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.
Alan Ackmann, Relief's Fiction Editor, received his MFA in fiction from the University of Arkansas and teaches at DePaul University.His work has appeared or is forthcoming in McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, Clackamas Literary Review, Louisiana Literature, Ontario Review, and elsewhere. He is a former fiction editor of The Evansville Review and was a Tennessee Williams Scholar at the 2007 Sewanee Writer’s Conference.Find out more at www.alanackmann.com.
Brad Fruhauff continues his series on the Craft of Christian Poetry with his third installment on the essentials of Christian poetry.
I can’t seem to reduce all my thoughts on the subject of writing poetry down to just three posts, so I’m going to stop trying to predict just how many more of these there will be. I’ve previously suggested that poetry of any variety loves the world and doesn’t need to waste time trying to prove anything. I went on to say that poetry I like tends to surprise, transform, play, redeem, or sacramentalize. For this post, technically number 3, I said I would give some ideas on how to do these things.
If it feels like it’s been a long time coming, that may be because I’ve been trying to avoid it. What can I really tell you that you haven’t already heard or are likely to hear again from the place I got it? It turns out I can tell you all sorts of things, but the most important is that you have to write. I’ll probably blog more about that later. You can read advice on top of advice, but you’re going to have to write at some point. Knowledge is power, but it ain’t art.
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.
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.
Fiction Editor Alan Ackmann continues his series on Crafting Fiction with an explanation of why creating complex three-dimensional characters is so important in short stories and in other types of writing.
It’s been awhile since my last blog; chalk it up to mold, moving, teaching, and travels. But I’m thrilled to continue our Crafting Fiction Blog Series. Those with shrewd memories (or the ability to click Past Blog links) recall that the last post ended by promising to explore how fiction can honor God without overtly sermonizing. That’s a tall order, and the first step is recognizing that good writing reveals the truth of people’s pain and ecstasies, and when the right moments are depicted lovingly, that truth reveals the majesty of God and his creations. From my perspective, this requires focus on good characterization, which can also extend powers to other aspects of writing.
The Power of Specificity
Characterization is the process of creating authentic, recognizable individuals. When discussing stories with fellow editors, my most frequent comment is that characters seem generic, nothing separating them from the rest of the world. Most frequently, interchangeability results from a writer’s having not recognized or portrayed one of life’s great simple mysteries: that each person is made up of unique experiences, memories, fears, and feelings. Such characters lack precision, and their anonymity makes them inaccessible. A professor of mine claimed that if your character drinks beer, you should know if he wraps both hands around the glass and hunches over, if he pinches the rim and sips politely, or if he rests one palm on the sides when he’s not drinking, scared the glass will fall. You should know whether he notices that the glass is cold, if the beer is imported, or if he cares. You have to know if his father drank, and if this makes him feel guilty; if he is celebrating, mourning, forgetting, or remembering. People reveal themselves through major decisions about jobs or marriage, but more readily reveal themselves through smaller, incremental gestures that transform our understandings, and writing that does not resist the impulse to see people as types rather than individuals can only go so far. I wish I had a formula that could chart predictable trajectory for characterization, but there isn’t one; the only proven way I’ve found is time and observation. But the rewards of this process are great: if the people at the center of our stories are recognizable, their stories can create universal emotions for the reader.
The Power of Desire
Of course, fashioning a fleshed out person or two is not, by itself, enough (although it’s a fine start). The art of fiction is narrative in addition to portraiture. The encouraging news is that good characters suggest good stories, because every specific, fully rendered person will experience desire. All people want something—whether it is a thing (Moby Dick), a person (Lolita), a home (The Grapes of Wrath) an emotion (Catcher in the Rye), the recreation of a memory (The Great Gatsby), or whatever else. Your job as a writer involves recognizing these desires. Ideally, this is not something you will have to force; the more time you spend with characters, the more clearly their desires—like everything else—reveal themselves. Your job as a writer then becomes following those desires, and (for awhile at least) keeping them unfulfilled. There are countless ways to do this, but we’ll save that for some other time.
There are caveats, of course. The characters’ desires should be vital enough to lead them towards significant changes or experiences, which have impact beyond the world of the story. By the end of an Alastair Macleod story, a reader never doubts that they have read about the most significant thing to ever happen to a character, and that the ripples of their narrative transcend the borders of the page. Similarly, it’s helpful if characters’ desires and challenges are interesting to people beyond themselves—if their decisions impact other circumstances. Finally, it’s a good idea if the desire is complicated by some subsequent internal factors—which brings me to my final point.
