked to the topic and the mood that I wanted him to be going through. So that there would be… So that, I guess, that tonally it was still… It was in the right ballpark for what I was going for. I wanted to be able to kind of retain as much of the original structure as I could. But it… That was… I looked at a lot of Byron poems. But that was mostly what I was looking at, was the emotional tone.
[Amal] Right. So, similarly, I think that when you want to be writing something that is following again, like a certain organizational principle, there's going to be a certain amount of chicken and egg in terms of figuring out what poem you want to write on this theme versus what theme this structure suggests and stuff like that. There's some back-and-forth there. But in terms of like how do you do it. So, what I…
[Mary Robinette] Specifically, like with unstructured things.
[Amal] Yeah. Exactly. So, with unstructured things, a lot of things come into play. I love that you brought up Amanda Gorman's poem, because a great deal of what's going on in that poem is the room she allowed herself for its performance. If you see that poem on the page, it is experienced very, very differently than when she reads it. A big… And I don't just mean in terms of like her charisma and her ability to perform it. I mean the… There is a lot of internal rhyme in that poem. If you don't… It's internal rhyme that you won't notice on the page, because it's not structured with linebreaks where those rhymes are. They're occurring almost like commas in a sentence. Like those rhymes, there's a layering that's happening. I would also argue that, like the layering that's happening with those rhymes is not dissimilar to building a ladder on a hill that one might climb. For instance, like, there's a kind of upward motion in that poem that follows… So the form of it is sort of following the function of it.
[Mary Robinette] Got it.
[Amal] It's following the idea of it. But those are kind of day brain concerns, right? Those are kind of structural, thoughtful, logic-based elements that you're bringing to something which in its conception tends to be a bit more numinous and a bit more strange. So I want to give a different example of a form that I think is essentially exploding a certain structure in order to build itself out from it. This is possibly… Possibly the kindest, most generous poem I've yet read. I love it so much. It's by Kaitlyn Boulding, and it's called Questions to ask yourself before giving up. It's a bit too long to read on the podcast, but what I want to say about it is that it was sparked, as the biography says… It appears in GUTS magazine, and I'm sure we will link to it. But there was a certain text that began to be circulated, I think on Tumblr, that was a series of questions, a kind of self-care checklist, essentially. It goes like this Are you hydrated? If not, have a glass of water. Have you eaten in the past three hours? If not, get some food. Something with protein, not just simple carbs. Have some nuts or hummus. Have you showered in the past day? If not, take a shower right now. So, Kaitlyn Boulding encounters that article and explodes it. What I mean by that is, if you take that, just that first line, are you hydrated? If not have a glass of water. What she does is
 
Are you hydrated?
When did you last glut your thirst with a handful of spring?
Have you eaten anything besides emails or your fingernails in the last three hours? 
Have you pulled the protein out of an oak tree or palmed an avocado pit this month?
 
She just takes these straightforward questions and embroiders them and builds them outwards and elaborates on them. She takes them and she… To return to a previous episode, she sings them, in a way. It feels to me very much like she's taken that checklist, which was the source of some controversy. I remember at the time, this was several years ago, but I remember this checklist kind of being denigrated by a lot of people. Not unjustly in terms of this is not how you solve depression. You cannot solve depression in this way. But in different contexts, with different degrees of distress, this may be helpful to someone, essentially. What Kaitlyn Boulding does, and in the biography, I think she says specifically that she wrote this poem for a friend going through a difficult time. That checklist becomes transformed into a gift. It's like taking yarn and knitting. It's like taking some kind of initial fiber form of something and build… Using it as material to build something else.
[Howard] Mary Robinette and I have both talked in the past about times when we just needed to fall back on craft in order to get something done. Without the assist of an external large structure, it's difficult to fall back on craft. I think part of the answer, Mary Robinette, that you may be looking for lies in the microstructure of some of these poems. The opportunity to use an internal rhyme, the opportunity to use something that sounds like two lines of a sonnet, because they have the same meter. As I listened to The Hill We Climb at the Inauguration, I kept hearing chunks of forms in the presentation. That's not to say that that's how it was composed. But I think with a lot of these formless, or absent an outlining form, poems, you will find lots of these little forms on the inside. So, as I've done with, for myself, when I'm trying to write humor, coming up with a list of tools, things that I know how to do. Oh, I know how to say Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles…
[Chuckles]
[Howard] With Wikipedia titles. I know how to do all of these things. You make a list of these tools, and you said it in front of you. Then you take your topic, and now you might have the pieces you need to fall back on craft and write a formless poem that is borrowing from a dozen different forms at once.
[Amal] Well, this is actually… You've hit on a much more succinct way, I think, of talking about, like, how do you do the poem that has a non-traditional form. It's basically that you invent a form for it. You can… I'm reminded here…Shweta Narayan, who I've mentioned before, has a stunning poem called The Bone Harp Sings Nine Moods. To write that poem, what they did was they took a fairytale which is like The Bonny Swans or The Cruel Sister, the tale type where one sister murders another because of some jerk. But, anyway, took that basic story template and took the fact that there was a harp in that story and thought what if I transported that story not from a European setting, but like transposed it into an Indian setting via the medium of Carnatic music. So what Shweta ended up doing was structuring the poem in nine sections to reflect different ragas, essentially. Like different musical modes in Carnatic music. And had each one title the section. Then, within each of those sections, has a very free verse engagement with the meat of the story of that fairytale, essentially, that they were retelling. But it's structured within this totally other context now of ragas and of the different moods that a different raga refers to. As a consequence, you've got this like multi-vocal poem that isn't in a strictly speaking recognizable form, but is very, very structured nevertheless. Very, very formed.
[Mary Robinette] This is all incredibly interesting. I've let us run long because of all of… Like, I just want you to keep unpacking things. But I know that we have homework and we have two more episodes in this topic.
 
[Mary Robinette] So, your homework, I think is going to give us some exercises to actually try and take some stuff out for a spin. So, will you tell us?
[Amal] Absolutely. So, today's exercise involves basically writing a poem inspired by the thing you've chosen to structure it. I want to make this easier. I'm going to use the medium of the numbered list, okay. So I want you to take a numbered list of things, and use that numbered list to write a poem inspired by the list, and also organized according to that list. If that seems complicated, let me unpack it. Consider, for instance, if you used the four cardinal directions. So you have, the form that I am giving you is, 1, North, 2, South, 3, East, 4, West. Use each one of those headings to write a piece of a poem that is going to make a whole that is in some way involved with north, south, east, and west. But once you have those four directions, you can apply them to whatever you want. Do you want to make it relevant to a map, to some geography? Do you want to make it relevant to the body? With, like, North as the head, and South as the feet? Do you want to make it be about a compass? So, having that numbered list of four things should be a springboard for you to then write a poem about something related to that list. Some other examples can include the elements, four or five, depending… According to whichever tradition you choose. The periodic table might be slightly too long for your purposes. Or the three laws of thermodynamics. Or the neighborhoods in a city. Or anything else that you make up. It just has to be a numbered list where each number is the heading to a different section.
[Mary Robinette] Ah. This is great. Thank you so much, Amal. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.
 
