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How to Write Fiction for Close Reading: Pay Attention to Significant Detail
Posted on April 24, 2020 by Christine Walker
The first sentence of a well-written novel gives clues to its theme and structure. Some great novels begin with a sweeping view of past events or future possibilities, but without significant details in the first sentence.
"In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice I've been turning over in my mind ever since." (F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby); or "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife." (Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice).
Neither of these sentences give details of characters, even whether the protagonist will be male or female, or of setting. Both of these novels, of course, incorporate significant details in the writing as they progress, and they both contain vivid characters and setting. Because so many great novels contain similar sweeping views toward the past or future, we might think we need to write our opening sentences to show the scope of our ambitions. But there are exceptions.
Anne Enright's The Green Road begins with two small details of events and an indication that time has passed between these two moments. In this first sentence, two characters are introduced and the setting of the kitchen—the home—which also has a role as character.
"Later, after Hanna made some cheese on toast, her mother came into the kitchen and filled a hot water bottle from the big kettle on the range."
Being an admirer of well-crafted first sentences, I puzzled at this one. I read it several times. Why begin with "later"? It seemed confusing. Why mention two mundane acts? Neither captured my imagination. I liked Enright's previous prize-winning novel The Gathering very much, and like its predecessor, The Green Road also won the Man Booker Prize, among others. I trust this writer. I know that details matter to her. So I read on, paying close attention.
Cheese on toast is a simple, common food. Filling the hot water bottle from the kettle is a simple act of comfort and self-care. I already know a lot about these characters, this domestic story. "Later" indicates that time will be an element and that this writer is in control of it.
'Go on up to your uncle's for me, will you?' she said. 'Get me some Solpadeine.'
'You think?'
'My head's fog,' she said.
So begins a novel that is all about the small moments of life, about paying attention or not paying attention to these moments, about retaining them in the memory and the heart, and about the time that passes between them and sequences them into a lifetime of moments well lived or not. The story is about what happens over the decades in the lives of the mother (Rosaleen Madigan) and her children Hanna, Emmet, Dan, and Constance. In this post, I want to explore how and where the theme of paying attention to small moments manifests in Enright's vivid writing.
Lesson: Loop time and use metaphor to mimic consciousness.
The first chapter, which begins on page 3, (Norton 2016 paperback edition) ends on page 35 with Roseleen again asking Hanna 'Go on up to your uncle's for me, will you?' and declaring 'My head's a fog.' In those 32 pages, we travel out of the Madigan's house and over the humpy bridge into town, out and back again. Through observing select moments that Enright presents, we learn a bit about youngest daughter Hanna and see all four Madigan children in their roles in the family, see indications of the best and worst of Rosaleen—her 'horizontal solution' for dealing with things, her giving and withholding of love. We see the father (Pat). We meet the uncle (Bart) and other relatives. We observe some family dynamics between Rosaleen's Considine relatives and her husband's Madigan relatives.
With these moments, Enright starts us abruptly in a moment in the past and draws us years forward to where the Green Road may lead. "My head's a fog" begins and ends the chapter. Readers have come full circle, as most of us often do in our own musings of the past. We've begun the story understanding that Rosaleen's mind isn't sharp. There are gaps in Rosaleen's thinking, in her memory. Near the end of the novel, Rosaleen is wandering in the night and lost. We are in her consciousness:…there were gaps between things, and this frightened her. This is where Rosaleen was now. She had fallen into the gap.
This is how we think, how we remember. We compress time and incident, we stack memories and loop them back on themselves, gathering up as we go random incidents that happened after the earlier memory but now inform that memory through other memories. In her first chapter, Enright has prepared the reader for traveling forward and backward in time, naturally as we do in memory and consciousness, a device she'll use throughout the book.
Lesson: Show a moment in time to detail characters, emotions and motivations
The sweep of characters is shown, not told, through an omniscient and close-third chronicling of moments of conflicted love and attention.
Rather than tell readers that Hanna has internalized her mother's inconsistent demonstration of love, Enright shows Hanna moving from lack of attention to what her mother said, thus being not worried, to being concerned about her mother's health. Rather than say that Rosaleen's relatives are annoyed because they feel Rosaleen married beneath her, Enright shows Uncle Bart's [Rosaleen's brother's] irritation. Hanna is at the pharmacy on the errand to pick up medication for her mother. 'What does she want?' [Bart said.] 'Em. I can't remember,' said Hanna. 'Her chest.' Hanna gets the Solpadeine but lingers at the perfume counter, "Do you think Mammy's all right?" Her uncle replies, 'Oh for God's sake. What?"
Rather than tell readers that Hanna' oldest brother Dan feels a loyalty to his mother, whom he has hurt, and rather than tell us that Hanna feels conflicted by a loyalty to her mother and to Dan, Enright shows us a moment on one Sunday before Easter, shortly after Dan announces he is going to become a priest. Rosaleen has gone upstairs to her room and is not coming down. Dan hangs around, rather than going back to college. Hanna carries food up to his room. Sometimes he only took a bit of the food and Hanna finished it as she took it back to the kitchen, and the stale edge to the bread made her even more fond of her brother, in his confinement.
Rather than tell readers that Dan doesn't fit into this family, Enright shows us a moment between Dan and Hanna on one Christmas when Dan is back home. Dan passed Hanna in the hall and he took her to him, saying, 'Save me, Hanna. Save me from these ghastly people.' He folded her in his arms.