The Power of Contradictions
A student of mine, in that simple, poignant way freshman have, once commented in workshop that “people are funny little creatures.” I could not agree more. The context had to do with a character wanting something (let’s say…“love”) purely and desperately, no other inclinations in her head. On paper, this sounds fine—the character wants something, put something in her way, and off you go. The problem, in this case, was that the character wanted nothing but love, and her desire was so passionately and undistractedly rendered that its very intensity became boring. People rarely want only one thing, and they rarely feel only one way about it. Characters should do the same. A character may desire the same thing someone he loves also wants, for example, but only one of them can have it; in working towards their goal characters may feel willingness to hurt that frightens and excites them, or they may attain their goal and find it empty, or unworthy of the price. Internal contradictions, surprises, create complexity, which is nothing more than the end sum of a character’s (and reader’s) divided emotions. These contradictions are also the stuff of great literature, and some of the most moving images in the Bible reflect this truth—fear-filled Jesus on his knees in dim Gethsemane; Abram’s trembling knife above his son; Jonah’s cowardly flight and remorse. Today, there are limitless complexities, contradictions, doubts, and textured triumphs in our faith and spirituality, and when taken together, these distinctions demonstrate “the human heart in conflict with itself”, which (in the words of William Faulkner) “alone can make great writing, because only that is worth writing about—worth the agony and the sweat.”
When selecting pieces for Relief, we always look for strong characterization, and many works we showcase (“The Institute of Transcendence” from 2.1 and “Baggage” from 2.2) do a fine job of creating three-dimensional characters. Check them out, and check back in two weeks for the next entry in our “Crafting Fiction” series.
Alan Ackmann received his MFA in fiction from the University of Arkansas and teaches at DePaul University.His work has appeared or is forthcoming in McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, Clackamas Literary Review, Louisiana Literature, Ontario Review, and elsewhere. He is a former fiction editor of The Evansville Review and was a Tennessee Williams Scholar at the 2007 Sewanee Writer’s Conference.Find out more at www.alanackmann.com.
We interrupt Relief News Tuesday to bring you an important response to questions/comments we’ve received regarding the direction for the Relief Blog.
Dear Relief Readers:
I don’t mean to sound like your girlfriend, but we need to talk.
The title of this blog is actually the subject line of an email I received in reply to last week’s post on how to read the Bible, which (along with several other comments we’ve recently received) leads me to believe that some people out there in Relief-land assume that “edgy,” the term Relief has used to describe our Christian literature, means we are Christians who don’t (or shouldn’t) read or study the Bible. Let me assure you, this is not the case.
In a way, this confusion is not unprecedented. Over the life of this journal, we’ve been asked by many to justify our existence in Christian publishing, and we’ve responded by saying that we seek to “bridge the gap” between what we perceive as a growing rift between secular and Christian publishing—a rift that was confirmed this past week when we were criticized for being both too conservative and traditional for edgy AND too loose and off-the-mark with our biblical interpretations to be considered “Christian.” What surprised us though, was that it was an atheist website that wrote we “watered down religion” by picking and choosing “which laws, rules or commandments” to follow, while it was the fellow Christian writers who criticized the fact that we are running a blog series on studying the Bible. And so, the question once again on everyone’s mind seems to be what we mean by “edgy.”
And we’ll admit it—carefully studying the Bible doesn’t initially seem like the most “edgy” activity in the world. Nevertheless, it is essential to living a healthy spiritual life—just as studying writing is essential to being a successful writer. As you’ve probably noticed by now, publishing “edgy” Christian writing isn’t our only goal here at Relief. We strive to also act as a resource for Christian writers, which mean we’ve published quite a few articles recently designed to make writers more professionally successful. For example, we’ve blogged about why writers need technology and how writers can hone their craft—and we’ve received glowing compliments about these articles, even though they weren’t as “edgy” as, say, our interview about Relevant Church’s 30 Day Sex Challenge. It seems, though, that it is easier to convince people that writing takes practice, development, and study than it is to convince them that faith also takes practice, development, and study. But as a Christian literary journal, we feel it necessary to address both Christian and literary matters alike.
Back to the Relief Blog:
With this in mind, we plan to continue publishing resources for Christians in addition to resources for writers—and we plan to present a comprehensive view of both subjects. In an effort to gain a “complete picture of Christ and life,” we have attempted to represent a complete picture of his people. We therefore have a right-wing conservative Christian blogging alongside a left-wing liberal one. We have a stay-at-home-schooling-mom blogging next to a workaholic dad. Heck, we have published authors blogging next to first-time bloggers. Think of this like Barbara Walters’ “The View,” only we won’t talk over each other, jockeying for more camera time. So stick around and get to know our new bloggers as God sees them: inquiring, intriguing, and absolutely beautiful people.
