GUILD: Jean Lorrah discussion on 4 Tools A Writer Uses to Tell a Story

From: "Jean Lorrah" <writers-l@simegen.com Subject: Re: [Writers-L] 4 writing tools Date: Friday, March 23, 2001 6:02 AM

On Wed, 21 Mar 2001 16:48:36 -0500 writes:

Hello,

Narrative, dialogue, description and exposition are the 4 main tools used to tell a story

?!? Huh? I guess I must have fallen asleep in class again. I thought they were typewriters, computers, quills and pencils. *grin*

No, seriously. Source?

Just about every creative writing course ever taught. I have no idea where or when I first heard this, and probably Jacqueline hasn't either unless MZB happens to have said it to her. But if she did, it didn't originate with MZB--this is "everybody knows" information that has been around forever.

I've never run into this anywhere else.

Try the various how-to books on writing. Any kind of writing AAMOF--many public school English class writing programs teach narrative, description, and exposition, although they rarely teach more about dialogue than how to punctuate it.

Not saying you're lying, but its not something I've run across.

We have learned not to be surprised at what students either have never been taught, or were taught in such a way that it didn't stick, which is why Jacqueline spelled it out here.

These "esoteric secrets" of writing are not really so very esoteric, but it is hard to learn them--or at least all of them--simply by reading. They are also very tough to learn to do right, so students are sorely tempted to try to jump over them and never learn the basics, just as beginning musicians want to jump right into playing in a band without learning to read music first (ask Sir Paul about the problems he had _writing_ music when he couldn't _read_ it). If all you ever want to do is dabble and play around, and then drop music and go on to some other hobby, fine. If you want to become a serious and significant musician, though, you do what Paul McCartney did: you stop and take the time to learn the basics of your craft. THEN you go on to break new ground.

For me, the tools I use to tell a story are grammar, vocabulary, tone and pace.

Oranges and apples here. Grammar and vocabulary are tools of LANGUAGE--you need them in order to communicate at all. We ASSUME that anyone interested in becoming a writer already HAS those tools, for without them you can't articulate, "I want to be a writer."

Pace is a subcategory of narrative--once you have conquered basic narrative, you move on to the means to set its pace--but you can't speed up or slow down something that doesn't first exist.

Tone is the voice of the author coloring the story, and is produced in many different ways--it is not a basic tool, although it is something a writer eventually wants to learn to control, because until he or she does, everything is likely to come out with the same tone. However, tone is NOT one of the places to begin to learn to write--the only reason a teacher would bring up tone during a course in basics would be if one particular student were using a tone completely at odds with and undermining what the student was trying to say. That does not happen very often; it is usually the basic tools that beginning writers don't have--oddly, most have little trouble controlling pace and tone once they conquer narration, dialogue, description, and exposition.

Pace is a facet of the same stone conflict resides on. (They aren't really different, but are rather different images of the same concept.)

No, pace is not conflict--and the fact that you think that conflict is the same thing, or nearly the same thing, as pace (confusion caused by the definition of, not conflict, but ACTION as the frequency of change in situation?) may be one of the reasons you have trouble understanding and producing conflict. Therefore this post is _extremely_ useful to us as teachers, in showing us where you are still struggling with one of the essential elements of story.

Conflict is one of the essentials of story. To try another analogy, conflict is the building being built. Pace is whether it takes a week, a month, or a year to build that building, as well as how the workmen work frantically for a few days to get the foundation laid, then go away for two weeks while nothing at all happens, then return and put up the walls at a leisurely pace, etc. But there would be no pace to putting up that building if there were no building to put up. The outline is the plan, the blueprint; the conflict is the actual act of building; the pace is not either the materials or the act of building, but the variations of speed at which that building takes place.

For dialogue, I write by ear. I *hear* the speech of my characters.

(Even when they say bad things. I ended up with a Thelemic Inspirational romance from listening to my characters. *sigh* What a pain! Now I have to figure out what to do with the silly thing.) It is very much an issue of tone and pace.

Well, that particular dialogue, which I have not read, may have tone and pace problems, but for the most part, Ann Marie, your dialogue is just fine. You have what is called a "good ear." So we have not been trying to get you to improve your dialogue, just trying to get you to stop trying to substitute it for conflict.

For narrative, well, I actually don't use a whole lot of traditional narrative. (or at least I try not to) Its always character narrative. Its how the character who's 'live' (the one I'm using for the current PoV) 'sees' whats going on. With all their extraneous commentary, occasional lapses of grammar, expletives and prayers. Also their errors, their omissions, their blind spots and their predjudices. *shrug*

Yes, that is what narrative is: the reporting of the events as they occur. It can be done from one point of view, from a shifting point of view, or from an omniscient point of view, but nothing about which point of view you use changes the fact that this is narrative. I don't know what YOU mean by "traditional" narrative, but writing from the point of view of one or more characters is certainly one of the most common (thus traditional) ways of presenting narrative.

