Poetry Editor Brad Fruhauff shares his advice regarding cliché.

On July 3rd, Kevin Lucia posted a blog about what writers should be prepared to give up when pursuing their craft.  I’ll start by saying that, while I agree with almost all of Kevin's thoughts, I’d like to build upon his final point: that it is important not to go too far when hacking things out of your life to make room for writing, and would add additional caveats to the ones Kevin outlined. 

I’ve seen many writers maintain the illusion that writing is a purely solitary profession, one in which the artist sits secluded in a lushly cushioned chamber (or, depending on his temperament, a pleasantly impoverished one) and reflects upon the distant world outside.  There is, of course, some truth in this.  Many activities in writing—reading, editing, planning, revising—are best conducted in isolation, as is the sincere reflection that legitimate art requires.  Nevertheless, reflection doesn’t do much good if there is nothing on which to reflect.  With that in mind, the message of today’s blog is simple: if you want to be a good writer, don’t forget to do something other than write.

Counterintuitive, you say? Simplistic?  Perhaps true on both counts…but the reminder is also sometimes necessary. As Kevin mentions, many writers are naturally shy, sticking to what is comfortable, familiar, and consequently they sometimes struggle to generate material.  Such writers slouch paralyzed before their keyboards, claiming writer’s block; in worse cases, they substitute tired plots and situations for fresh, sincere experience; in the worst cases, they write maudlin stories about writers with nothing to write about and stick them in the mail.

I would argue, however, that the root of such difficulties is often a lifestyle problem rather than a writing problem.  While you shouldn’t get up prematurely (good writing often approaches cautiously, requiring patience), sometimes the best thing you can do for writing is, for the moment, to stop writing and experience something else.  Ideally, this should be something that jostles your routine, even taking out of your comfort zone entirely.  Such experiences can put your own material into higher relief, sharpening it, and can even give you new material entirely.  

This is especially true, by the way, for writers who churn out solipsistic prose, which sometimes results in work without the breadth and comprehensiveness of actual life.  One of the worst mistakes writers can make, after all, is assuming that everyone sees things the same way they do, or (even worse) assuming that the only rationale or comprehensible perspective is their own.  Both of these illusions are easier to nurture when you only occupy one sliver of the world, and therefore many writers—and, for that matter, many Christians—find it difficult to tolerate conflicting worldviews, ignoring or invalidating their existence rather than seeking them out and grappling with them.  Such myopia, I think, can limit growth both as an artist and a person.

For that matter, you never know what encountering new things can teach you about your own craft.  For example, one of my fresh hobbies is barbershop music, and a few months ago my chorus brought in a consultant named Steve Jameson who believed that musicality results from a calculated process of sustaining and releasing tension.  I don’t mean tension in the voice; I mean tension created around and within an engaged listener. Let me put it like this: a song—through this theory—is compelling because something initially unsettled within the music is soothed (or, in contrast, something tranquil is disrupted).  It can be a chord that takes its precious time resolving, a crescendo that drags the listener through the wake of its momentum, a tone sustained beyond its expected breaking point, or a narrative lyric portraying some uneased conflict—anything that causes a shift in the song. These disparities—like a thermodynamic imbalance between hot and cold—create energy that propels the music forward, resulting in a listener’s invited agony as they expect something to happen in the piece and then have those expectations skillfully denied or satisfied.  These musical principles of tension and release, of course, are analogous to the notion in fiction of conflict and catharsis, the idea that we read a story because there is something compelling that we wish or expect to happen next.  The best writing (like the best music) engages its reader by generating tension—in the drama of a scene, the unexpected collision of metaphor, the balancing act between phrase and line break—and then releasing that tension at key moments to optimize emotional depth.  It’s a new—and useful—way of thinking about an old problem, and one I never would have encountered if I’d stayed all cooped up in an office.

And of course, there are all of the magnificent experiences, stories, and people you encounter while out of your shell.  I’ve been singing with a barbershop chorus for about two years now, and the variety of people and perspectives I’ve encountered have already begun to infiltrate my fiction.

I think it’s only fair to mention, here at the end, that this is a personal axe for me to grind.  I started graduate school at twenty-two (probably too young, in retrospect) and one of my greatest challenges dealt with discovering what to write, as opposed to how to write.  Some of my classmate’s assessments, in the first few years, were that I wrote some lovely but unseasoned stories, ones which failed not because of lack of skill, but lack of perspective.  I bristled at these comments—they were true—but once I expanded who I was and what I did, I feel that my writing improved.  Such activities work best, incidentally, if you make them a deliberate part of your creative process, rather than a distraction from that process.  With appropriate scheduling and moderation, outside activities can enhance your writing, rather than restrict it.

