Category — MFA Sunday School

Welcome to MFA Sunday School, a once-a-week, free, online writing workshop. MFA Sunday School posts are uploaded on Sunday mornings, though you can read them or participate any time — the comment section is always open for people to post a link to their work or ask a question. You can subscribe to blog posts via the RSS feed, or look for them under the category heading “MFA Sunday School.” If this is your first time in “class,” you may want to jump back to the first post in the series in order to understand how things work, or peruse all of the past lessons as well as a glossary of terms by reading the MFA Sunday School Glossary and Course Archives.

We’re returning to fiction next week, and getting into some heady stuff such as how to deal with rejection or getting over writer’s block.  But right now, I want to jump back into a fixed form poem because these exercises are not only poetry in and of themselves; for prose writers, they are the verbal equivalent to sodoku.  They are helping you problem-solve with words, and if you can do it here, fitting your thoughts into a restrictive poetic form, then you can figure out ways to get your character from point A to point B in your book.  I promise you; trying other forms of writing only strengthens your capabilities in your chosen writing field whether that is writing blog posts or churning out novels.

The third form we’re going to look at is the sonnet (remember, we’ve already done the sestina and villanelle, and if you’re joining us for the first time today, delve back into the archives because we’re on lesson ten).  Fixed form poetry is meant to free the mind by providing a structure much in the same way a house frees the person who lives inside to focus on things other than the elements outside.

I find sonnets very difficult to teach because the form is somewhat a mess. It began in Italy in the 13th century — a 14 line poem that was a little musicless song (sonetto means “little song”) with a set rhyme. And then people started playing with it — most notably the Earl of Surrey (though we’ve slapped Shakespeare’s name on the earl’s invention because he wrote a lot of them). But other poets started riffing off of Shakespeare, changing the meter or changing the rhyme. To simplify things, since we don’t have all day to walk through the various tweaks poets have brought to the form, we’re going to reduce it to two schools of thought: the Petrarchan sonnet and the Shakespearean sonnet (even though I really love the Spenserian sonnet… sniff).

Petrarchan sonnets are a conversation (actually, all sonnets are a conversation, but they are split in different ways). The first part of the poem is an octave (eight lines) which outlines the situation. Usually it’s a love problem, as in “dude, I love this person so much and they don’t even know I exist.” It could also be presenting an idea or question. An octave is just a fancy way of saying eight lines. If we’re working with 14 lines total, that leaves us with six lines for the sestet, which is the resolution (or answer if the writer poses a question in the octave). The ninth line of the poem, the start of the sestet (six line part) is called the “turn” or “volta.” It should be clear to the reader that you’re switching direction, making a proposal, saying what you wish would happen.

All sonnets (for the sake of reduction) follow iambic pentameter. If you’ve forgotten this meter, go back to the villanelle post and refresh your memory.

The rhyme scheme of the Petrarchan sonnet is somewhat fluid. The octave (first eight lines) are set in stone:

A
B
B
A

A
B
B
A

That’s how you get that song quality — the meter as well as that constant rhyme. All the “A” lines rhyme and all the “B” lines rhyme in their final word.

The sestet has some wiggle room. Some people use:

C
D
E
C
D
E

Some people play with it and make it C, D, C, C, D, C. There is also C, D, C, D, C, D. All are kosher.

An example of a Petrarchan sonnet is John Keats’ “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer.” Classic Petrarchan in form: set meter and traditional rhyme scheme — A, B, B, A, A, B, B, A, C, D, C, D, C, D. There is a breakdown of the situation (he never could get into Homer until he found Chapman’s translation) with a turn line (“Then felt I like some watcher of the skies”) and a reaction (finding this translation made him feel like an explorer finding a new land).

Shakespearean sonnets are those poems you slogged through in high school while the boys in your class giggled when the teacher read “her breasts are dun.” Instead of an octave (eight lines) and a sestet (six lines), you have three quatrains (four lines) with a two line couplet. This form gives you more space to outline the situation because you get 12 lines to play with. The final couplet is the answer or the resolution.