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Writing Excuses 16.15: Poetic Structure, Part 1

Apr. 14th, 2021 03:58 pm
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Writing Excuses 16.15: Poetic Structure, Part 1
 
 
Key points: Sonnets are memes! Poetic forms are memes. Structure, rhyme scheme, meter can be tools of communication. Patterns of difference and repetition. Sonnet, villanelle, sestina, different forms suit different themes and topics. Repetition catches our attention, but it needs to point to something.
 
[Season 16, Episode 15]
 
[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses, Poetic Structure, Part 1.
[Dan] 15 minutes long.
[Amal] Because you're in a hurry.
[Howard] And this is haiku.
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.
[Dan] I'm Dan.
[Amal] I'm Amal.
[Howard] And I'm Howard.
[Humm…] [Mary Robinette] I'm not going to pause to count to see whether or not that was actually haiku, however…
[Howard] I counted five times to make sure.
[Laughter]
[Dan] It is. Our tagline is very accidentally a perfect haiku.
[Mary Robinette] Oh, that's
[Amal] That's beautiful.
 
[Mary Robinette] That is so beautiful. And thus, poetic structure. Which Amal will speak to us as part five of our eight part series on poetry.
[Amal] Yes. So, poetic structure. So, one of the things that we've been sort of… I feel like up until this point in this series, I've been trying to talk about lots of underlying ideas about poetry, some things that are assumed, some things that are received, and stuff like that. To kind of challenge and develop our ideas of what a poem is or can be. But what I want to do in today's episode is talk about some much more recognizable poetic forms, and talk about how, even though you don't need a poem to be structured in an explicit way that has been received with like centuries of lineage and baggage behind it, in order for it to be a poem, it can be really fun to play with those forms on the same. So you absolutely do not need to write a sonnet in order to be writing a poem. You don't need to write a villanelle or a sestina or a limerick or a haiku for it to be a poem. But since we have these forms, I would love to actually talk about the forms themselves and how they can be not so much constraining as liberating sometimes. Especially when you're just starting out writing poetry. Also, to talk about a revelation that I experienced about poetic structure that I received from one of my students while trying to teach a class on structure, when I was talking about sonnets. What happened was this. I was talking about how sonnets have come through a series of transformations over time, the way that the sonnet form tends to get taught at say an undergraduate English student level is that it is 14 lines of iambic pentameter with a rhyme scheme. But there is a distinction that happened. In the past, once upon a time, Petrarch, an Italian poet, wrote in a certain rhyme scheme because Italian is a rhyme rich language. So poets were wanting to write sonnets the way Petrarch did copied that scheme. But then Shakespeare comes along, and Shakespeare, recognizing that English is a rhyme poor language, changes the rhyme scheme of the sonnet. Instead of having a turn in the poem that happens in the middle, he has the turn come right at the end, before that last couplet. All this sort of stuff. As I was going on and saying this in class, a student, absolutely ingeniously, interjected to say, "So, you're saying a sonnet is like a meme?"
[Chuckles]
[Amal] I said, "Oh, my God. Yes."
[Chuckles]
[Amal] A sonnet is a meme. My mind exploded. I thought this. This is the most… How could I not have seen it before? A sonnet is a meme. So is almost any poem that is a received form that you interact with and engage with and transform as you move forward. Then it occurred to me that there is actually a fantastic example of this in that there is a specific poem that has been meme-ified more than perhaps any other, which is This Is Just to Say by William Carlos Williams…
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] That was exactly what I thought you were going to refer to.
[Chuckles]
[Amal] So, here you have this poem. This is the plum poem, if you're not familiar with its actual title. If you literally just Google this is just to say meme, you will get the most beautiful panoply of transformations of this… Of the plum poem.
[Mary Robinette] This is just to say, that this is a podcast that you were probably saving to listen to later.
[Laughter]
[Dan] Yeah.
[Amal] Exactly. Exactly. So this is what I want to kind of touch on. But even though the idea of a structure in a poem, of a rhyme scheme, of a specific meter, look essentially like constraints, like things that are going to limit your creativity, they are going to hamper you in your progress towards poetic majesty, they also can be tools of communication and of ultimately freedom as you engage with and transform them and contribute to a kind of accumulation of meaning around these poems. Shakespeare 100% did this with something like my mistress eyes are nothing like the sun. Where he took this idea of a sonnet is a sincere honest love poem, and one of its defining features is that you're going to itemize a kind of shopping list of your beloved's features and kind of sing the praises of each one. He just comes out and goes, "Nah. My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun. Coral is more red than her lips are red." And just kind of goes down this sort of like seemingly nasty list of ways of saying, "Nah. My lover is actually not that great. She's not a goddess, she's not got all this stuff." But "And yet, I think my love more rare than any she belied with false compare." It's totally transforming the whole principle of the poem.
[Dan] Yeah. I love… I've got a 19-year-old daughter. She is constantly trying to show me, because now she's off to college, and so most of our communication is done over text, and she will send me all these things she thinks are hilarious. I say, "No, they're not. Those are not remotely funny. What's wrong with you?" What we eventually figured out is that the root of this kind of massive generational gap between what I think is funny and what she thinks is funny is…
[Mary Robinette] That you're a dad?
[Dan] She knows the memetic structure behind everything that she is trying to share with me.
[mmm]
[Dan] Right?
[Ooh]
[Dan] So it's not necessarily funny on its own, it's funny because someone is taking a known form and playing with it. I love the idea of… That your brilliant student who compared that to poetic structure is absolutely dead on. One of my favorite web comics is Dinosaur Comics by Ryan North.
[Yes!]
[Dan] That is… He actually has… What's brilliant about that one is that it's like six panels that are identical every single time. They're thousands upon thousands of comics that he has put out and they all have exactly the same visuals with different texts. One of them, in response to critiquers who were like, "How can you possibly just use the same images over time? That's so boring." He literally calls back to sonnet structure, and says, "No. The form is just the way in which you are saying something, and allows you this incredible freedom of expression, because you don't have to worry about all these other aspects of it."
[Howard] During the break between recording episodes, I posited what I now think is a possible doctoral thesis for someone who understands…
[Chuckles]
[Howard] Poetry and oral tradition. That was the idea that poetry with rhyme and meter is a checksum for the oral tradition. Well, in between episodes, I was reading up on the word meme and Richard Dawkin's original interpretation of it, which is that it's a unit of information which, when exposed to humans, is easy for the humans to copy. Easy for them to replicate. So, yes, these forms with meter and rhyme, it makes it easier for us to replicate them. I love that concept, and the idea that memes at some point… Like Dan said, I have a 20-year-old and a 26-year-old and a 17-year-old, and they're regularly trying to show me things on their phones. No, I don't want to look at your phone, I just… Do you want to tell me a story? No, I want you to have the experience of this meme unfolding before you. I guess, Dan, I'm fortunate in that I have a little bit more of the context, because I regularly think they're funny.
[Laughter]
 
