TOPICS: Spotlight Workshops Style

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TOPICSSpotlight WorkshopsStyle VoiceFluency
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SPOTLIGHT WORKSHOPS ASSIGNMENTSJR 18 Write your
name on a slip of paper, and place it in the
lottery can.
     
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VOICE (AND STYLE)THE SOUND OF A STORY

• Voice is what the readers "hear" in their heads
  when they read your story.
• Voice is the "sound" of the story.
•  
• In every work, one voice rises above the rest and
  leads the reader through the mosaic of
  characters' voices. 
•  
• voice of story    voice of narrator
•  

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types of voice

• CONVERSATIONAL VOICEno dressing up. 
• It feels as if the narrator is having a casual
  conversation with the reader.
•  
• Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn  You
  don't know about me without you have read a book
  by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer but
  that ain't no matter. That book was made by Mr.
  Mark Twain, and he told the truth mainly. There
  was things which he stretched but mainly he told
  the truth. That is nothing. I never seen anybody
  but lied one time or another, without it was Aunt
  Polly, or the widow, or maybe Mary.
•  
• Salinger's Catcher in the Rye   If you really
  want to hear about it, the first thing you'll
  probably want to know is where I was born, and
  what my lousy childhood was like, and how my
  parents were occupied and all before they had me,
  and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but
  I don't feel like going into it, if you want to
  know the truth.

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types of voice

• INFORMAL VOICEdressing down, but tucking it in. 
  
• It does not feel as casual as a conversational
  voice however, does not have the dressed-up feel
  of formal voice.
•  
• Carver's "Cathedral"  I remembered having read
  somewhere that the blind don't smoke because, as
  speculation had it, they couldn't see the smoke
  they exhaled. I thought I knew that much and that
  much only about blind people. But this blind man
  smoked his cigarette down to the nubbin and then
  lit another one.
• main advantage informal voice is middle of the
  road and arguably the most commonly used voice in
  contemporary fiction.

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types of voice

• FORMAL VOICEprom night. 
•  
• Conveys a detachment from the characters--never
  chatty, conversational, or colloquial (unless, of
  course, these characteristics are conveyed via
  dialogue).
•  
• Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude
  Many years later, as he faced the firing squad,
  Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that
  distant afternoon when his father took him to
  discover ice. At that time Macondo was a village
  of twenty adobe houses, built on the bank of a
  river of clear water that ran along a bed of
  polished stones, which were white and enormous,
  like prehistoric eggs. The world was so recent
  that many things lacked names, and in order to
  indicate them it was necessary to point.
•  
• Nabakov's Lolita  And less than six inches from
  me and my burning life, was nebulous Lolita!
  After a long stirless vigil, my tentacles moved
  towards her again, and this time the creak of the
  mattress did not wake her. I managed to bring my
  ravenous bulk so close to her that I felt the
  aura of her bare shoulder like a warm breath upon
  my cheek.
•  
• This dressed-up style can work in contemporary
  fiction when you're working on a big screen
  sweep a story that spans several generations, a
  number of locations, and a multitude of
  characters.

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types of voice

• CEREMONIAL VOICEthe Armani tux and Vera Wang
  gown are mustsall jewels are the real thing. 
•  
• While this is not an easy voice to convey in
  contemporary fiction, many writers have and
  continue to use it to great effect. Nearly always
  written in third-person POV. 
•  
• Stein's Melanctha  Melanctha Herbert was always
  losing what she had in wanting all the things she
  saw. Melanctha was always being left when she was
  not leaving others.
•     Melanctha Herbert always loved too hard and
  much too often. She was always full with mystery
  and subtle movements and denials and vague
  distrusts and complicated disillusions. Then
  Melanctha would be sudden and impulsive and
  unbounded in some faith, and then she would
  suffer and be strong in her repression.
• Melanctha Herbert was always seeking rest and
  quiet, and always she could only find new ways to
  be in trouble.
• Some call it biblical rhythm because of its
  repetitious language and odd phrasing. See
  Morrison's work for more examples of the
  ceremonial.

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STYLE AND VOICE ARE NOT THE SAME

• STYLE consists of the technical choices made by
  the writer.
• VOICE is the sum result of those choices.
•  
• If voice is a magnificent dress, style is the
  fabrics, threads, buttons, and pattern-design
  that create the garment.
• VOICE IS CREATED BY THE MOST ELEMENTAL WRITING
  TOOLS
•  
• words you choose
• how you string them together in a sentence
• how you mix match sentences to form paragraphs
•  

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WORD CHOICE (aka diction)

• Murakami's "Sleep"  All I wanted to do was to
  throw myself down and sleep. But I couldn't. The
  wakefulness was always there beside me. I could
  feel its chilling shadow. It was the shadow of
  myself. Weird, I would think as the drowsiness
  overtook me, I'm in my own shadow. I would walk
  and eat and talk to people inside my drowsiness .
  . .
•  
• Updike's "Falling Asleep" Falling asleep has
  never struck me as a very natural thing to do.
  There is a surreal trickiness to traversing that
  inbetween area, when the grip of consciousness is
  slipping but has not quite let go and curious
  mutated thoughts pass as normal cognition unless
  snapped into clear light by a creaking door,
  one's bed partner twitching, or the prematurely
  jubilant realization, I'm falling asleep. The
  little fumbling larvae of nonsense that precede
  dreams' uninhibited butterflies are disastrously
  exposed to a light they cannot survive, and one
  must begin again, relaxing the mind into
  unraveling.
•  
• WHAT DIFFERENCES DO YOU NOTICE IN WORD CHOICE?
  WHAT ARE THE EFFECTS OF THESE CHOICES?