All Shakespearean sonnets follow the same rhyme scheme (and all are written in iambic pentameter):

A
B
A
B

C
D
C
D

E
F
E
F

G
G

Think of Shakespearean sonnets as having a big lead-up, and then the final couplet hits the idea out of the park. That couplet needs to pack a punch because it’s the end thought for the reader. The final two lines are the “turn.”

Shakespeare wrote many free-standing sonnets as well as incorporating them into his plays. A good example is Sonnet 130, otherwise known as “My Mistress’ Eyes are Nothing Like the Sun.” For the first three quatrains (12 lines), Shakespeare puts down his woman, saying her eyes don’t sparkle like suns, her lips aren’t red enough, and her breasts don’t have that snow white creamy skin the Englishman craves. And then he hits it out of the park with that final couplet, stating that it doesn’t matter if she doesn’t measure up to traditional beauty standards because in Shakespeare’s eyes, she’s hot.

Pretty cool, right?

Homework: write a sonnet. And when you do, come back and leave a comment with a link to your sonnet posted on your blog. That way, future students can take a look at other examples of sonnets as well as visit their virtual classmates’ blogs.

Welcome to MFA Sunday School, a once-a-week, free, online writing workshop. MFA Sunday School posts are uploaded on Sunday mornings, though you can read them or participate any time — the comment section is always open for people to post a link to their work or ask a question. You can subscribe to blog posts via the RSS feed, or look for them under the category heading “MFA Sunday School.” If this is your first time in “class,” you may want to jump back to the first post in the series in order to understand how things work, or peruse all of the past lessons as well as a glossary of terms by reading the MFA Sunday School Glossary and Course Archives.

Last week, we started looking for your writing accent, the small quirks that you use in your writing which make it undeniably yours.  It goes beyond your writing voice; it is about the tiny inflections you pepper into your writing that people respond to on an emotional level without realizing it.  Sometimes within your writing accent, we’ll also find your writing mistakes.  The goal is to clean up the mistakes without cleaning up the accent.  What you want to look at is intent: why are you utilizing that writing quirk/error?  Does it enhance or detract from your writing?

We’re going to define mistakes as anything that doesn’t bring the reader into the poem, post, or story.  That serves as the vinegar to their oil.  In other words, these things pretty much only detract from your writing.

Let’s begin with the most concrete ones that are easy to see and fix.

Concrete Mistakes

• Passive Voice Instead of Active Voice: active voice is simply more interesting than passive voice.  From Alexicographer below: “Passive: She was run over by a car. Active: A car ran over her. Ooh, that sounds really bad. Let’s change it: Her umbrella was run over by a car. OR A car ran over her umbrella. Did the subject of the sentence perform the action? Active. Or was the action performed on the subject? Passive.”

• Past Tense Instead of Present Tense: present tense is a little more interesting than past tense because it places the reader into the story.  The story is unfolding around them and they respond accordingly.  It’s not always possible to play with tense, but past tense keeps the reader on the outskirts of the story at times.  At the same time, I see this as a minor point that I bring up simply to challenge you to look at your writing.  There are plenty of engaging stories — Harry Potter comes to mind — that are written in past tense.

• Boring Sentence Structure: do all your sentences begin the same way or close to the same way?  Mix it up in terms of structure and length.  Read the first paragraph in this post underneath the weekly opening (the paragraph that begins, “Last week…”).  Every sentence begins in a different way, and they all vary slightly in length (though I could have done better with that too).

• Too Many Rhetorical Questions: your reader can’t actually answer your questions; plus, the reality is your reader is approaching your work to get information or a story.  A few questions that make them think are fine.  Too many becomes a chore.

• Incorrect Words, Grammar, or Punctuation: quick fix once you familiarize yourself with the three billion grammar and punctuation rules in English…  But you get my point; incorrectly-used words, grammar mistakes, and punctuation errors take the reader out of the story because they create confusion.