And for the record, almost all of the ideas you’ll encounter in these blogs, like almost all of what you’ll encounter in life, remain open to discussion and refinement. In addition to providing a full, eclectic picture of what it means to be Christian today, we also strive to be more accessible as a community. If something you read strikes you as either too edgy or not quite edgy enough, you are invited and encouraged to leave a comment (I think we are close to working out all the bugs with our commenting system). Think of the edginess as coming from your ability to assess, question, and delight in your faith as much as you would your art. And if you just can’t get enough of Relief on this website, you can also find us on Facebook, Twitter, and roaming around the Relief Writers Network. We strive to be a community and we would love for you to be a part of that community.
Like I said above, if both Christian life and Christian writing are going to be all that they can be, we need to talk.
Sincerely,
Heather von Doehren Assistant Editor Relief: A Quarterly Christian Expression
P.S. We’ve also received emails from people who can’t quite figure out what we’re blogging about when. That’s my fault, as I’ve been experimenting with the schedule this first month (think of me as the B. F. Skinner of the Relief Weblog). Therefore, I promise to experiment less for consistency’s sake. As such, you’ll find a “Blog Schedule” published on the right sidebar. Mondays will feature a message from one of our editors regarding the state of writing and publishing, focusing on topics specifically designed to help writers. Tuesdays will continue to feature updates about Relief News and other happenings with the journal. Wednesdays will be a sort of “Relief Recommends Day,” where we’ll publish interviews with authors, book reviews, websites that you absolutely must know about, and the like. Thursdays and Fridays we’ll rotate staff bloggers to give you insight into more general and personal stories about life, God, and writing. We will not update on Saturdays and Sundays (unless there’s breaking news) in order to focus on the actual print journal. Use this time to browse the archive or submit your creative work. Or, just browse and submit all the time. That works too.
Heather von Doehren is a former English teacher turned computer applications instructor, which works out well for Relief as she wears many hats, both literary and technical. Check out her video on How to Format Submissions Using Microsoft Word 2007!
Relief Assistant Editor Heather von Doehren teaches writers about the need for RSS feeds, popular feed readers, and about how to subscribe to your favorite websites' RSS feeds.
Over the course of our series on Writers and Technology, I’ve heard a fair amount of people say that the Internet just “takes up too much of their time.”It’s true.Blogging and Internet surfing can take time away from your “real” writing.But a fair amount of the business side to writing involves staying in touch with a lot of writing websites, news, events, and resources.The good news is, you can really limit the amount of time you spend surfing by subscribing to RSS Feeds.
Q: What is an RSS feed?
A: An RSS feed (which stands for Really Simple Syndication) brings your favorite websites to you rather than the other way around.For example, let’s say you keep typing in our URL because you can’t wait to see what the Relief bloggers will write about next.Well, you opening a web browser and typing in a link (or even clicking a bookmarked link) takes time.Well, subscribing to a website’s RSS feed means that you don’t have to keep checking back.As soon as content on your favorite website changes or updates, that article will appear in the “inbox” of your RSS reader.
Q: How do I subscribe to an RSS feed?
A: Well, you need some kind of feed reader.Most email programs will be equipped with this ability, but there are many to choose from.
There are email readers (you probably already use these for email) such as…
Thunderbird
Outlook
Personally, I use Outlook 2007, which upon opening my email Outlook will download any new content just as if it were an email.To add new feeds, all you have to do is right-click on the RSS Feeds folder and click “Add New RSS Feed.”Then it’s just a matter of copying and pasting the RSS link.
And there are many stand alone RSS applications you can install directly on your computer…
Still confused?Not convinced?There are a lot of other sites out there that explain RSS feeds better than I can.
To subscribe to the Relief feed:
Acquire one of the above RSS readers.I’d recommend Google if you are still confused.
Visit our website and click the above RSS Feed button located at the very top of this website.
Copy the URL and paste it inside your RSS reader to the appropriate place.
Just sit back and wait for quality content to come to you!
Next time, we’ll be talking about additional ways to make you writers more tech savvy with a little something called ‘social bookmarking.’So stay tuned!
Heather von Doehren is a former English teacher turned computer applications instructor (which works out well for Relief as she wears many hats, both literary and technical). Check out her video on How to Format Submissions Using Microsoft Word 2007!
Continuing his series on the Craft of Writing Fiction, 
Brad Fruhauff continues his series on the Craft of Christian Poetry with his third installment on the essentials of Christian poetry.
We interrupt Relief News Tuesday to bring you an important response to questions/comments we’ve received regarding the direction for the Relief Blog.