Rather than tell readers that eldest daughter Constance will bear the burden of guilt for Rosaleen and stay close to home to continue trying to prove her love, Enright shows the family dinner table one night. Her mother juddering and sputtering, with the carrots falling from her mouth in little lumps and piles. 'Oh, Mammy,' said Constance, leaning in, with her arm around her, to slip the plate neatly away.
Lesson: Prepare the readers for what you want them to notice.
Writers notice details. Through our writing, we pay attention to what we notice and want our readers to notice. By showing and telling, we decide what matters and what is important to our stories. The masterful handling of significant details can make good fiction more vivid and memorable. You can guide your readers into the story by starting with the sweeping view or starting with small, but meaningful, details. Enright could have begun with a view of the green road, which is an important element in the story. She could have given us a bird's-eye view of the road curing through the landscape and shown the houses, the village, the cliffs. She could have begun high on the road, overlooking the sea, and brought us swooping down into the Madigan's home, into their kitchen, to the boiling kettle. A cinematic beginning. But this book doesn't have a cinematic feel. It feels close to the body, held within the family, within traditions even as characters strain against them. When Dan and Emmet venture far beyond Ireland, their conflicted emotions of family, of Rosaleen, her neediness—her inability to give unconditional love or to graciously accept the love they give—tethers them to her and to their home.
In the end, Rosaleen says, "I have paid too little attention. I think that's the problem. I should have paid more attention to things." But readers have paid attention. Enright has made sure that we noticed all those things that Rosaleen missed.
Posted in 1 Gatekeepers & Story Seeds, 3 Character Development, 6 Time & Consciousness, 7 Love & Other Emotions, Anne Enright, Uncategorized, Workshops Follow-up	| Tagged Anne Enright, character development, creative writing, fiction, first sentences, The Green Road, writing, writing a novel, writing fiction	| Leave a reply
How to Create Presence of Place
Posted on October 21, 2018 by Christine Walker
Would you like to create a more vivid presence of place in your fiction? Here's a Moment of Mastery to inspire your creative process for success: Name the flora and fauna.
A subscriber to my YouTube channel suggested that I feature award-winning mystery writer James Lee Burke for this topic. His descriptive prose gives place a compelling presence while serving the story. Watch the video and/or read below.
In "Black Cherry Blues," Burke's naming of flora and fauna stimulates the senses and sets up character: "It was a place of salt-poisoned grass, alligators, insects, magpies, turkey buzzards, drowned cows whose odor reached a half mile into the sky, tropical storms that could sand the paint off a water tower, and people like my friend who had decided to slip through a hole in the dimension and live on their own terms."
Burke describes a world so uninviting that even before you meet the friend, you already know something about him. Who could tolerate living in this hostile place?
In "A Morning for Flamingos," the insistent naming of plants creates a felt, human-scale space and movement through it: "My apartment was inside a walled courtyard that you entered through an iron gate and a domed brick walkway. The flower beds were thick with blooming azalea and camellia and untrimmed banana tress, and the people who lived in the second-story apartments had placed coffee cans of begonias and hung baskets of impatiens along the balcony."
The reader looks up. In spite of the security assumed by the iron gate, the hanging plants suggest unease and add to the story's tension.
In "Dixie City Jam," the naming of one specific bird and plant creates a sharp-focused scene: "Down below in the muddy current, a dead snow egret floated among an island of twigs and torn camellia leaves. The egret's wing had been broken, and above one eye was the coppery glint of an embedded BB in the feathers." The dead bird contrasts the stark beauty of life with death.
In "Heaven's Prisoners," a listing of views in rapid succession creates cinematic space: "The sugar cane and rice fields were behind me now. The black earth and flooded cypress and oak trees were replaced by pastureland and piney woods, lumber mills and cotton acreage, sandy red roads that cut through the limitless pecan orchards."
The landscape speeding by serves the story with a sense of distance and time passing.
What places do you know well? Where have you lived and visited that shaped who you are? From that knowing can come powerful presence of place for your writing. Or do research. When populating place, put in specific flora and fauna to develop character, create tension, add sensory detail, and serve the story in many ways.
WRITING PROMPT: Think of a place or look at the photo of the alley in the video. Begin a scene. Add flora and fauna. Name them. Not just a hanging plant, but a genus or species – a Japanese wisteria or Million Bells. Not just an alley cat, but a breed – a Sphynx or Savannah. See how the names enhance and suggest more for the scene and start a story.
For a free trial of my online course "Writing Fiction: 9 Ways to Mastery" go to courses.christinewalker.net
Visit my YouTube channel for videos on writing fiction, memoir, visual storytelling, and creative process. Transform Your Story —the one you're writing, the one you're living.
Posted in 4 Place	| Tagged A Man Called Ove, Christine Walker, creative writing, fiction, fiction craft, James Lee Burke, sense of place in fiction	| Leave a reply
Posted in 0 Introduction to Craft, 2 Voice, Style & POV, 3 Character Development, Memoir, Writing Fiction YouTube videos	| Tagged Bill Bryson, Christine Walker, How to write a memoir, writing a memoir, writing fiction	| Leave a reply
How to Write Fiction – Tell Truths
"Truth" is a hot topic these days. Truthiness. Truth isn't truth. Alternative facts. Fake news. Fiction is an art form based on questioning and finding deeper truths about ourselves and others—about what it is to be human.