[Mary Robinette] Well, speaking of stories that we want people to tell us… Let's pause for the book of the week. Which is Resident Alien. That was your suggestion, Howard.
[Howard] Oh, my goodness. It's not a book, it's a television program which is airing now on scifi. It's based on a comic book, and it is about an alien who crash lands on earth and who must take the form of a human in order to fit in in order to complete his mission. The alien is played by Alan Tudyk. In the very first episode, there is a scene where Alan Tudyk is watching Law & Order and trying to replicate the dialogue. "I've gut mn mukoset."
[Laughter]
[Howard] Rewind. "I've got news for you, Cosette."
[Gasp]
[Howard] Okay. Alan Tudyk pretending to be a human being is my new favorite jam.
[Laughter]
[Howard] As of this recording, the first four episodes are out. It's funny in that the tagline that they've been using is 3 5-syllable sets. It's the doctor… Excuse me. Alien comedy doctor dramedy we all need right now. I realize that in the patterning of their marketing for it, they've created poetry. Anyway. It's beautiful. I think you'll enjoy it. Scifi.com, and it's called Resident Alien.
[Amal] That sounds so great. I extremely want to watch it.
[Chuckles]
[Amal] I love Alan Tudyk so much.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Yeah.
[Amal] Alan Tudyk being sinister, in particular, is of great appeal to me.
 
[Amal] So, I want to pick up on the last thing you were saying about pattern, actually, and how that fits into this idea of poetic structure. So, a pattern is essentially a recognition of difference and repetition, right? And the… So often, when we use a shorthand like rhyme scheme and stuff like that, what we're talking about is a pattern of difference and repetition. And that poetic forms are an orchestration of those kinds of differences. They are formed over time, they have different origins, different contexts, that kind of give rise to them. That each one can be its own mini lecture that I don't really want to get into, because I want to talk about structure more broadly. But I do want to point out that when you look at a poetic form, I would encourage you to think about what it is suited for. The sonnet comes out of a love poetry tradition. But something like the villanelle…  if you look at a villanelle, thinking of famous ones, something like Do not go gentle into that good night, Rage, rage against the dying of the light, by Dylan Thomas, or Mad Girl's Love Song by Sylvia Plath. I think I made you up inside my head. The thing that when you look at a villanelle, the repetition… The refrain in it makes it peculiarly suited to themes of obsession, to themes of being caught up in some feeling or idea, in a way that is different from something like a sonnet, where you kind of are building towards an argument and then turn away from it. Or from a sestina, where you have this ludicrous form of like repeating six words in a different pattern every stanza in a way that ultimately feels eclectic. Or like a sort of pattering of rain or something like that. So… Yeah. Sorry.
[Mary Robinette] No. Continue your thought, and then I have a question thought.
[Amal] So, it's… All this to say that different poetic forms can be… Can come out of a process that has suited them to a particular theme or topic, and then you can get a lot of mileage out of subverting that theme or topic, the way Shakespeare does with a love sonnet to make it slightly more sarcastic or something like that.
[Mary Robinette] This is so interesting to me. So, one of the things that I talk about, and it took me a while to get to it, was the idea of repetition carrying important. So, in puppetry, people have heard me talk before about head bobbing, which is where the puppet's head just bounces up and down. The problem with that is that it carries no meaning. It's not that the puppet's head is moving, that's not the problem. It's that it's not pointing to anything. Part of this is because the way people are wired, when you're thinking about narration, that someone who is droning is hard to listen to. But repetition also catches our interest. This is, I think, related to how we are originally hardwired, which is that repetition is inherently unnatural. So when you hear something repeating outside in the wild, that's important and that's something you should pay attention to. When you're… Like in prose, when you have accidental repetition, when something… A sentence is awkward because of the accidental repetition, it's because it's pointing to the wrong thing. So, my question is, after all of that, is one of the things… Like, it sounds like what you're talking about with this, with these different forms being well suited to different things, is, to some degree, because of where that repetition happens, because of what it's pointing at. Am I getting this?
[Amal] Absolutely. Absolutely, completely. I love the example of accidental repetition or unintentional repetition that happens in prose. Because the… There's a corollary to that which I find really fascinating. Those of you who did the night brain exercise might find this interesting to muse on if you look at the results of what you did. When I see people do the night brain exercise, there are a few things that kind of come up, that recur. That in the shape that their unguarded, unselfconscious thoughts take as they're trying to write past a snag or something, one of them is a sort of chanting repetition. That, as they're trying to write something that is poetic, they'll find themselves repeating a sentence over and over again. As if the repetition itself is going to bring them into a more poetic affect. It works. It absolutely works. Because the intention is there. Off the top of my head, I think of something like TS Eliot's The Hollow Men where it ends with, "This is how the world ends. This is how the world ends. This is how the world ends. Not with a bang, but with a whimper." You need that repetition, that accumulation, essentially, of a kind of storm gathering.
[Mary Robinette] That's so amazing. I cannot wait for us to get to part two, where you're talking about the without constraints. 
 
[Mary Robinette] So, do you want to slide us into homework so we can…
[Amal] Absolutely. So, your homework for today is to essentially write a poem with a form. So right either three haiku or one villanelle. You can look up the constraints of these respective forms. They are widely available online. I want you to pay attention to the demands of the form. Consider how those constraints that you're experiencing can actually inspire the theme of a poem or a certain mode of poetic expression. If these particular two forms don't speak to you, go for another one. But it has to be an established, traditional form that you are engaging with from our contemporary present moment.
[Mary Robinette] This is amazing. Thank you so much. You are out of excuses. Now go write.
 
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Writing Excuses 16.13: Day Brain vs. Night Brain

Apr. 1st, 2021 09:54 am
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Writing Excuses 16.13: Day Brain vs. Night Brain
 
 
Key Points: Singing and speaking use different parts of the brain. Speech therapists sometimes teach their clients to sing through a speech impediment. The day brain is the state of consciousness we use for communication, while the night brain is the intuitive metaphorical side. In musicals, songs are moments of emotional change. Songs are a break in the layers of reality of the musical. Or consider iambic pentameter versus trochaic tetrameter. In writing, we try to get in the zone, where the words flow. How do you activate night brain? Try Amal's exercise! A little poetry in a dark space, and write, write, write.
 