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SENTENCE CONSTRUCTION

• Words alone do not create voice how words are
  put together is what really gives writing
  voiceit is possibly the most important stylistic
  choice a writer makes.
• two basic considerations
• sentence length
• sentence structure

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WRITING EXERCISEJR 19 Comma Types

• Prompt (a) write a short poem, and each line
  must begin with a preposition.
•   
• Prompt (b) document the following comma types
  and the examples provided on the board.
•  
• starter commas
•  
• conjunction commas
•  
• island commas
•  
• list commas
•  
• "Hey, you!" commas
•  

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WRITING EXERCISEJR 20 Fluency Application

• Prompt (a) select any mundane activity (e.g.,
  cleaning the house, tending to bills, standing in
  line at the grocery store, etc.). Document the
  activity in your response space.
•  
• REMEMBER THE FIVE SENSES
• SIGHT
• SOUND
• TASTE
• TOUCH
• SMELL
• "As to adjective when in doubt, strike it out."
  Thoreau
•  
•  
• Prompt (b) your character is engaged in the
  mundane activity you selected, and your goal is
  to (1) capture each of the five senses in
  wonderfully vivid ways and (2) be hyperconscious
  of sentence crafting. However, here's the twist
  your character has recently fallen in love, is
  suffering from a hangover, OR is just about to
  engage in her/his ultimate vice while performing
  the task.

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REVIEWING OPENINGS

• a refresher BEGINNINGS
• drops the reader into the middle of action
• provides a good deal of the necessary background
  information to get your reader up to speed
• must establish the major dramatic question
• You need to start at the "right" timenot two
  days beforehand.
• It is fabulous when you begin at the point of
  change.
• You should provide a sufficient amount of
  exposition, but remember that the reader wants to
  get to the action.

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REVIEWING OPENINGS

• Hurson's Their Eyes Are Watching God
• Ships at a distance have every man's wish on
  board. For some they come in with the tide. For
  others they sail forever on the horizon, never
  out of sight, never landing until the Watcher
  turns his eyes away in resignation, his dreams
  mocked to death by Time. That is the life of men.
• Now, women forget all those things they don't
  want to remember, and remember everything they
  don't want to forget. The dream is the truth.
  Then they act and do things accordingly.
• So the beginning of this was a woman and she
  had come back from burying the dead . . .  

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REVIEWING OPENINGS

• Hornby's High Fidelity
• Prologue
• THEN . . .
• My desert-island, all-time top five most
  memorable split ups, in chronological order
• Alison Ashworth
• Penny Hardwick
• Jackie Allen
• Charlie Nicholson
• Sarah Kendrew
• These were the ones that really hurt. Can you
  see you name in that lot, Laura? I reckon youd
  sneak into the top ten, but theres no place for
  you in the top five those places are for the
  kind of humiliations and heartbreaks that youre
  just not capable of delivering. That probably
  sounds crueler than it is meant to, but the fact
  is that were too old to make each other
  miserable, and thats a good thing, not a bad
  thing, so dont take your failure to make the
  list personally. Those days are gone, and good
  fucking riddance to them unhappiness really
  meant something back then. Now its just a drag,
  like a cold or having no money. If you really
  wanted to mess me up, you should have got to me
  earlier.
• One
• NOW . . .
• see p. 35

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REVIEWING OPENINGS

• Fielding's Bridget Joness Diary
• Prologue
• New Years Resolutions side by side

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REVIEWING OPENINGS

• Sparks's The Notebook
• Who am I? And how, I wonder, will this story
  end?
•  
• The sun has come up and I am sitting by a
  window that is foggy with the breath of a life
  gone by. I'm a sight this morning two shirts,
  heavy pants, a scarf wrapped around my neck and
  tucked into a thick sweater knitted by my
  daughter thirty years ago. The thermostat in my
  room is set as high as it will go, and a smaller
  space heater sits directly behind me. It clicks
  and groans and spews hot air like a fairy-tale
  dragon, and still my body shivers with a cold
  that will never go away, a cold that has been
  eighty years in the making. Eighty years, I think
  sometimes, and despite my own acceptance of my
  age, it still amazes me that I haven't been warm
  since George Bush was president. I wonder if this
  is how it is for everyone.
• My life? It isn't easy to explain. It has not
  been the rip-roaring spectacular I fancied it
  would be, but neither have I burrowed around with
  the gophers. I suppose it has most resembled a
  blue-chip stock fairly stable, more ups than
  downs, and gradually trending upward over time. A
  good buy, a lucky buy, and I've learned that not
  everyone can say this about his life. But do not
  be mislead. I am nothing special of this I am
  sure. I am a common man with common thoughts, and
  I've led a common life. There are no monuments
  dedicated to me and my name will soon be
  forgotten, but I've loved another with all my
  heart and soul, and to me, this has always been
  enough.  