In the middle of this discussion of life, the universe and everything, I use description to place sets. Its a way to keep from doing 'he said, she said', or 'shouted', or 'yelled', or whatever. Instead I describe everybody's surroundings to tag my dialogue.

Oh, dear, oh, dear.

_"Oh, my goodness!" he was wearing a red shirt and tight black trousers, and had loosened his silver hair to lie over his shoulders like a cloak._

I don't think so. See what you say next:

I also will describe things to 'show' what's going on. Joe just tripped and fell in the mud. He looked silly! I laughed so hard my sides hurt. Particularly when he dug half a kilo of mud out of his ear.

This is not description. This is narrative--a sequence of events (falling in the mud, looking silly, laughing, digging mud out of his ear). Look at all the VERBS (tripped, fell, looked, laughed, hurt, dug). Not adjectives. Narrative, not description.

This is really telling, but *shhhhh*. To me, narrative description

See? Right here you realize that you are talking about narrative, not description. So why try to invent a new term, "narrative description," when clearly you are simply using narrative?

is the glue I use to hold my dialogue together. But even so, it is closer kin to dialogue than some people's narrative, as it is from the 'unreliable narrator' of one of my characters, rather than the classic narrator, which is the author.

But very, very few writers use omniscient pov today, and many an ancient author chose to use the point of view of characters in the story. Chaucer _never_ writes from other than his persona's pov. All the best parts of the _Odyssey_ are told in first person by Odysseus. _The Divine Comedy_ is entirely from the pov of the fictitious character Dante (not the author Dante--this use of persona in Dante is probably where Chaucer picked up the idea for his character Jeffrey--you don't think Lucy is really Lucille Ball, Jerry really Jerry Seinfeld, and so on and on, do you, just because the names are the same?) So the "classic" narrator is very, very frequently a single pov character, not the author.

Exposition is a tool I've never gotten a handle on. Possibly because every time I pick it up it bites my hand. It does have its place, but it isn't one I've managed to figure out. Maybe if I ever stop writing pure hack work, I'll give it another shot.

Exposition is the primary tool of non-fiction, and should be used very sparingly in fiction. In fiction it is a means of compacting time, of skimming over material that does not need to be dramatized. It's not terribly interesting, so it has to be kept _short_, but it often fills in gaps between events in the action. Here's an example: you have just written a scene that occurs a week after Year's Turning, and the next piece of action (change in situation) does not occur until three months later. Therefore you do not want to detail and dramatize what happens in that three months, nor invent some "cute stuff" just to fill in the space. So you use brief exposition:

_That year it seemed Spring would never come. New lambs were born in the snow, and John and Mary had to bring the flock into the paddock and try to feed them when the wolves came down out of the mountains and challenged their dogs, killing two of them in their attempts to get to the sheep. When finally the snow melted and the daffodils appeared, the farmers went straight from plowing snow to plowing mud with no chance for a rest._

Three months covered in three sentences, and now we know that the local people are exhausted and in no condition to fight whatever the next piece of action is that we are planning to throw at them, whether it be flood, epidemic, or an attack of Freeband Raiders. But no action took place during those three months (no change in the situation of the plot line), and therefore the time was filled in with a few sentences of exposition. THAT is the main purpose of exposition in fiction, along with supplying necessary background. Use it _sparingly_.

Now, all this said. I'm sure people here who've read my stuff are going to toss dozens of places where I've violated all of this.

Ann Marie, do you realize that the rest of this paragraph has _nothing_ to do with whether or not you have ever violated your ideas of what narration or description are? Instead, you write on and on about characterization, something you happen to be very good at but which has nothing to do with your claim at the beginning of this post that Jacqueline is wrong about the four writing tools you need to learn to use.

You end by arguing for writing from a variety of points of view, which doesn't need to be argued: everyone will agree with you. But that is NOT what your post was about--go look at the beginning. A lesson that applies to both fiction and non-fiction is to stick to your topic. If you want to introduce a new topic write a new post or a new story.

Jean

______________________________________ Writers-L mailing list Writers-L@simegen.com

Jean Lorrah, jean1@juno.com http://www.jeanlorrah.com NEW BOOK: Nessie and the Living Stone by Lois Wickstrom and Jean Lorrah http://www.nessiebook.com

_______________________________________________ Writers-L mailing list Writers-L@simegen.com http://www.simegen.com/archives/