• Too Many Analogies or Metaphors: this is another one of my common mistakes.  It’s about trusting that your reader “gets it,” and using analogies sparingly.  Which leads us to…

• Don’t Overwrite: don’t use more words or more sentences than you need to use in order to make your point.  This isn’t Dickens’ time period, and you’re not paid by the word (he wasn’t actually paid by the word, but since that myth exists, I thought I’d exploit it).  Sometimes it helps to strip out every unnecessary word, and then tuck back in colourful words that add to the idea.  But at the same time…

• Don’t Underwrite: your storytelling capabilities are the doorway through which readers walk into your imagination.  Have you left that door wide enough open for them to fit through?  Do they understand the story?  Too many times, writers expect us to know what is inside their head (and makes perfect sense to them) without giving us access to the content of their brains.  Make sure your mind doesn’t fill in what is missing on the page, but instead note what parts seem confusing and explain them better.

• Go Easy on Modifiers: make your word choice do the work of modifiers which are a quick (and albeit lazy) way to tell your reader how to read something.  Sometimes they’re necessary, but see if you can rework your word choice to clearly convey whatever is contained in the modifier.

• Transitions: are you transitioning well between ideas, characters, scenes?  Take a look at your transitional moments because you need flow instead of jarring movement.

• Repetitive Words: this applies both to using the same word too many times too close together as well as using an unusual word or phrase or metaphor too many times in the same piece.

Less Concrete

• Focus: are you keeping a close focus on the subject matter or story; or is your reader being dragged away on too many tangents?  Tangents should only exist if they add to the understanding of the main story.

• Foundation: you can’t build a house without a strong foundation because it will collapse in on itself, and you can’t build a story without a strong foundation and structure.  Do you clearly know your storyline and characters?  Have you clearly set the time and place?

• Pace: you want your poem, post, or story to read at a good clip.  Not too fast so that the reader is confused and can’t process what is happening, and not too slow that the reader feels as if they’re plodding along.

• Exhaustion: some long pieces — especially novels — are coated in writing exhaustion.  It’s clear to the reader that while the author started out confident with the story and characters, he/she lost focus somewhere in the middle and didn’t know how to get the story from Point A to Point Z.

• Hollow Dialogue: make sure your conversations ring true.  That they sound like something someone would say.  By which I mean that they contain the meat of the conversation, not the piddly extras we throw into real conversations.

• Show, Don’t Tell: oy… this one needs more than a sentence or two explanation.  We’ll have a whole lesson soon on show, don’t tell, but I wanted to put it in this editing list so you remember to check for it.

Things You May Have Been Told are Mistakes But are Probably Just Part of Your Writing Accent

• Fragments: nothing wrong with a little fragment when used well.  Especially for impact. (A ha!  Like that fragment!  Or this one!)

• Prepositions: I try not to end sentences in prepositions, but sometimes it works depending on where you’re coming from.

• Splitting Infinitives: to unabashedly split your infinitives, place a word such as “unabashedly” between the “to” and the “verb” in the sentence.  Be a bad-ass.  Splitting them can have an impact.

• Conjuction-led Sentences: yet there are so many good reasons to begin a sentence with a conjunction.

• Or peruse this list of non-errors.

Homework: Choose something brief — perhaps a blog post — to practice self-editing.  Look at the information above and apply it to your piece, and then examine the before and after side-by-side.  What writing mistakes keep cropping up in your pieces?  Does it feel easier to stop yourself from doing them in the first place, or would that stilt your writing and is it better to edit them out later?  Are you starting to see your writing accent?

Welcome to MFA Sunday School, a once-a-week, free, online writing workshop. MFA Sunday School posts are uploaded on Sunday mornings, though you can read them or participate any time — the comment section is always open for people to post a link to their work or ask a question. You can subscribe to blog posts via the RSS feed, or look for them under the category heading “MFA Sunday School.” If this is your first time in “class,” you may want to jump back to the first post in the series in order to understand how things work, or peruse all of the past lessons as well as a glossary of terms by reading the MFA Sunday School Glossary and Course Archives.

Looking at your work with a critical eye means exiting your own brain and figuratively trying on someone else’s in order to see your writing from an entirely new angle.  Everyone has their own approach to self-editing: some work as they go along, editing before they write the next paragraph or scene.  Others wait until they have a final product in hand and then go back in to polish it up.  Some do a blend of both, and others get so hung up on the editing process that they sort of stop writing altogether.  Editing is what makes them hit the proverbial wall with their project.