[Season 16, Episode 13]
[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses, Day Brain vs. Night Brain.
[Dan] 15 minutes long.
[Amal] Because you're in a hurry.
[Howard] And we're not that smart.
[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.
[Dan] I'm Dan.
[Amal] I'm Amal.
[Howard] And I'm Howard.
 
[Mary Robinette] We are continuing with our third episode looking at poetry with Amal. Amal, tell us about Day Brain vs. Night Brain.
[Amal] I am so excited to do this. So, last episode, we ended… Well, the whole episode was about talking about poetry as being like singing and talking about prose as being like speaking. What I want to dig into a little bit more today is the ways in which singing and speaking are super different, and that they literally use different parts of the brain. So this is something… I am, by no means, a neuroscientist, absolutely. I am so open to being fact checked on this, but my understanding is that often speech therapists will have recourse to teaching their clients to sing through a speech impediment, that... To kind of essentially draw on this other part of the brain that is not impeded in the same way. So you can draw on this as a resource to shape or change the way that you speak.
[Howard] There are numerous accounts of stroke patients who've suffered from aphasia who can no longer speak, who can nod and shake their heads, but they can sing. By singing, they are suddenly able to unlock things, and, yes, the speech therapist can in many cases bring them back to being able to speak by having them sing everything first. It's… Brains are weird.
[Chuckles]
[Howard] The fact that singing and speaking are different parts of the brains is probably learned early on and, it's hard to say, but there's no doubt about the fact that where we are culturally and physiologically today, they are different brain activities. Using both is a super powerful tool.
[Amal] I am so glad to be… I always have this moment of, like, I am using this as a metaphor, but I want to make sure that it is actually accurate.
[Chuckles]
[Amal] So I don't [garbled]
[Howard] I googled it before we started.
[Amal] So, this is the thing. I mean, like any… Like any muscle… Sometimes where I feel more comfortable using this metaphor is that if you have one muscle that is weak because another one is overworked, then using… Rehabilitating them will often mean bringing them into some kind of balance or line. So I want to draw on this difference, to think about poetry and prose, and how we can not only learn to write poetry, and draw on those parts of the brain that maybe we don't draw on as much in order to essentially sing on the page. But also to use it as a metaphor for this concept that comes from [Cecilia Ryan?] who i have mentioned before, who first, so far as I am aware, coined these terms of day brain and night brain, where day brain is your attitude, your state of consciousness that is about communication, denotation, connotation, and all that sort of stuff. Your night brain is instead the brain that you use for vocation, invocation, for the more ambiguous, the more intuitive, the more unselfconscious, essentially. The part of your brain that you metaphorically sing with essentially. I want to kind of like really get into this. I want to think about, again, drawing on the singing/speaking difference, I want to kind of draw your attention to when do we tend to encounter sort of singing as a weird disruption, and stuff. So I'm thinking here of things like musicals, where… Where does the… Where do the songs tend to come in? Right? They tend to come in at moments of great emotional transformation or distress. Like, the music… The song is a break in a layer of reality, essentially. And is like an opening in something to allow something else to emerge. I think too of the difference between, to draw on Shakespeare again, the ways in which characters speak in iambic pentameter in a play and the regular… Iambic pentameter being ta-duh, ta-duh, ta-duh, ta-duh, ta-duh… Which is a kind of tends to get called the most spoken sort of cadence, the one that most mimics our regular speech, versus when someone like the witches in Macbeth come on stage. Instead, they speak in trochaic tetrameter. So instead of something like, "Shall I compare the to a summer's day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate," you get something like, "Double, double, toil and trouble. Fire burn and cauldron bubble." That's different, right? Like, that weirdness, that is a cadence that gets associated with ballads and with songs, instead of with speech. It's also associated with the supernatural, with the unnatural, with the frightening and the different. So, without the negative connotations of that, I want to kind of map out day brain and night brain. I want to ask all of you, basically, do you ever feel when you are writing your novels and your short stories or your comics, do you ever feel like you are slipping from one state of mind to another? That you feel like sometimes you are writing from a very kind of day brain-y perspective versus sometimes you slip into this weird other world that is more night brain-y?
[Dan] Yeah. For me… I don't know if this is exactly the same mechanism that you're talking about, but I suspect that it is. A lot of my writing, and one of the reasons that I try to block out long chunks of time rather than writing in small pieces, is because I feel like my writing process is trying to force my way through, out of this very structured, knowing what I'm going to say before I write down kind of brain, versus just what we like to call getting in the zone. I'm there, I'm in the zone, and the words are just flowing. I suspect that that is more of a night brain situation, where the words are just coming out kind of almost independently of my conscious thought.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. This is more literal than you actually mean it to be, but I have fallen asleep while writing, and continued to write.
[Amal] What? Wow!
[Mary Robinette] It's interesting…
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] Reading what I've written the next day, because it is… It's never very long. It's a couple of sentences. This… We won't go into why this happens. It involves… Well, no, we are going into why. It involves staying up too late. If I said I often write with my eyes closed so that I can see a scene in my head and not be distracted by what's going on around me. Occasionally, when I am really fatigued, it happens two or three times maybe over the course of my life, my hands keep going. In the same way that you can drive someplace and not notice… Not remember any of the drive.
[Amal] Right.
[Mary Robinette] It's very interesting when that happens, because there is this… The sentences still contain like subject object verb, they're grammatically correct, and also completely free associative. Like, one of them, I was talking about revolution, and the scene was supposed to be about some one turning around.
[Amal] Huh.
[Mary Robinette] But the entire thing pivoted off the other meaning of that word.
[Amal] Oh, wow.
[Mary Robinette] And went into this thing about a revolution and my nephew's involvement in the revolution. I'm like, "There is no nephew in this story. There is no revolution in this story." Someone was literally just turning around. It's… For me, the thing that is interesting about that is the… With what you're talking about with the day brain/night brain, is that it's about, for me, the times when I find the other places that languages can go. The unexpected places, and the unexpected associations. That these are the times that I feel like I am activating my night brain as opposed to my day brain, which is very "These are the facts."
[Amal] Yesss.
[Howard] A thing that has stuck with me ever since I learned it is that trochaic tetrameter… Is that the name that…? That is the meter of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles song.
[Amal] Oh, that's awesome.
[Howard] No, it gets better. XKCD number 1412 is a Wikipedia article titles with the right syllable stress pattern to be sung to the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles song. If you need to break your head out of the word loop it is stuck in, start singing golden mantled howler monkeys, Greater Cleveland film commission, hairy flower chaffer beetle. Okay? It's a whole list of these. It's a beautiful, beautiful thing.
[Dan] There's…
[Howard] And it's…
[Dan] I just gotta say, there's a twitter account that all it posts is this.
[Chuckles]
[Amal] Yes. I follow it. It blows my mind periodically. The worst thing… It's not worst, it's actually wonderful. But as you said, each one of those terms what was coming to mind was not the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, but the opening to Alexander Hamilton. Like… What was the howler monkeys one? [Melodic] Golden mantled howler monkey. [/Melodic] It's like… It actually doesn't match on as well, but it is the go to stress pattern in my brain still, years later.
[Chuckles]
 