In the 1960s, author Flannery O'Connor said, "We live now in an age which doubts both fact and value, which is swept this way and that by momentary convictions. Written a half-century ago, her words speak to us today. "Instead of reflecting a balance from the world around him, the novelist now has to achieve one from a felt balance inside himself."
For instance, a writer's story about a town's divisive politics—one group of people clinging to the past, another group wanting change—could become a polemic if the writer uses the narrative to argue his opinion and refute the other.
But what if this writer, inspired by seeing a small-town Fourth of July parade, creates a fictional character, who clings to the past and is afraid of the new. Let's call him Ray. He's a mechanic, a restorer of cars. His daughter marries someone of another race or religion. Then a family that Ray sees as "foreign" moves in next door. He's angry. He's used to fixing things, but he can't fix this. He doesn't have the tools. His world is disrupted. Now we have the beginnings of a story. Because fiction is about transformation, we know Ray must change, but how and why? What actions will he take?
In what ways will the daughter and neighbors also transform? Will they help Ray through a crisis? Will he help them? The writer avoids a timeworn polemic and explores universal human truths about choosing to love and making things right. Whether humorous, poignant, or tragic, the story becomes timeless. Through writing it, through reading it, we discover our own ability or inability to love deeply and to restore lovingly what's been damaged.
Wherever fiction is set, past or present, fictional town or real, when it's grounded in human truths, it will ring true for readers now and into the future. Without human truths, fiction would feel false. By telling truths with imagination, we make fiction readable, believable and memorable.
Go to https://courses.christinewalker.net for a free trial of my online course "Writing Fiction: 9 Ways to Mastery."
Now – go out into the world or turn on the news. Listen for differing opinions and deeply held beliefs. Listen for anger and hurt. Listen for human truths. Then give one deep belief to one character, the opposite to another.
Write a scene where they argue. What truths are at the depths of their emotions? What does each character have to gain or lose by changing? You, the writer, takes each side in your heart. What can you learn from them?
Posted in 0 Introduction to Craft, 3 Character Development, 4 Place, 9 Theme & Gestalt, Writing Fiction YouTube videos	| Tagged character development, Christine Walker, creative writing, fiction, fiction craft, fictional characters, short stories, writing	| Leave a reply
Writing Fiction – An Online Course
Posted on August 3, 2018 by Christine Walker
I created this blog several years ago to accompany the Read to Write Books writing classes I taught at my local bookstores for writers and readers. In the blog, you'll find lessons of story, craft, and writing intentions that authors give us on the pages of books through their masterful examples of prose.
These past few months, I've been creating "Writing Fiction – 9 Ways to Mastery," a self-paced online course featuring videos and writing activities in pdf. Check it out and enroll in the preview for free at Courses.ChristineWalker.net.
Today I launched a YouTube channel and posted this trailer for the course. It introduces the framework I call "Master Craft Juggling," which I designed to help writers learn basic and advanced elements of fiction. I will also be posting a "Moments of Mastery" video every Friday to inspire and inform a meaningful, productive, and successful writing practice.
Writers start with a blank page every time and juggle the elements to make the story. I organize the elements into 9 groups to help you gain skill with them individually and in combination. They are: 1. First & Last Sentences and Story Seeds, 2. Voice, Style & Point of View, 3. Whole-bodied Characters, 4. Presence of Place, 5. Tension & Plot, 6. Time & Consciousness, 7. Love & Other Emotions, 8. Image & the Senses, 9. Theme & Gestalt.
Developing ability and agility with the elements of fiction will inform your writing practice, whether you're starting a story, revising a novel draft, writing a memoir, writing nonfiction, or polishing for publication. The course will help you create fictional characters, plot a novel, shape your short story ideas, overcome writer's block, develop your writer tools, establish good writing habits, find your writing voice, and much more. And you'll have fun!
The best books on writing fiction are the novels and short story collections that masterful authors create. They show us by example how to write fiction that is compelling and memorable. The best writing advice is to read closely and well. If you read with a mind to enjoy the story but also to notice craft and intention from a writer's perspective, you will always find within reach many wonderful and inspiring companions for your writing journeys. In my teaching, I show how to learn from these lessons that accomplished authors give us on the page.
Join me on my YouTube channel and online course in discovering how masterful fiction shows us ways to write our own memorable and publishable stories and books. Learn to write toward your highest aspirations and establish a writing practice to achieve your goals and potential. Preview the course for free at https://courses.christinewalker.net.
With "Writing Fiction – 9 Ways to Mastery," you can access the video lessons and writing activities from anywhere and tuck in some watching and writing any time of day, wherever you can find a quiet moment to log on! And you can also download the videos and activities to take with you. You'll be newly inspired every day to fulfill your writing desires and goals!
Get ready for mastery!
Posted in 0 Introduction to Craft, Workshops: A Course in Fiction Craft, Writing Fiction YouTube videos	| Tagged books, creative writing, Creativity, fiction, literature, short stories, writing	| Leave a reply
Posted in 1 Gatekeepers & Story Seeds, 2 Voice, Style & POV, 3 Character Development, A Man Called Ove, Fredrik Backman	| Tagged A Man Called Ove, character development, close third-person, Emotions, fictional characters, Fredrik Bachman, point of view	| 2 Replies
Trouble with Characters
Posted on January 7, 2015 by Christine Walker
I've been thinking a lot about conflict. I prefer to avoid it in real life, but must heighten it in my fiction. My teachers at the Bennington MFA Writing Seminars said, "Give your characters more trouble!" Every good writing manual says, "Conflict is the heart of fiction." Characters without conflict are nice people we might like to meet for lunch but wouldn't compel us to turn pages when reading about them.