So how does one go about learning how to self-edit?  There’s something to be said for the joke about starting a whole new relationship by masturbating with your other hand — getting out of your own tired brain is easier said than done, but changing the location of where you wrote the piece (writing it on one computer but editing it in a different room or on a different computer), reading it aloud to someone, or editing on a different medium (writing on the screen but editing on paper) are all simple ways to trick your brain into seeing your writing from a new angle.

Before you start editing, you need to understand one thing: there is a difference between your writing accent and writing mistakes.

When I talk about your writing accent, I don’t mean writing to convey to the reader the accent of the character (as in, putting “y’all” in there so the reader knows this person is from the south).  Your writing accent — as defined by me — are the small quirks that you use in your writing which make it undeniably yours.  It goes beyond your writing voice; it is about the tiny inflections you pepper into your writing that people respond to on an emotional level without realizing it.  I think of your writing voice as something loud, immediately defining.  You would never mistake Danielle Steel’s writing for Stephen King’s.  But your accent is something much more subtle.

Two seconds into a blindfolded conversation with an Australian, you can tell that they’re not from America.  That is due to the way they pronounce their words, and that is the equivalent to your writing voice.  But several minutes into the conversation with the Australian and regardless of what they’re talking about, without even seeing them, your gut has formed an opinion on whether you like the person or not.  Whether you respond to the person or whether you’d rather not talk to them anymore.  It’s how I can put three Australians in front of the blindfolded you and asked them to talk about something as mundane as the weather, but you’d be able to form an opinion on each one, though you may not be able to point out why you formed that gut reaction.

Side note — this lesson is about discovering why.

Now do you see the difference between writing voice and writing accent?  Voice is apparent.  Accent takes some searching.

With editing, we want to get rid of writing mistakes without getting rid of your writing accent, but in order to do that, we need to know whether the way you’re writing is putting off the reader or drawing them in.  And best example I can give you comes from my own writing accent.

Perhaps not in blog posts, but within book writing, I have two things I constantly do — one of which is my writing accent and the other of which is a writing mistake.  Part of my writing accent is my love of verb-led sentences.  “Running for the bus, she slipped on the newspaper sheet stuck to the sidewalk and landed with her face in yesterday’s gum.”  Verb-led, non-gerund sentences was something I was known for back in my MFA program.  When other people did it, people would jokingly ask if I secretly wrote the story.  Now that I’m conscious of it, I tone it down or play it up depending on the piece I’m writing and the volume I want on the action or external story.  That’s my writing accent, and people respond to it (either liking or hating it).  I also use a lot of dashes to draw out thoughts.  To drag your brain this way and that.  Either you like that or you don’t, but that’s what you’re responding to in my writing.  I use a lot of semi-colons to keep ideas close together.  Again, either you like that you or you don’t, but those are small things I’m doing that you unconsciously respond to in my writing.

Here’s a writing mistake I often make: I summarize a whole scene with a one or two sentence punch at the end, a move that my advisor always called “tags” but since I can’t find this online, it’s making me think that he invented the term.  The tag was a mistake because it not only slowed down the storytelling, repeating what was essentially shown in the scene, but it treated the reader poorly.  My professor once jokingly told me that he was going to gather up all my discarded tags one day and publish a whole book of them called Tag Sale.  I still write tags because I have to write tags.  It’s like stopping myself from vomiting — not only does it not work most of the time, but it’s usually better just to vomit and get it over with and move on.  So I write my tags, and then, when I go to edit, I remove them.

This lesson is getting long, so I’m going to break it into two parts.  Next week, we’ll take a look at common writing mistakes so we can find them in our writing.  But for the time being, start looking at your writing with your other hand… I mean… a different portion of your brain.  What writing quirks do you notice you do?  What is done consciously, and what is done unconsciously?  If you can’t find them, don’t worry.  Once we get to writing mistakes next week, your writing accent is going to pop out at you.