Previous Articles: 

• Using Setting Wisely in Fiction
• The Importance of Characterization
• Introducing Our Crafting Fiction Blog Series
• The Moral of the Story Is...

Continuing his series on the Craft of Writing Fiction, Alan Ackmann advises Relief writers to consider using setting as a tool for deepening characterization.

As Heather mentioned last week, I’m in Daytona Beach, Florida at the moment scoring AP English essays.  As you can imagine, this is a pleasant change of scenery.  Since my grandparents live in St. Petersburg I grew up seeing the beach once a year, although Daytona—an Atlantic Beach—has more waves and fewer shells than its gulf coast counterpart.  There’s a pier here where all the shops have closed save for a henna tattoo parlor and man with no legs who paints moonscapes on velvet.  A magician outside my hotel shackles himself in a straightjacket every two hours or so, and a sky-bucket ride glides folks along the pier and over one of Daytona’s many seafood restaurants—whether those folks are wealthy tourists staying in the five-star hotels on the east side of A1A Beachfront, or unshaven, hardscrabble drifters living in the one bedroom beach-houses on the west side of the street.  It’s as far from Chicago as you can get and still be in America, and for this week’s blog it all got me thinking about setting.

Before getting into opportunities setting can provide, I’ll start with a caution: Setting, like many elements of fiction, is a secondary feature best utilized as an augmentation to more primary elements such as character or theme.  While it is true that significant details can add texture and dimension, stories designed solely as an explanation of a culture or place—rather than a person or idea—often feel more like ethnographies than narratives. Readers lose patience when they sense that details are stacked on top of one another just to serve themselves, or (even worse) to serve as proof of the writer’s talent.  You therefore have to be selective with detail, taking care not to let description overwhelm other, more vital elements.  When I began writing, I would often use exotic bits of historical or cultural trivia as a substitute for more fulfilling dimensions of fiction—but I’ve come to accept that a description of setting can rarely, if ever, sustain a cohesive story by itself. 

Setting, however, can be a fantastic device for deepening a story that survives on other elements.  First, it can work magic on character—in terms of both scene and plot development.  Simply put, when people change locations, they change behavior.  Don’t get me wrong—when a character moves into a new environment, nothing integral about a person typically shifts, but every small movement will be shaped and transformed.  In my last blog, I talked about how people reveal themselves through incremental gestures, which are often influenced by setting.  A confrontation about why a father left his family years ago will be completely changed if it takes place on a cruise ship instead of a coffee shop, or a living room couch as opposed to a hospital bed.  Each location exerts new tensions, and readers will learn more about characters if the writer acknowledges how their internal conflicts respond to these external pressures.  Some of the best scenes take place in settings that constrict their character’s behavior, or that allow them freedom to take liberties they sometimes wouldn’t have.  More globally, a change of scene can serve as the catalyst of an entire story. Alison Lurie’s Foreign Affairs, for example, deals with two Americans living in London, and how their personalities, priorities, and ambitions are modified by the change of location.  E.M. Forster went so far as to say that there were only two archetypal stories: “Man goes on a journey” and “A stranger comes to town,” both of which hinge on some kind of modification of setting.  

Furthermore, since setting is tied to description, characterization can exert further influence on style.  There is a fantastic exercise in the back of John Gardner’s The Art of Fiction where Gardner asks students to describe a cabin on the lake from the point of view of a woman who has just learned that her son has been killed in war, but students cannot mention the son, the death, or the war.  Poorly written responses commit a descriptive emotional fallacy and communicate the emotion through weather (sometimes rain, occasionally ice).  Better responses match emotional tone to the rhythm of sentences, and seize upon the details one would notice in this state, which subsequently alters style and detail.  Think of it this way: whenever you see anything, what you see will be altered by the forces affecting your psyche.  An ocean like the one I’ve described above, therefore, can be nurturing and humbling to one person yet expansive and terrifying to another.  A person in one state of mind will notice the sunbathers, the pick-up soccer game on the back dunes, or the never-ending calypso music drifting from the hotels, and be enthralled, their sentences blossoming and flourishing.  A person in another state will notice the horizon line of rain some miles off away, or the deteriorating paint on the piers and empty lifeguard towers, or the upturned, dying jellyfish washed up on shore.  Their sentences will be stark.  Complacent.  Full of clarity and grit.  On CSI, investigators once commented that eye-witnesses are inherently untrustworthy because no two viewers will interpret a scene the same way.  What is a hindrance in criminology is an asset in fiction.   