Lesson: Trouble comes in many forms. Imagine the possibilities!
Author Nancy Margulies invents troubled characters —"strangers" for whom she feels "compassion for their predicaments and gratitude for their honesty."
As promised (see my post of November 25, 2013), Margulies has written a group of stories titled Sudden Friction. They comprise a chapter in her book of short shorts Animal Husband, where she dishes out all kinds of conflict. Her inspiration comes from one-word prompts—such as patient, bridge, final act—given by her writing group.
Here are a few characters: the six-year-old girl who can't speak but conveys love to her mother: seven-year-old Millicent and Michael, conjoined twins separated at the age of four; Rose, a repentant arsonist; Ralph and JoyLee, whose marriage stinks; Francie, who tries to deconstruct her horrific childhood; Maggie and Peggy spilling secrets about their high school days; Marsha, who follows in the footsteps of a man on a beach; Grandma Nell, who believed a bracelet would protect her; a daughter hospitalized because her father commanded her to dive; a beat-up teenager who knocks on his aunt's door.
Lesson: Let the reader be the judge, not the author.
The process of writing "whatever comes to mind without judging or editing" allows room for the compassion needed to conjure such misfortunate characters onto the page. Margulies sketches them vividly for us to witness. Will we like them or care about them? Maybe, maybe not. Do they even like or care about themselves? Not always. But most of them come to life after only a few paragraphs or pages. And many of them stick in the mind and heart after meeting.
These people could go anywhere—they're fiction! Margulies takes them briefly into imagined circumstances and offers unexpected, wise, or open-ended resolutions. If we follow them beyond the stories, dig deeper into character, what would we discover? Some of her characters experience similar troubles and a few characters reappear. Margulies explores themes of abuse, abandonment, secrecy, confrontation, and acceptance. "Bad Daddy" show up in many guises, bad deeds go unpunished, and people hope for the best.
Lesson: Let there be rays of light in the darkness!
In Margulies' stories, truth is mercurial and promises vanish, but otherwise bleak circumstances are gifted by her humor. Even the most despicable characters or ones that might in other hands beg for our pity, receive her comic relief. These people open their closets and shut their mouths. They threaten, murder, betray, repent, apologize, and forgive—not necessarily in that order. They witness magic; they look on the bright side. When a crystal horse come alive in Macy's and quickly disappears, the clerk makes the best of being left with horseshit, not a magic horse. The crystal turds "are stunning," after all.
Lesson: Explore a range of real emotions & find out what your characters need.
If we are loved and nourished, educated and accomplished, where's the problem? If we are safe and have self-esteem, what is the real need? Is hatred, shame, terror, or longing the most powerful emotion to explore in fiction? Is sex or justice a more compelling goal for a character to seek? Each of us lives in our own skin, as do our characters, and any range or amount of troubles can be authentic and compelling. Any need can be intriguing. It all depends on our ability to write characters, and their ability to carry the story.
For my Read to Write Books workshops, I develop visuals to aid writers in their craft. Recently, I've been struggling with a protagonist who is, by her own admission, flawed and forlorn. I envisioned her narrative arc from feeling deadened inside to full of life, from grieving to gracious. But the problem is, her troubles aren't interesting enough to keep the reader turning pages. I need to re-imagine her flaws, up the ante on her problems, heighten her losses and gains. Below, I've posted visuals I created for the Love & Emotions workshop. I'm re-visiting these schematics to give my protagonist more conflict and depth. And I thank Nancy Margulies for her example of compassionately imagining and presenting troubled characters—ones we may come to love or hate, but who eagerly claim the right to take up space on the page and in our hearts and minds.
May all your troubles be interesting!
Posted in 7 Love & Other Emotions	| Tagged Animal Husband, Bennington MFA, character, character development, Christine Walker, conflict, creative writing, Emotions, fiction, fiction craft, Maslow, Nancy Margulies, short stories, W. Gerrod Parrott	| Leave a reply
Provocative Short Shorts
Posted on November 25, 2013 by Christine Walker
"Short Shorts: Sudden Fiction" by Nancy Margulies brings to mind in the very best way those colorful foam Magic Grow bathtub toys that begin as little gel capsules. When my son was small, we'd drop a capsule into the warm water and watch it miraculously birth a lion or giraffe, elephant or dinosaur within minutes. Even knowing the science—a dry sponge squeezed tightly into a small space will expand exponentially when wet—didn't make it less amazing and fun. What Nancy Margulies brings forth in stories quickly inspired by one-word, emailed prompts is similarly marvelous. Her "Short Shorts" expand vividly and unpredictably on the page.
On first reading the book, I assumed that these crisp, visual, and emotionally charged stories had evolved through revision for publication from the author's initial "free writes" sent as replies to her writing group's prompts. When I learned that these published versions were drafted in twelve minutes or less and not reworked, I was impressed and mystified. How does she do it?
Lesson: Choose precise details
This author is gifted in making us see. From the opening in "Preparing to Meet My Birth Mother"—"…as cherry blossom explode off their branches, wrapping around houses like so many pink scarves"—to the final entry "Not Here" on page 53 (yes, it's a short book) —"As people paint Hitler mustaches on the image of our President…"—Margulies uses images to establish emotional tone, define character, create scenes, and extend meaning beyond the poetic prose. The prompt for the first story is "mother." The character tells us she "should be packing instead of watching" the cherry blossoms out the window. She then steps through the imagined packing, telescoping the twenty-nine years missing from life with her birth mother through bursts of autobiography and could-have-beens. She sums up her first short marriage to LeRoy Pratt in these eight one-syllable words: "He won races. I wore a pit pass."