Homework: No special assignment this week because we’re mid-lesson, though keep writing.  Instead, let your classmates know how you edit in a comment below — do you do it at the end of a project/post, as you go along, or a blend of both?  And does the editing process ever stop you from finishing what you’re writing?  It will be interesting to see the various ways people approach editing before we get to talking about finding writing mistakes.

Welcome to MFA Sunday School, a once-a-week, free, online writing workshop. MFA Sunday School posts are uploaded on Sunday mornings, though you can read them or participate any time — the comment section is always open for people to post a link to their work or ask a question. You can subscribe to blog posts via the RSS feed, or look for them under the category heading “MFA Sunday School.” If this is your first time in “class,” you may want to jump back to the first post in the series in order to understand how things work, or peruse all of the past lessons as well as a glossary of terms by reading the MFA Sunday School Glossary and Course Archives.

I wanted to work on self-editing your own writing today, but realized with the holiday weekend that it may be better to hold that for a week and do something more concrete such as another poetic fixed form.  If you like puzzles or brain-teasers, the villanelle is the perfect form for you.  It’s complicated, but once you understand the format, it becomes a writing exercise akin to a crossword puzzle that makes you stretch your brain and think about how words fit together.

The villanelle is a French form shaped by two rhyme sounds, a fixed meter*, and repetition. One of the easiest poems to look at in order to understand the form is Dylan Thomas’s “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night” from 1952’s In Country Sleep. In order to understand the form, all we need are the first two stanzas:

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Before we get to the rhyme scheme — which is the best-known aspect of the villanelle — let’s look at the meter, or the rhythm of the line. Just like music, poetry can have a set number of “beats” to a line, which is why poetry teachers often read poems aloud, having their class clap out the words to hear the inflections.

Villanelles and sonnets are written in iambs which are an unstressed beat coupled with a stressed beat: or ba-BUM. With the words “do not” in the first line, the “do” is soft and unstressed, whereas the voice lands harder on the word “not.” But the line obviously is longer than one iamb or two beats. It actually has five iambs strung together, which is why we say it is written in iambic pentameter. Iambic refers to the foot — the way the words are stressed — and pentameter is the length of the line: penta means five.

So now clap out that first line as you read it aloud, and you’ll hear the meter:

Welcome to MFA Sunday School, a once-a-week, free, online writing workshop. MFA Sunday School posts are uploaded on Sunday mornings, though you can read them or participate any time — the comment section is always open for people to post a link to their work or ask a question. You can subscribe to blog posts via the RSS feed, or look for them under the category heading “MFA Sunday School.” If this is your first time in “class,” you may want to jump back to the first post in the series in order to understand how things work, or peruse all of the past lessons as well as a glossary of terms by reading the MFA Sunday School Glossary and Course Archives.

Hopefully you’ve tried your hand at writing a sestina, the first fixed form poem we’re going to work with (after we get a few fixed forms under our belt, we’ll switch to looking at imagery, sound, etc) even if you haven’t posted one yet.  Surely with several thousand tuning in for this series every Sunday, there are more than four smart, brave souls willing to post their poem?

Moving back into the world of fiction.

Brian Christian wrote a book called The Most Human Human about the Loebner Prize Competition’s version of the Turing test which pits humans against computers to determine whether or not a “blind” third subject can accurately label which is the computer and which is the human as he/she communicates with both.  The computer that is able to most closely imitate human communication receives the label, “the most human computer” and the human who is chosen most often as sounding like a person is labeled “the most human human.”

Okay, so I haven’t actually gotten to reading the whole book (though baby steps — I’ve downloaded it for iBooks), but I love this concept of a contest to determine who is coming across as human, and I think it is something that all writers need to grapple with in creating characters.  Are your characters believable?  Do they make very human choices (which usually means complex choices) or are they more two-dimensional and go for the obvious?  Do they have tiny, unique traits — especially in their voice — which help the reader keep all of your characters straight in their head?

Let’s take the Harry Potter series as an example since it’s a widely read series, and you’re likely familiar with the characters.  Who said: “I enjoyed the meetings, too. It was like having friends.”  There are only two characters who could have uttered that line: Neville or Luna.  Certainly Harry has never struggled to find friends.  And noticing a lack of friends isn’t very Ron-like or Hermione-like.  Can you imagine Draco Malfoy saying that?  And now, having narrowed it down, you realize that Luna is much more blunt, much more self-deprecating, much more likely to say exactly what she is thinking than Neville.