The gist of this blog is that setting, if appropriately calibrated, should be neither the entirety of a story nor one of its forgotten elements—if harnessed appropriately it can deepen style and characterization.

Incidentally, many of the stories in Relief’s upcoming issue feature setting prominently, and in many of the ways just discussed.  So when that issue hits the stands, you should check it out.  I, meanwhile, plan to check out the fireworks display beginning off the edge of the pier in about twenty minutes.

I’m in a good mood, and so suspect they will be beautiful. 

Previous Articles: 

• The Importance of Characterization
• Introducing Our Crafting Fiction Blog Series
• The Moral of the Story Is...

Christian Intuition

Write about what? Well: nothing and everything. It’s not necessarily what you write about as how you do it that makes it poetry. And it’s sometimes no more than the fact that the writer was a Christian that makes it “Christian” poetry. If a poem is going to surprise me, it is probably not because the poet pulled some clever technical gag, reworked a Bible story, or said anything about spiritual experience—it may be that, but it’s more likely the poet opened me up to something I had never seen, felt or thought before, or a way of seeing, feeling or thinking about something, or a way of experiencing the words we use to talk about things. We often call such a power “vision,” but visual metaphors in Western culture are caught up with conceptual knowledge and quickly become confusing—that is, we tend to think that to have vision is to have unique or quirky ideas. Ideas are great, but poetry works in forms and patterns: meter, rhythm, rhyme—Frost spoke of the “shape a poem makes.” Poetic vision, then, is about organizing one’s raw materials (fundamentally, language) into some meaningful shape.

The Christian poet will, or should, have a Christian vision—or what I am calling here intuition. The Christian poet still works with language and form, but the meaning of her experiences, of her language, her “raw materials,” will always be bent according to a distinctively Christian intuition, a Christian sense of the world.

This is not to be perspectival. I do not believe that a Christian and a Buddhist simply have different interpretations of experience—that would reduce religious arguments to the level of fighting over the taste of lettuce. Rather, their beliefs and traditions condition them so that they actually experience the world differently from each other. Meaning is experienced as much as interpreted—or maybe we need to separate out kinds of meanings. In either case, poetry is in part the language of these disparate and distinct experiences.

When one is moved to great emotion, one wants to show another that moving thing—whether from love or anger or amusement or spite (but always, ultimately, from love). To do that poetically requires a trained awareness to the contours, colors and temperatures of the thing, to its motion, its volume, its cast, its repose. The poet draws these things together for many reasons: to share, to name, to comfort, to encourage, to empower. The Christian poet has to be both devoutly Christian and devoutly poetic, training herself to chase the names for the events and emotions that constitute a shared life. Don’t put limitations on the Spirit—rather, seek and expect to find. Or, better, seek and expect your reader to find.

To say the poet chases names just begs for some remarks on avoiding cliché, but they will have to wait for another time. If I were to leave you with one thing for the time being, it would be to trust your intuition and to always require more of it. God doesn’t require that we quote a psalm in every poem we write; he requires that we worship and obey him whether we’re writing a poem or cashing out the till. To paraphrase Augustine, then: Love God, then write what you will.

Previous Articles:

• Writing and the Christian Poet II
• Writing and the Christian Poet I

Brad is pursuing a PhD in English at Loyola University Chicago. He occasionally contributes book and music reviews to the Burnside Writer's Collective, and his story "The Strangler" appeared in the first issue of the Ankeny Briefcase. He is by temperament something of an Ancient - "a grumpy old man," as his (young) wife puts it - and does not believe a good idea goes bad by going out of fashion. He has not found a better dictum for poetics than "to instruct and delight" (Horace). In application he believes these are very hard to balance: a pleasant poem may yet be vacuous, and a didactic poem is almost always bad. A poem instructs by being itself, and the poet never knows just what her reader will learn. He wishes to say that good poetry is true, but the truth is not always poetry. He is currently excited about the novels of Marilynne Robinson and Orhan Pamuk, and enjoys the poetry of Auden, Donne, Hopkins, Tennyson and, more recently, Scott Cairns.