Throughout the book, there are these "magic grow" details that encapsulate a relationship or era of a character's life. These gems could be dropped into the warm bath of imagination and expanded into longer works of fiction, but they serve this short form beautifully and economically.
Lesson: Deliver meaning through form
"Strip Poker," a scant page of story prompted by the word "layers," is a confession by a girl that she's been raped. Margulies devotes four brief paragraphs to layering her character from childhood through teenage years with skirts, shorts, slips tucked into shorts, and a bra stuffed with toilet paper, only to strip her bare in one final sentence. "Turns out she was wrong" is the narrator's response to her mother's belief that no one would have the patience to rape a girl so layered by clothes. We don't know when the rape happened or any hint of the perpetrator, but the horror lingers in those final five words which ravish the girl's modesty and innocence, along with the belief in a wise mother who could keep her safe.
The story "Backwards" (prompt "backwards") is a witty and pithy unraveling from the narrator's gentle present time through past generations spiked by family tragedy, dislocation, and finally to a pre-literate time when the ancestors "told stories that were passed down then forgotten" leaving the rest of this story "anybody's guess." The remaining inches of blank page loom large with possibilities.
Lesson: Try it!
Prompts can inspire writing at any stage of mastery. Whether working alone or in a supportive group, writers can discover more about their characters, their stories, and themselves through random prompts and timed exercises. The prompts used by Margulies in this book are Mother, Dream, Time, Mask, Adventure, Photo, Short, Imagine, Missed, Morning, Layers, High School, Backwards, Secrets, Clutter, Regret, Goals, New Job, Sun, News, Wanting a Child, Sacred, Boyfriend, Yellow, Last Words, Crush, Committed, Late Night, Candy, Wanting, Who I Was, Photo, Assertive, Pause, Independence, Ocean, Songs, Fitting In, Memory, and Garden.
Choose a word. Allow twelve minutes or less to write. Dig deep. Have fun. Risk revealing what you have never before revealed. Surprise yourself. Intrigue your readers. Email the story to your own address or to fellow writers. If you're like me you'll end up with a notebook full of promising free writes, any of which might produce a publishable story upon considered revision. If you've mastered the short form as Margulies has, then you'll soon be working on your new collection. Watch for "Sudden Friction: Stories That Rub You the Wrong Way" to see what emerges next from this author.
Posted in 1 Gatekeepers & Story Seeds, 8 Image & Senses, Short Shorts, Nancy Margulies, Short Stories	| 1 Reply
Gathering Emotions
Posted on May 1, 2013 by Christine Walker
Here I am writing a review of The Gathering by Anne Enright. Here is the story briefly: Veronica Hegarty's brother dies from a suicide drowning. She travels from Ireland to England to claim his body, arranges its return to Ireland, and gathers her many surviving siblings to their mother for the memorial service. While doing so, she travels into the past—her own, her grandmother Ada's—to reveal a dark detail of sexual abuse she witnessed long ago involving her brother and an older man, a friend of her grandmother's.
This book thrusts its enormous and hugely loving emotional reach through generations, across relationships—sibling to sibling, daughter to parents, granddaughter to grandparents, mother to children, wife to husband.
Lesson: Use clear "gatekeepers" to frame time shifts and emotional range.
Veronica's life becomes unmoored by Liam's death and by her memory of the incident from their past. Her journey through time and places could be as chaotic for the reader as it is for her, but Enright gives Veronica the good sense—she is the organized sibling, after all— to orient us with each shift of time and emotional focus.
Here are Enright's "gatekeepers"—first lines for the first several chapters—that orient the reader to each chapter:
1. I would like to write down what happened in my grandmother's house the summer I was eight or nine, but I am not sure if it really did happen.
2. Some days I don't remember my mother.
3. The seeds of my brother's death were sewn many years ago.
4. I ring the bereavement people in Brighton and Hove from Mammy's phone in the hall, and they give me the number of an undertaker who, very nicely, takes my credit card details while I have it handy.
5. Here is my grandfather, Charlie Spillane, driving up O'Connell Street towards his future wife in the Belvedere Hotel.
6. This is how I live my life since Liam died.
7. But let that wait. Let the poor chicken wait awhile. Here I am on the Brighton line, on my way to collect my brother's body, or view it, or say hello to it, or goodbye or whatever you do to a body you once loved.
8. When I was eight and Liam was nearly nine, we were sent with our little sister, Kitty, to stay with Ada in Broadstone.
9. The man beside me on the train to Brighton lifts his pelvis slightly, and settle it back down.
10. Here's Ada and Charlie in bed a year later.
11. I was opening the car door for the girls one day before Liam died and, as it swung past, I saw my reflection in the window.
12. Bad news for Bea and my mother and all the vultures who will flock to 4 Griffith Way for the wake—which is that there will be another ten days at least to wait before they can feast on Liam's poor corpse, because of the paperwork involved.
13. When I was in college, I decided that Ada had been a prostitute—the way you do.
14. I think of her when I do the dishes.
Enright's powerful and disturbing emotional material tumbles in Veronica's mind, but the gatekeepers keep readers grounded when they enter the chapter as to time, place, and emotional territory explored.