[Mary Robinette] So, speaking of go to stress patterns, this is where we should break for the book of the week.
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] Make that segue happen somehow. The book is The City in the Middle of the Night by Charlie Jane Anders. I wanted to recommend this one this week, because… So, the book is really beautiful in a lot of different ways. One thing is that she is doing… She has these very, very different voices happening from different characters, different POV's. The other thing is it's set on a planet that is tidally locked. So there is a dayside and there is a nightside. All of humanity who is living on this planet lives in the twilight area. The daylight does not change over the course of the day. The daylight changes depending on where in town you are. So your relationship with the sun and with the night in this world as this totally different feeling. Day brain versus night brain, again, like those mean completely different things. I love that, because of how much exploration she is doing about the way our environment shapes our connotations and contexts. It's a wonderful book. It's a coming-of-age story. There's revolution… There is a revolution in this one.
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] Highly recommended. It got all kinds of critical acclaim. The City in the Middle of the Night by Charlie Jane Anders.
[Amal] That is so wonderful. I cannot help now but imagine a planet as a giant brain…
[Mary Robinette] Yes.
[Amal] A right hemisphere and a left hemisphere and all of the in between this that that entails and stuff.
 
[Amal] but, yeah. So this is actually I think a great segue for talking about… So you've talked about these different ways in which you experience like flow states or being in the zone and stuff like that. I want to basically shape that into a question, which is, how do we activate night brains? Is there a way to do that, and to do that specifically either to write poetry if that something that's intimidating or to overcome snags in prose. My experience of this… I developed this particular exercise that I want to take us to partly because I was stuck writing a short story. I had just… I was really snagged on an issue of character motivation or of plot development essentially. Did not have Dan's intensive courses to refer to, on the subjects of character arcs and things, at the time. So I found myself in order to overcome this snag and what was really a structural problem by leaning into the prose line instead and trying to just let the language of the story that I was writing carry me over the hump that I was experiencing. By doing that, I felt like what tipped me over into being able to solve the other problems was by just languishing essentially in the language, in the prose. I felt that that was kind of tipping away from the anxieties and concerns of a day brain oriented sense of how am I going to solve this problem with a night brain oriented sense of what if this sentence felt like pearls slipping off a string? What if this sentence felt in these ways? What if I just let myself flow out of this and just let it carry me into the next thing that's going to happen and then I'll solve it later? I feel like that's something that could potentially be useful to anyone who's writing anything, essentially.
 
[Amal] Towards that end, I want to bring us to the homework of this episode. Which is a night brain activation exercise. What I want you to do is to either, if you are currently in a project, currently in the middle of some writing project, I want you to find a piece of prose in there that is giving you trouble. Maybe it's actually the spot that you are at right now in your work in progress. I want you to take the last sentence that you have on the page and isolate it. Put it on a different page and just have like a blank screen following that one sentence. Then I want you to put yourself in a dark place. I want you to like dim the lights. I want you to close the blinds. I want you to try and put yourself in a space where you are as unaware of your surroundings as is possible for you to be. Then I want you to listen to a recording of a poem. I will provide one shortly. Then I want you to, in response to that poem, write automatically, unselfconsciously, for five minutes. I want you to think about it like singing onto the page. I wanted to just let whatever that last sentence that you had there was, let it just lead you into some other world of language in response to this thing that I'm going to read you. So what I'm going to read you now is a poem called Moon Fishing by Lisel Mueller.
 
When the moon was full they came to the water.
some with pitchforks, some with rakes,
some with sieves and ladles,
and one with a silver cup.
 
And they fished til a traveler passed them and said,
"Fools,
to catch the moon you must let your women
spread their hair on the water --
even the wily moon will leap to that bobbing
net of shimmering threads,
gasp and flop till its silver scales
lie black and still at your feet."
 
And they fished with the hair of their women
till a traveler passed them and said,
"Fools,
do you think the moon is caught lightly,
with glitter and silk threads?
You must cut out your hearts and bait your hooks
with those dark animals;
what matter you lose your hearts to reel in your dream?"
 
And they fished with their tight, hot hearts
till a traveler passed them and said,
"Fools,
what good is the moon to a heartless man?
Put back your hearts and get on your knees
and drink as you never have,
until your throats are coated with silver
and your voices ring like bells."
 
And they fished with their lips and tongues
until the water was gone
and the moon had slipped away
in the soft, bottomless mud.
 
[copied from http://famouspoetsandpoems.com/poets/lisel_mueller/poems/15573]
 
[Pause]
[Amal] Now write.
[Mary Robinette] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.
 
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Writing Excuses 15.06: Prose and Cons, with Patrick Rothfuss

Feb. 12th, 2020 02:49 pm
mbarker: (Me typing?)
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Writing Excuses 15.06: Prose and Cons, with Patrick Rothfuss
 
 
Key points: Delicious, tasty writing with flavorful words? Good word do! How do you write beautiful prose? Go over it again and again, tweak and tweak and tweak, like tumbling a rock in a tumbler. Watch for repetitions and ambiguities. Beware lazy writing. Focus on the sound of language. Listen to good word doers. Read good word do! Read your own work before writing more. How do you add density to your sentences without going purple? Don't add things to it, take out the unnecessary parts. Trim, and trim, and trim again. Ask yourself, what is the emotional output of this paragraph supposed to be, and what order of information is most effective in getting there? Words go through the brain, but sounds can strike you in the heart. Lyricism can put your hand around somebody's heart in a way that the best analogy in the world never could.
 
[Mary Robinette] Season 15, Episode Six.
[Dan] This is Writing Excuses, Prose and Cons, with Patrick Rothfuss.
[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.
[Howard] Because you're in a hurry.
[Pat] And we're not that smart.
[Dan] I'm Dan.
[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.
[Howard] I'm Howard.
[Pat] And I'm Pat.
 