I’m certain I could write out twenty more random quotes, and you’d be able to identify the speaker even without a tag.  That is because Rowling creates characters that would win in my version of the Loebner Prize for “most human character.”  There are plenty of other very human characters in literature to television writing: from Ramona Quimby to Foreman on House.  And there are also plenty of characters who would fail the test and have their two-dimensional “characterness” come through more than their ability to imitate a real person.  They’re the characters that just don’t ring true.

So how does one construct the “most human character?”  Through observation, retention, and utilization, or what I’ll keep returning to as ORU.  Note to self: create a glossary of all my made-up writing terms*.

So what is ORU — it’s the process that writers go through for bringing elements of the real world around them into their fiction.  (1) Writers observe.  They notice the small details.  If you don’t naturally notice the small details yet, you can hone this skill with the practice homework below.  (2) Writers retain information, filing it away for later use.  Some writers can do this in their brain, other writers keep notebooks or notecards with tiny details they want to use in a story later.  (3) Writers utilize those tiny details to create believable characters.  That is ORU in a nutshell, and we’re going to be returning to this concept and practicing this concept over and over again throughout this online course.

Later on, we’re going to go on an observation field trip to observe space (because you also want to create believable settings), but right now, we’re just focusing on people.  And we need to narrow this down even further: today we are only looking at how humans move; what their movements say about their internal state.  See, there are dozens of tiny working parts to observe, so it helps to narrow our focus for the moment to just one aspect of being human.  No extra points will be given if you diffuse your focus and try to write about how humans sound or how humans choose words — you are only looking at how humans move.  Ready to start your homework?

Homework: Go out to a public space with a partner — a restaurant, coffeehouse, park.  Leave all distractions at home (especially… I’m sorry Wolvog and ChickieNob… kids).  Set the timer for twenty minutes and without talking to each other (and try not to even look at the other person), write down everything you notice about the people’s movements around you.  Does someone keep scratching their neck?  Tapping their pen?  Rubbing their hands over their eyes?  What are you picking up from their small movements?  Can you sense that the neck scratcher is nervous, the pen tapper impatient, the eye rubber trying to hold back tears?  What small traits are you picking up on that give you a piece of information about the sort of person you’re viewing.  After twenty minutes, match up what you observed based on what your partner observed, and like Scattergories, you get no points for the things you both observed and processed similarly.  You get one point for the things that you both observed but processed differently. (For instance, if you both noticed the neck scratcher but your partner thought he looked as if he was nervous whereas you thought he looked bored.)  You get two points for everything you observed that the other person didn’t observe at all.

If you ended up with the low score, ask yourself whether it was due to where you were sitting (if you’re facing the person, you’ll notice more about them than if they’re behind you and your partner is facing them) or if you were distracted.  Did you check your Twitter feed during the 20 minutes?  If you did, you probably missed noticing small moments.

This exercise is about:

• Seeing how good you are at seeing the small movements. [OBSERVATION]
• Recording/remembering the small movements for later use (along with what information they convey.  A note might look like: “people scratch their necks when they’re bored and distracted.  If I have my character scratch her neck in the scene coupled with the right words, I will be able to convey boredom without ever using the word bored.”)** [RETENTION]
• And in the future, you’ll utilize these notes to create believable characters. [UTILIZATION]

See?  ORU — observation, retention, utilization.

If you get more time this week, additionally do this exercise on your own.  While you’re waiting in line at the grocery store, while you’re talking with a friend, while you’re looking for books at the library.  Keep a notebook with you at all times so you can jot down these small observations and have them in a single place to use later.

* I paused from writing this lesson in order to compile terms and past lessons on a single page which you can now find here and will be linked to on my right sidebar as well as the top of each MFA Sunday School post. Now you can quickly see a lesson where each term is used so you don’t have to wrack your brain trying to remember what ORU means the next time I use it.

** We’ll come back to this concept, but it’s a popular idea in writing: showing and not telling.