Memory can be elusive to the narrator—where did it happen, when?—but readers don't want to be confused by the where and when of the story. A clear narrative structure is not only kind to the reader, it also helps the author deliver her punch. The more emotional the material, the simpler the transition exposition can be, so that the emotional narrative or scenes rise like shark fins on a calm surface.
Lesson: Use all the senses to crescendo emotional material.
Enright writes from the body and uses all the senses. Sex is a theme throughout the story — good and bad, loving and illicit. The sensuality of children, their innocence, is played against what Veronica, now a grown woman, views in hindsight and what we, as adult readers, also glean in her storytelling.
Here's me at the age of three, with my ear pressed against the beige tin cliff of her washing machine…
Here's me eating Ada's rubber bathing hat whose famous yellow flowers appeared in my nappy the next day. Though, of course it must have been Kitty's nappy—hardly mine.
Here's me, definitely, pulling the bathing cap over my face. I lick the salty inside of it, until it seals me up—the smell of Ada's hair in the sea.
Ada's little garden was probably just a yard, but we thought it an exciting place, with crab apples and nettles: the door to the garage was sometimes open and sometimes bolted, and the fat that you never knew if Mr Nugent was in there only added to the interest.
I just used to slide up and down the upholstery, or squirm across the nice rows of stitching, and talk in a grand voice to whoever was driving, whether or not he was actually there.
On a Friday he came round to the front door to know, and he always had sweets for the children. He wore a hat, which he doffed when Ada opened the door. It was many years before I wondered at the formality of this arrangement, or what was going on.
The themes of love, loss, sex, betrayal, and forgiveness reverberate across the years. The mysteries of the body and the heart befuddle the child and the woman Veronica has become, perhaps as they befuddled Ada, a woman of a different time, more repressed by her era than Veronica is by hers. Yet the freedoms of a more openly sexual era don't make it easier for Veronica, a modern woman, to sort out her emotions.
Lesson: Use the tangible body to contrast with a psychological, emotional state.
Veronica veers back and forth from past to present and to and from her brother's death and her own disintegration— her marriage to Tom, her sense of self. Enright plays Veronica's fragile state of mind against tangible flesh and domestic objects.
I can not feel the weight of my body on the bed. I can not feel the line of my skin along the sheet. I am swinging an inch or so off the mattress, and I do not believe in myself—in the way I breath or turn—and I do not believe in Tom beside me: that he is alive (sometimes I wake to find him dead, only to wake again). Or that he loves me.
…I wake to a livid tumescence on his prone body; a purple thing on the verge of decay. Tom is flung wide on his back, asleep like a dead saint, or a child.
…And I turn around again and gather the covers about me, as the thing my husband is fucking in his sleep slowly recedes. A thing that might be me…Or it might not be me.
This is a setup for the abuse scene Veronica witnessed as a child and which appears in the book ten pages later. It also sets her more adrift.
Lesson: Follow Chekhov's advice.
An often-quoted piece of advice from Anton Chekhov applies here."If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired." Substitute "penis." His advice also concerns the economy of story elements put them there for a reason and make good use of them.
Enright prefigures the abuse scene Veronica witnessed as a child with a perfectly legitimate and ordinary bedroom scene featuring Tom's "cock so purple and dense it was a burden to him." (Page 133)
We have that image in our mind when, in the next chapter, the child Veronica happens upon Mr Nugent and Liam, in Ada's good front room.
What struck me was the strangeness of what I saw, when I opened the door. It was as if Mr Nugent's penis, which was sticking straight out of his flies, had grown strangely, and flowered at the tip to produce the large and unwieldy shape of a boy, that boy being my brother Liam, who, I finally saw, was not an extension of the man's member, set down mysteriously on the ground in front of him, but a shocked (of course he was shocked, I had opened the door) boy of nine, and the member not even that, but the boy's bare forearm, that made a abridge of flesh between himself and Mr Nugent.
As an adult, Veronica questions her memory. What did she really see? But readers see the penis—an echo of Tom's erect and spousal, but this one erect and terrible—a threat to the young Liam. Neither he nor Veronica, at the time, understands the harm. We readers do understand. We know the difference between right and wrong, between a man naked with his wife in a casual bedroom scene and a man exposing himself to a young boy. Veronica, the young girl, could not have given us the vivid description of Mr Nugent's penis that she gave of Tom's. It would have been crude and inappropriate within her narrative. The unadorned description "so purple and dense" from the woman Veronica's bedroom contrasts with the "flowered at the tip" from the child Veronica's memory of her intrusion into her grandmother's "good room." There's another contrast—not such a "good" room, after all.
Like Chekhov's gun, the penis is a necessary element. It's better to describe it before the crime, because in the heat of the moment, can we trust our eyes? And even if we could, the description would impede the crime scene, especially if we want doubt about what was witnessed to linger in the mind of a key character or the mind of the reader.
Lesson: Reveal emotions through the body.
We know bodies. We each have one. Usually our bodies know before we consciously understand what is wrong, what is right, and what our emotional state is. Enright gifts Veronica with body awareness, and Veronica lets us read her body along with her. We discover her emotional state as she does.
I have been so much touched these last few days. I cross my legs over the memory of the ex we had the night of the wake. Or he had. And wait for the Mass to begin. Everyone wants a bit of me. And it has nothing to do with what I might want, or what my body might want, whatever that might be—God knows it is a long time since I knew. There I am, sitting on a church bench in my own meat: pawed, used, loved, and very lonely.