[Dan] We have Patrick Rothfuss with us again. We're going to talk about prose. This is specifically about writing itself. Word for word, how do you make your prose delicious? How do you make your writing as wonderful as it can be?
[Howard] Tasty, tasty sentences with flavorful words and syllables and… And…
[Mary Robinette] Things.
[Laughter]
[Howard] You know, it's a lot easier to do when I write it.
[Pat] We all good word do. We make you do word good too.
[Laughter]
[Dan] Now I'm super excited to have Pat on for this episode. This is… You have such a reputation for fantastic word-for-word writing in your work.
[Pat] Do I actually?
[Mary Robinette] Yes, you do.
[Pat] Really?
[Dan] You absolutely do. That's always…
[Mary Robinette] You didn't know that?
[Pat] I mean, I know I work on it, but… Usually, that's not what people s… I mean, it's rarely what people say when they come up to me.
[Mary Robinette] Huh. That's what people talk about all the… I'm…
[Howard] It's what we say behind your back.
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] Yeah, I guess so. Yeah. Yeah.
 
[Dan] But I know that people do ask you how do you get… How do you write beautiful prose? What do you say when people ask you that?
[Pat] What I said just today was, "Boy, I don't know how I would teach that." Because it comes very intuitively to me. So for it to get better and better, I just sort of go over it again and again. Each time, I tweak and I tweak and I tweak. It's like tumbling a rock in a tumbler. It gets smoother and smoother and smoother until it's done. But that's not advice that can be followed.
[Mary Robinette] So, one of the things that I have found, because it's… I come at it from theater, and similarly, I run into this issue when people ask me about dialogue.
[Pat] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] Like, how do you do dialogue, which is… Dialogue is one of those places where the words are… Like, the words… You're telling a story, so the words are always important, but dialogue specifically, because it's often carrying even more, you have to be very concise with it. But similarly, it came super easy to me. It took me forever to figure out how to teach it. I wound up having to reverse engineer what I do as a narrator. Because my job as a narrator is to take the words that are on the page and make them into sounds. Writing developed to convey the spoken language. Right? So what I'm looking for with that, what it taught me, are the things that sound good, the things that play smoothly, the… It's a lot about repetitions. What I find is that if you use repetition with intention, it will draw attention to something and it will point it at the thing you want people to look at. But when you don't use it with intention, when it's an accidental repetition, the repetition is always going to catch the reader's attention, and it will drag them in the wrong direction. That's the thing where you… It's not quite having a piece of déjà vu with the thing, but it'll pop you out of the story just a little bit. Sometimes that repetition is a word, and those are easy to spot. Sometimes it's a collection of sounds. Sometimes it's a concept. But often that's the thing that I'm looking for. Making sure that those repetitions are where I want them to be. One of the other things that I look for our ambiguities. Words or phrases or concepts that could go either way and aren't doing so on purpose. Like, one of the examples that I use sometimes when I'm talking to people about it is this thing… There's a compilation video of… In movies, people saying, "You just don't get it, do you?"
[Pat] [snort] Oh, that.
[Mary Robinette] I know. There's a compilation video of person after person after person in completely different films saying, "You just don't get it, do you?" That's lazy writing. It's ambiguous, because what don't you get? Why don't you get it? But then you look at Blade Runner and Rutger Hauer's famous speech, "I've seen things you people wouldn't believe." That is "You just don't get it, do you?" But it's getting… It's making it specific, it's removing the ambiguity, and the repetitions there are all very deliberate. This beautiful rhythmic flow.
 
[Pat] That's really interesting, because you're coming at this from a conceptual… As soon this topic got brought up, I immediately thought of the sound of language. Because I focus that way a lot. But what you're talking about is something that I also do. I love the term lazy writing. That's something that I find increasingly galling as I watch more TV. I actually hear it reflected in my son's speech, now that he gets to watch more TV, is he is emulating the lazy writing that he has heard.
[Dan] That is depressing.
[Pat] Oh, it's super depressing, which is one of the reasons I've tried to keep him away from bad media, is it homogenizes his beautifully original speech. That's what it does to everyone. So, I first off say, if you want to do good word do, then listen to good word doers. Like, absorb it in a meaningful way that like it sticks to you. Sometimes, that's just like… For me, I read Peter Beagle's The Last Unicorn. Like… Or I read Shakespeare. Like, ooh, some Shakespeare. The problem is, I am so sticky, I'm such a mimic, that if I read a Shakespeare play, I will have to fight to not write and speak in iambic pentameter. Especially if I get a couple of drinks in me.
[Chuckles]
[Howard] So good word do sticks to you.
[Laughter]
[Pat] Sometimes, yes. So, like, that is a trick that I would recommend, is, like, if you read enough of something, it kind of gets in you.
[Mary Robinette] That's exactly the way I wrote The Glamorous Histories is that I would read a chapter of Jane Austen, and then I would write a chapter.
[Pat] Wow.
[Mary Robinette] Because that… Because I was using it as a conscious upload of her language.
 
[Pat] Actually, that's a trick that I use in my own stuff if I've been away a while, or even just to maintain consistency, is I read the previous chapter before I start writing or drafting a new chapter.
[Mary Robinette] You do that, don't you, Dan?
[Dan] Yes. I will always start each day's work by reading what I wrote yesterday to kind of get myself up to speed before I step out of the moving car, so I can…
[Chuckles]
[Pat] By the time you get to the end, I'm usually already tweaking and fiddling, so I'm already writing by the time I hit the end.
[Dan] Exactly.
[Pat] Then I've got momentum.
[Dan] That also makes the first draft a little cleaner, because it's kind of been cleaned up as you go.
[Pat] Exactly. And the tone is easier to match, because you've kind of… Or at least I tend to have my head in it.
 
[Dan] I would like to pause here if we can for our thing of the week. It is not a book this time. It is a podcast. What are you going to recommend for us?
[Pat] I would really love to recommend to you the One-Shot Podcast Network. Now, it's a group of podcasts, and they all deal with gaming in some way. But what I have really come to love over the last year is listening to a lot of comedians and actors and game players get together. Effectively, what they're doing is collaborative improvisational storytelling. They have an ongoing series called Campaign. There was 100 episodes of like a Star Trek theme podcast. The current one that they're doing, where I think they're about 30 episodes in, is unoriginal world called Sky Jacks that is inspired by the Decemberists' music. Oh, it's so good, guys, it's so good. But also, the One-Shop Podcast Network itself, they do a bunch of one-shot games. Like, I came in and I played a game called Kids on Bikes.
[Mary Robinette] Oh, that's…
[Dan] That's a good game.
[Pat] Oh, it's amazing. It's based off like the 80s, like ET and Goonies and The System. James D'Amato runs it, and he runs a lot of these games. You can go in and see like what they're doing. This year is especially interesting, because they… James has decided to feature only games designed by not-white dudes. He is an amazing guy, an incredible storyteller. I've learned a lot about gaming and narrative just by listening to the podcast.
[Dan] Cool. That is called One-Shot?
[Pat] The One-Shot Podcast Network. Which contains many shows, including Neo-Scum, One-Shot, Campaign, and some others that I'm embarrassed that I can't remember off the top of my head.
[Dan] Awesome. So go listen to that. We will link to it in the liner notes as well.
 