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REVIEWING OPENINGS

• King's Apt Pupil
•   He looked like the total all-American kid as
  he pedaled his twenty-six inch Schwinn with the
  apehanger handlebars up the residential suburban
  street, and that's just what he was Todd Bowden,
  thirteen years old, five-feet-eight and a healthy
  one-hundred and forty pounds, hair the color of
  ripe corn, blue eyes, white even teeth, lightly
  tanned skin marred by not even the first shadow
  of adolescent acne.
• He was smiling a summer vacation smile as he
  pedaled through the sun and shade not too far
  from his own house . . .

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REVIEWING OPENINGS

• Palahniuk's Fight Club
• Tyler gets me a job as a waiter, after that
  Tyler's pushing a gun in my mouth and saying, the
  first step to eternal life is you have to die.
  For a long time though, Tyler and I were best
  friends. People are always asking, did I know
  about Tyler Durden.
• The barrel of the gun pressed against the back
  of my throat, Tyler says, "We really won't die."
• With my tongue I can feel the silencer holes we
  drilled into the barrel of the gun. Most of the
  noise a gunshot makes is expanding gases, and
  there's the tiny sonic boom a bullet makes
  because it travels so fast. To make a silencer,
  you just drill holes in the barrel of the gun, a
  lot of holes. This lets the gas escape and slows
  the bullet to below the speed of sound.
• You drill the holes wrong and the gun will blow
  off your hand.
• "This isn't really death," Tyler says. "We'll
  be legend. We won't grow old." 

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WRITING EXERCISEJR 21 Examining Openings

• Prompt what patterns do you notice between the
  various openings? what strikes you about the
  authors' choices?

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IMITATION FLUENCY

• Excerpted from Hurston's Their Eyes Are Watching
  God
•  
• It was a spring afternoon in West Florida.
  Janie had spent most of the day under a
  blossoming pear tree in the back-yard. She had
  been spending every minute that she could steal
  from her chores under that tree for the last
  three days. That was to say, ever since the first
  tiny bloom had opened. It had called to her to
  come and gaze on a mystery. From barren brown
  stems to glistening leaf-buds from the leaf-buds
  to snowy virginity of bloom . . .
• Excerpted from Student-Writer Malia Dean's
  Imitation
•  
• It was a winter morning in Pearl Harbor. Paul
  had spent most of the night in a downtown Waikiki
  bar. He had been spending every minute that he
  could steal from time to escape the horrors of
  the possibility of death which could occur at any
  moment and remembering the loves claimed every
  day for the fight of freedom. That was to say,
  ever since the first moment of realizing his air
  tubes could be cut without warning had opened his
  eyes to live in the moment. It called him to come
  and gaze at the painted ladies and submerge
  himself into a world of mystery. The starch white
  neatly pressed uniforms illuminated the night
  like fireflies, as they lumbered about the
  streets looking for an opening to seek refuge for
  the moment before moving on to the next lighted
  tavern willing to serve another drink . . .

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WRITING EXERCISEJR 22 Imitation

• Prompt imitate one of the following openings, by
  utilizing the author's sentence constructions to
  describe your protagonist.
• He looked like the total all-American kid as he
  pedaled his twenty-six inch Schwinn with the
  apehanger handlebars up the residential suburban
  street, and that's just what he was Todd Bowden,
  thirteen years old, five-feet-eight and a healthy
  one-hundred and forty pounds, hair the color of
  ripe corn, blue eyes, white even teeth, lightly
  tanned skin marred by not even the first shadow
  of adolescent acne. He was smiling a summer
  vacation smile as he pedaled through the sun and
  shade not too far from his own house . . .  
• The sun has come up and I am sitting by a window
  that is foggy with the breath of a life gone by.
  I'm a sight this morning two shirts, heavy
  pants, a scarf wrapped around my neck and tucked
  into a thick sweater knitted by my daughter
  thirty years ago. The thermostat in my room is
  set as high as it will go, and a smaller space
  heater sits directly behind me. It clicks and
  groans and spews hot air like a fairy-tale
  dragon, and still my body shivers with a cold
  that will never go away, a cold that has been
  eighty years in the making. Eighty years, I think
  sometimes, and despite my own acceptance of my
  age, it still amazes me that I haven't been warm
  since George Bush was president. I wonder if this
  is how it is for everyone.

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WRITING EXERCISEJR 23 One Avenue for Opening

• Prompt let's try one avenue for opening your
  novelsimply drop your protagonist into an urgent
  moment (or point of change) and write.
• Heads Up
• sift through your favorite authors prose,
• and select a fabulously amazing segment
• for an upcoming imitation exercise.