I won't tell here how the story ends. Veronica's memory of Liam's abuse appears halfway through the book. It's the trigger for her bodily and emotional journey through time and space.
But even if you know how the book ends, you'll want to read it again and again for the Enright's exquisite and profound sensory gathering of emotions.
Posted in 7 Love & Other Emotions, 8 Image & Senses, The Gathering, Anne Enright	| 1 Reply
A Working Theory of Character
Pre-publication reviews for A Working Theory of Love by Scott Hutchins promise a great debut novel—"brainy, bright, brilliantly observant about the way we live now, brilliantly inventive, incandescent with humor and insight, astonishing, can't-stop-reading-until-it's-over-kind of novel"—and the book doesn't disappoint. I agree with author Charles Baxter's jacket blurb that the "haunting story will stay lodged in the reader's memory."
It's lodged in mine. But is it the story or character that haunt? Those strands weave together in any good fiction. In this book there are two main characters' Neill Jr (the first-person narrator) and "drbas" (Dr. Bassett, Neill Sr), and two story lines that lace tightly, inextricably and, yes, brilliantly, for a fast, enjoyable read. The laudable invention of the book is Dr. Bassett, whose role in the story is as a computer being groomed for artificial intelligence. He has been programmed with the diaries that the human Dr. Bassett kept while alive. The book's most haunting aspect, to this reader, is how the "drbas" character lives beyond the page.
Lesson: Grow affection for characters by revealing their vulnerabilities
The narrator (Neill Jr) is flawed. He confirms this on page one by comparing himself to an upstairs neighbor, a hermit who is carted out of the apartment building by paramedics. Though Neill wouldn't trade places with Fred, he isn't living a much more colorful or enviable life. He is thirty-six, divorced, commutes two hours a day to his job at Amiante Systems—a linguistic computer project (Neill has no computer science background), and "without self-pity" follows an uneventful bachelor's routine of daily rituals. He states that "[n]ot everyone's life will be a great love story," but in that statement lies the promise that this book just might tell his. He is waiting for something to fill him, and we feel his huge hole. He has room to grow.
Drbas is also flawed. He was flawed as a man, husband, and father who committed suicide, and also leaves much to be desired as a computer linguistics program. He's awkward, inarticulate, full of clichés and platitudes, and emotionally distant. He has room to grow.
Rachel, a twenty-year-old woman Neill meets at a hostel, is also vulnerable. A spiritual seeker involved with the cult of "Pure Encounters" when they meet, she becomes his love interest and adds unpredictability (always a benefit for good fiction) to his staid life. She has room to grow.
All this room to grow gives readers room to grow their affection for the characters. To the end, we're rooting for them to claim the potential the story suggests they deserve.
Lesson: Make characters memorable through their relationships with other characters
Drbas is only a computer, but through Dr. Bassett's diaries with which he's been programmed and Neill's daily interactions with him, he gains a real presence in Neill's life and in the story. In fact, he seems to take on a life of his own to the extent that Neill confides in him about his new girlfriend and also looks to him for insight and closure on their father/son relationship.
Neill is evolving his own presence as a man who is able to inhabit a full, adult life. He is becoming a person who can better negotiate his fear of being in a relationship, of being disappointed, of giving and receiving unconditional love—whether with a parent or a mate.
Rachel can never meet the real Dr. Bassett, long dead at the time of the story, but Neil juxtaposes them in the narrative. "Rachel's eyes were crystalline green and bright, but here they're dark and dull, the color of old limes. Her skin is waxy white; a broad brush of young blood runs from cheek to jaw. Blood, as my father once, said, is both vital and mortal. He was a physician, after all."
Lesson: Infuse the writing with sensory material to bring your characters come alive
Hutchins follows beautifully the cardinal rule of fiction writing and engages all the senses. He uses sensory material economically, such as when introducing in the first paragraph the fact that Neill has been married by having him say "my ex-wife used to complain about the smell" of Fred's cigarette smoking. He uses it pointedly, singling Rachel out from the two girls he meets at the hostel."The girls are lightly dressed, as if we're hitting the clubs in Miami: short skirts with Ugg boots, tube tops skintight and grimacing. They shiver. The blonde, Rachel—the more handsome but less cute of the two—reddens and speckles from the gusting cold." He uses it to set a tone at work with Livorno, his eccentric boss: "The rhythmic ting-tock-ting-tock of Livorno's practice putts comes to a stop."
Neill craves the human touch. Drbas and Rachel represent the extremes of that desire. He never felt enough affection from his father while Dr. Bassett was alive, and the computer falls short in that department. But Rachel is fully fleshed. "I put my hand under the heavy band of her sweatshirt and help her take it off, feeling the ridges of her ribs. A clavichord, a scallop shell. Her deodorant smells warmly of cloves."
Lesson: It's okay to have your characters live "happily ever after"
No spoilers here. I won't give away the plot such as it is—more than to say that the charm of this story is greatly how these characters grow on us and the affection we feel for them. This is a human and hard-wired character-driven story with many lessons for the writer and a few hours of pure enjoyment for the reader.