[Dan] Now, I've got a great listener question that I'm going to throw out, and then immediately provide my own answer for.
[Chuckles]
[Dan] Because I've got a really good answer to this one. Someone asks, "How do you add density to your sentences without going purple?" Purple prose is something that we want to avoid that… If you've ever read an AP English essay, you've se… They're just trying to cram so much brilliance into their… My solution to this is actually you add density to something not by adding things to it, but by taking out the unnecessary things. Think of this as you are cooking your writing on low heat so that it reduces down, and what you're left with has just as much flavor as possible. Earlier, Pat was telling a story about how he revises by trimming something and then leaving it and coming back and then trimming it down until… What was it you said, that one day you'll be left with just 12 words that are so intense they can kill a person.
[Chuckles]
[Dan] What I loved about that story is that that's exactly what the poet, Ezra Pound, did. He had an experience where he was… He went into the Metro in Paris, and, just for whatever reason, had this profound experience looking at faces in there. He wrote this giant thing, it was this multipage essay, trying to re-create that emotion that he had. He was like, "No, this is too much." He kept cutting it down. He ended up with a poem called Faces in the Metro, which I'm going to tell you right now.
 
"The apparition of these faces in a crowd,
Petals on a wet, black bough."
 
[Pat] I remember that. [You said that before]
[Dan] Cutting out the extraneous stuff until he's left with just this one powerful emotion adds so much density to it because you don't have any filler.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. One of the things that… I have a similar kind of a relationship with Ray Bradbury's writing. Because it's… What I love are his short stories, and the way he plays with language. There's a piece that I use when I'm teaching narration, which was again one of those things where I'm like, "I know this works. Why does this work?" So I'm just going to read a little bit to you. This is from The Fruit at the Bottom of the Bowl.
 
"William Acton rose to his feet. The clock on the mantel ticked midnight. He looked at his fingers and he looked at the large room around him and he looked at the man lying on the floor. William Acton, whose fingers had stroked typewriter keys and made love and fried ham and eggs for early breakfasts, had now accomplished a murder with the same ten whorled fingers."
 
It's like… It's just… It's so beautiful. But the thing about it, and we'll put this in the liner notes so you can look at it, there's… That repetition that I'm talking about. He uses "He looked at his fingers, he looked at the large room around him, and he looked at the man lying on the floor." It's like this is a normal thing, this is a normal thing, this is not a normal thing. One of the things that he's doing there, when you look at it, is he's adding modifiers, but he's adding modifiers just to the things he wants you to pay attention to. The… First, it's "he looks at his fingers," and he doesn't give you any modifiers, he doesn't give you any modifiers to feet, to the mantel, none of that. "He looked at his fingers, then he looked at the large room." Gives you a little bit more emphasis. "Then he looked at the man lying on the floor." Like, lying on the floor, it's not purple prose. It's just… Just adding that little bit and it's making it more specific and it's pointing you at it, just by lingering on it. Then he comes back to the fingers again. Because those actually… It's like these… This, I… These are the things that did that. Everything in that sentence, about stroking the typewriter keys and the ham… It's all about these were normal, and I've done this other thing with them. I think it's just beautiful, but it is… It's that layering and that deliberate choice about what things am I going to emphasize. It's not about let me add more adjectives, but it's about pointing.
[Pat] It's also… Bradbury is so good about this. He's extraordinarily lean.
[Mary Robinette] Yes.
[Pat] It's just so clean. Robert Bly once said, he's an American poet, he was on stage, I saw a recording of it, and he said, "I think a person could be an amazing poet, even if they…" He goes, "You don't need more words. You don't need fancy words." He goes, "If you knew 25 words perfectly, you could be a poet." That was really interesting to me. It's the sort of… In some ways, this is kind of a wankery statement. But, I think, he's pointing towards a truth. That is, like, you don't need to get fancy. Now, I think there's a space for fancy. Sometimes a perfect word is perfect. But a lot of times, the perfect word is the less perfect word that everyone knows.
[Howard] My approach to this is… The Bradbury piece. What is the reader to be left with? Well, the reader is supposed to be left with the horror of having committed a murder and staring down at one's own hands and realizing that you are the murder weapon. Or at least that's what I got out of it. Other readers may get other things, but that's what I got. You can get that, sort of, by telling the reader exactly what they are supposed to feel. "He stared down at his hands, and was horrified that these were now murder weapons." Okay? That is really, really lean. But I've been very literal and told you exactly what to feel. Purple prose is when you have words in there that are not working towards giving us that emotion. They are working towards demonstrating to us that you…
[Dan] Own a thesaurus.
[Howard] Have memorized the thesaurus.
[Chuckles]
 
[Howard] So, a great many times, I will sit back and look at a paragraph and ask myself, what is the emotional output of this paragraph supposed to be? How do I get there? How do I get there fastest? Well, I get there fastest by being very literal, and that's actually not the most effective. How do I get there in an order in which it's the most effective? What are the pieces of information that I want to give? That's where I think the Bradbury piece becomes a tutorial.
[Pat] Yeah.
[Howard] Where we're looking at… We're identifying the murder weapons, but not yet. We're just looking at them. Then we're describing that there has been a murder. Then we are con… We are recontextualizing the hands. By describing it in that way, it suddenly sounds very non-poetic and very mechanical and very soup can. But when you sit down to do this, when you sit down with this recipe if you will. I'm headed for this emotion, and these are the beats I want to hit, that's the point at which, at least for me, I can no longer teach it, I can no longer describe it, because I have to have done it 200 times in order to have any sense of how this is going to work.
[Pat] It's a muscle memory thing, and I think… For some people, it's easier, for some people, it's harder. The same with plot and character and dialogue. I always come back to sound, as… Because, like, I love the plain… Rather, the simplicity of the concepts that Bradbury's talking about there are great. Because, like, who knows ham? Everybody knows ham. I can… It's good. Like, this isn't fancy, it's not elaborate. These are simple, solid, real things. He could get florid, he could get fancy, but… Honestly, I see that in a lot of like first-time books. Where they're describing the breakfast somebody sits down to. But authors like Bradbury, it's almost like everything he puts on the page is an icon with roots down to the heart of the world. Like, there's just nobody like Bradbury. Nobody did what he does, or does what he did. But, like Robert Frost, not to bring up another white guy, but Frost, like… Seuss doesn't get credit for his mastery of language. Because what most people know about Seuss is his kind of thumpy, heavy-handed, singsong-y kids' books. Which, by the way, are extremely hard to pull off, and you could not do it even though you feel like you could. But he wrote a book called The Tough Coughs As He Ploughs the Dough. Which, it's hard to understand how brilliant that title is, until you look at it in print, because all the words look the same, and they're all pronounced differently. Dude was like deep in the paint in his understanding of how words do. But, like, same thing with Frost. Frost wrote consistent beautiful iambic language and you would never know. He would do it in dialogue. Some of his longer unknown… Like, never cited, never read poems are pages and pages long of people having a conversation. You don't realize your reading iambic anything. It's because it's perfectly natural and perfectly flawless. Which means he sweat blood into it. I think Frost also wrote
 
"The old dog barks backwards without getting up.
I can remember when he was a pup."
 
