And Williams did. He didn’t redirect to something safer, for example having the narrator distract himself with the comforting childhood memory of eating a nice hot dog on July 4. Nor did he jump ahead to a future scene and recount the sex using dialogue or tasteful snippets of memory. Nope, the writer unpacked the details and read them in public to a crowd. Tom admired him for having the courage to write the tough stuff. And to read it. And if you were my student I’d tell you that that is your job.
To quote Joy Williams, “You don’t write to make friends.”
Joy Williams
It doesn’t make me look like anyone’s bright, shining god when I stand up and read the “Guts” story. In many ways it’s an act of public suicide. But good writing is not about making the writer look good.
So unpack the big stuff. Do not deliver important information via dialogue. Tension: No Thesis Statements
Imagine a stripper walking out onstage, shucking his or her pants, and saying, “This is my junk. Any questions?”
Whether it was Channing Tatum or Jenna Jameson, you’d feel cheated. As readers or exotic dance enthusiasts, we want tension. We want a gradual discovery process. The outcome is more or less predictable: genitals. So we want sustained arousal and engagement.
It’s a common mistake to give away everything in the opening sentence:
Lilla arrived at the barn dance a few minutes late, but just in time to see Reynolds kissing on Dawn Taylor.
Sure, there’s a smidgen of tension. Who does what next? But everything is so summarized the reader hasn’t had the pleasure of discovering anything. The payoff is in the first sentence. We don’t know what the barn looks like, or smells like. We’ve no idea how Lilla feels, if her shoes hurt, or if she’s been waiting tables all day. We’re just—blam—dropped into the action.
This summary might work in comedy, where constantly negating drama creates humor. But even the best jokes rely on creating tension and then resolving it very quickly. Sometimes it’s a long buildup full of power reversals, for instance:
A businessman arrives at his hotel and checks into his room. He opens the minibar and pours himself a Scotch, then dials the number of an escort service. When a voice says, “Hello,” he interrupts. Fast, before he can lose his nerve, he demands, “Listen. I need you to send over the biggest, blackest stud you have and the skinniest, whitest nerd you have. I want to watch the black guy fuck the white guy, and then to watch the white guy fuck the black guy. And then I want to fuck them both. You got that? Can you make that happen?” At the pause, a polite voice, a familiar voice says, “Sir, you’ve reached Reception. You’ll need to dial nine for an outside line…”
A long setup. The plot broken down into simple actions. The man in power asks for a display of power. Then he asks for a reversal of that power. Then he plans to overpower everyone. Finally, he’s humiliated and left without power. So even humor needs to create tension for its strongest effect.
Consider that each sentence should raise a small question. As the smaller questions are resolved, they should raise ever-larger questions. A dancer removes her white gloves. He removes his necktie. She begins to unzip the back of her dress. He shucks his dinner jacket.
An opening creates a question and promises it will be answered, but not too quickly. Consider the first line of Gone with the Wind. “Scarlett O’Hara was not beautiful, but men seldom realized that when caught in her charm…”
It instantly makes you wonder, Why? You’re hooked. Tension: No Dreams
As Tom explained this, Gordon Lish forbid depicting dreams in fiction. His thinking, as I understood it, was that dream sequences are a cheat. Reality can be just as surreal. Look at anything by Nathanael West.
Arbitrary as it might sound, nobody wants to hear about your dream from last night. Not even Carl Jung, unless you’re paying him $150 an hour, and even then he’s faking his interest. Dreams are fake, and fake stuff creates no tension. Fiction is already fake stuff so you don’t need to water it down with faker stuff.
Remember, you came to me. You asked my advice on writing, and I’m telling you what I was taught: no dreams. Tension: Avoiding Forms of Is and Have and Thought Verbs
According to another article clipped from Scientific American and sent to me by a reader, a study demonstrated that people respond differently to different types of verbs.
When they read an active, physical verb like “step” or “kick” or “grabbed,” the verb activates the part of their brain responsible for that movement. Your brain responds as if you’re actually swimming a stroke or sneezing.
But when you read any form of the verb “is” or “has,” no corresponding brain activity occurs. Likewise with abstract verbs such as “believe” or “love” or “remember.” No sympathetic cognitive mirroring, or whatever, takes place.
Thus a passage like, “Arlene was at the door. She had long, brown hair, her face had a look of shocked surprise. She was taller than he remembered…” is less engaging than, “Arlene stepped into view, framed by the open doorway. With one gloved hand she brushed her long, brown hair away from her face. Her penciled eyebrows arched in surprise…”
With that in mind, I’d tell you to avoid “is” and “has” in any form. And avoid abstract verbs in favor of creating the circumstances that allow your reader to do the remembering, the believing, and the loving. You may not dictate emotion. Your job is to create the situation that generates the desired emotion in your reader. Tension: The Second-Act Road Trip
Once you’ve exhausted your standard settings, consider gathering your characters and sending them into the great outside world for some fresh perspective.
The road trip at