It's amazing because what he's doing is playing with metrical feet. "The old dog barks backwards" is a series of words that you must say in stochee, in single metrical feet, because of just how… You can't make those flip trippingly off your tongue. Then, I think, the second line are all dactyls. They go dada dah, dada dah. One two three, one two three. "And I can remember when he was a pup." They're frolicking. They sound like a ferret running. It's things like that that I think of, and that I have a particular fondness for, because the words always have to go through the brain, but sounds will start… Will strike you straight in the heart. I get… I can get… If I can get past your brain to your heart, then I've won as a writer. It's like way easier to short cut around the brain because our brains are really messy and complicated.
[Mary Robinette] And often not very bright.
[Pat] Right! So, like, poets like Gerard Manley Hopkins, who would write things so beautiful that I could not understand them. Like
 
"I caught this morning morning's minion, kingdom of daylight's dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon..." [The Windhover https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44402/the-windhover]
 
You're like, "What are you even doing? What are you talking…" That is beautiful. I don't know what you just said.
[Laughter]
[Pat] See, that's… I don't know if that's purple? It's close to purple, but, like, if you can figure out how he did that and do a piece of it… You get 15% of that in your prose, and you can have a lyricism that will put your hand around somebody's heart in a way that the best analogy in the world never could.
 
[Dan] This is… Has been a wonderful discussion. I'm glad we ended on poetry, because that is our homework for you, is just to go out and read poetry. We've been reciting some of our favorites. We will put some of our recommendations in the liner notes, but go out and fi… Not just one poem, but multiples by several different people, and people of different backgrounds. Just read a lot of poetry, and see what they're doing, and how you can put that kind of fluidity and grace…
[Howard] Read it until your mouth starts trying to poet…
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] Actually, no, one of the things I'm going to suggest is that if you are having difficulty getting poetry, because it is a different language, it's a different form, if you've been reading prose your entire life and you're trying poetry. One of the things to try with it is to try to read it out loud as part of your homework assignment. Also, to listen to people. So I'm going to add a… We're going to put some poems in the liner notes that we have mentioned or that we're fond of. I'm going to give you one to start with. That is Gwendolyn Brooks We Real Cool.
[Pat] Oh, man.
[Mary Robinette] It's so good.
[Pat] Read her off the page, but then… I'm sorry, go ahead.
[Mary Robinette] Yes. Exactly. Because there is audio of her reading it. So, read it on the page, and then you can find the audio to listen to it. Then, also, if you're still like this is difficult for me, there is a video by Manual Cinema which is, strangely, is a public company that I am very fond of.
[Dan] Imagine.
[Mary Robinette] But they were commissioned by the Poetry Foundation to create a poem… A visual poem to go with and support the recording of Gwendolyn Brooks reading We Real Cool. It's a great way to kind of get a sense of oh, this is what it can do, if it is new to you as a form.
[Pat] I heard her do it live.
[Mary Robinette] [gasp] I'm a little bit jealous of you.
[Pat] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] I'm a lot jealous of you.
[Dan] All right. So, go read some poetry. Read it to yourself, read it out loud. Just kind of see what you can do with it. That's your homework. You are out of excuses, now go write.
 
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Writing Excuses 12.12: Words as Words, with Linda Addison

Mar. 21st, 2017 04:58 pm
[identity profile] mbarker.livejournal.com
Writing Excuses 12.12: Words as Words, with Linda Addison

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2017/03/19/12-12-words-as-words-with-linda-addison/

Key Points: Picking the exact right word, for the shape, sound, visual space, as an object unto itself, independent of meaning. Taste your words, feel them, find the rhythm, the breaks. "Poetry is to be read like a fine meal or a fine wine, one sip at a time." Journals! Write down anything and everything, then go back and pull out words and ideas and feelings. Write stories and turn them into poems. Write poems and create stories out of them. Take words out. Change words. Read them out loud. Create a startling image. Change hard and soft words, or sibilants and bebop. Take out the most important word, and let the reader put their own ideas, their own breath, their own emotion in there. Play with the rhythms of poetry, to learn them. Make them an unconscious rhythm that you can draw on. Poetry, like music, is organic and normal. It's the cadence of storytelling around the fire. Whether you want to write poetry or something else, pay attention to word choice, the music of words, and to words as words.

( Iambic pentameter and blank poetry? )

[Dan] So, you said that you had a little writing prompt to throw at us at the end?
[Linda] Always. I mean, it may be something I end up building my life poem on today, because I haven't done it yet, but it's four words. I would suggest playing with something that starts "Driving through the tears."
[Dan] I like it. All right. So there's your writing prompt, dear listeners. You are out of excuses. Now go write.
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Writing Excuses Season Three Episode 11: Trimming

Feb. 16th, 2011 08:35 pm
[identity profile] mbarker.livejournal.com
Writing Excuses Season Three Episode 11: Trimming

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2009/08/08/writing-excuses-season-3-episode-11-trimming/

Key points: Trimming takes fat out so that you say what you need to say in the best possible way. Trimming improves the pace, makes writing snappy, and helps with clarity. Killing your darlings is not trimming. Trim repetition. Trim false starts. One strategy is section by section trimming -- 10% off each page or chapter, aka Jerry Pournelle's cut. Another approach is spot trimming, focusing on scenes, aka Dan and the Writing Group take a slice. Poetry teaches word usage. Trim adjectives, very, dialogue tags, navelgazing. Fix passive voice.
( 1 Lightyear: 10 to the 13th KM. About 63,000 AU, which is the average distance from the Earth to the Sun. )
[Brandon] The writing prompt is you are going LARPing with Jerry Pournelle. If you have to look up LARP, go ahead. If you have to find out what Jerry Pournelle is like, go ahead and Google that. Write a story that involves you LARPing with Jerry Pournelle. Not Howard LARPing with Jerry Pournelle, because he has already appeared in too many of our writing prompts.
[Dan] Then cut it down to half size.
[Brandon] Jerry Pournelle or the story?
[Dan] Something in the story has to be cut in half.
[Howard] Do you have any idea how big a light year is?
[Brandon] This has been Writing Excuses. You are out of excuses, now go write.
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