Posted in 3 Character Development, A Working Theory of Love, Scott Hutchins	| Leave a reply
Follow Read to Write Books on WordPress.com
0 Introduction to Craft
1 Gatekeepers & Story Seeds
2 Voice, Style & POV
3 Character Development
4 Place
5 Tension on the Page
6 Time & Consciousness
7 Love & Other Emotions
8 Image & Senses
9 Theme & Gestalt
A Man Called Ove, Fredrik Backman
A Working Theory of Love, Scott Hutchins
Anne Enright
Atonement, Ian McEwan
Baron in the Trees, Italo Calvino
Books as Teachers
Disgrace, J.M. Coetzee
Eleven Kinds of Loneliness, Richard Yates
Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad
Housekeeping, Marilynne Robinson
How to Make an American Quilt, Whitney Otto
Imagination Unleashed
Lie Down in Darkness, William Styron
Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov
Master Craft Juggling
Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf
Out of Africa, Isak Dinesen
Patricia Highsmith, The Talented Mr. Ripley
Selected Stories, Alice Munro
Short Shorts, Nancy Margulies
The Awakening, Kate Chopin
The Country Life, Rachel Cusk
The Days of Abandonment, Elena Ferrante
The Gathering, Anne Enright
The Human Stain, Philip Roth
The Joy Luck Club, Amy Tan
The Things They Carried, Tim O'Brien
Tinkers, Paul Harding
To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf
Vanity Fair, William Thackeray
Waiting for the Barbarians, J.M Coetzee
Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? Lorrie Moore
William Trevor, Felicia's Journey
Workshops Follow-up
Workshops: A Course in Fiction Craft
Writing Fiction YouTube videos
Out of Africa: A Love Story
Narrating "To Kill A Mockingbird"
Quarrel in "The Human Stain"
A Place to Grow: Mapping Maycomb
A Man Called Ove and What Love's Got to Do with It
The Days of Abandonment: First Paragraph
The Elements of "Housekeeping"
Expectations in "To The Lighthouse"


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text:
MarketWatch First Take
Oracle outlook raises concerns about growth
Published: Sept. 15, 2017 at 9:08 a.m. ET
Therese Poletti
Opinion: Investors will be looking for more growth in the cloud, tied to future automated database
Oracle's Safra Catz gave a disappointing outlook for the fiscal second quarter.
Some Oracle Corp. investors got one big milestone they were anticipating in the company's cloud transition on Thursday, but they also got a signal that its future growth rate, at least for the next quarter, may not be as strong as they hoped.
Earlier, Oracle ORCL, -2.44% Co-Chief Executive Safra Catz told analysts on a conference call that the software giant expects revenue in the fiscal second quarter to grow in a range of 2% to 4%, on a constant currency basis, compared with analysts' consensus of 4.7% growth. The company did achieve one big milestone analysts had hoped for: New licenses for its on-premises software fell below $1 billion to $966 million, while cloud revenue increased to $1.5 billion.
But as part of its disappointing outlook, Catz said Oracle was continuing investments in building out its cloud-computing infrastructure, which could pressure profits.
As many analysts on the call asked about its outlook for lower margins, Oracle's stock began to sink after-hours. In the past three trading days, Oracle's shares set new record closes just ahead of earnings. Its shares have gained 37.3% in 2017 through Thursday's close, while the S&P 500 index SPX, -1.84% has gained 11.6% in that same time frame. In after-hours trading Thursday, Oracle fell 4% to $52.79.
"There is a startup cost to getting into these businesses," Co-Chief Executive Mark Hurd said, as one analyst asked about the outlook. "We're deployed now virtually in all the critical geographies...so you just see it show up in the margin rate."
Oracle's total cloud revenue was up 51% in the quarter, but it still makes up a smaller portion — 16% — of its overall revenue of $9.2 billion in the quarter. While its revenue growth of 7% beat analysts' expectations, Oracle's outlook spooked some investors. One of the big contributors to growth was its NetSuite business, which it acquired last year while Oracle's on-premises database software business was a continued drag.
Oracle said its future growth, however, will come from its current businesses, or organically, as it put it, and not so much from acquisitions. Co-founder and Chairman Larry Ellison made a surprising statement when asked about its acquisition strategy, when he said, "There's no one left to buy." He highlighted the company's plans to unveil an automated version of the Oracle database for its cloud customers at its big customer conference, Oracle Open World, next month.
"So I think it's going to be primarily come from internally developed technologies, the growth of those technologies and us gaining dramatic amounts of share in applications in the cloud and with our new autonomous database," Ellison said.
Whether that will be enough for investors, who have pushed Oracle's stock to record highs in recent weeks, is the big question.
CIO Network: How Big Companies Move to Cloud
Microsoft bets on the metaverse with $69 billion deal for Activision Blizzard
Barron's: 'I Promised Myself I'd Never Be That Broke Again.' This Financial Advisor's Family Inherited $1.4 Million —and Quickly Lost It All.
Therese Poletti writes the "Tech Tales" column for MarketWatch. Follow her on Twitter @tpoletti.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


Start your next travel opportunity with this great Registered Nurse (RN) position in Englewood, NJ. While you are in Englewood, be sure to check out Bergen County Zoological Park, The Shops at Riverside, and NYC which is less than 15 miles away!
BLS, ACLS, and a minimum of 5 years of ICU experience required.


Conservative Yoga clothes: While at the temples you will need to cover up shoulders and legs. Bring a sarong or purchase a Balinese sarong to take with you so you can respectfully enter the sacred sites.
Comfortable walking shoes which are easy to slip in and out of.
If it makes you feel better bring some Balinese rupees with you. There are places to exchange money at the airport. There is also an easy option to exchange money at the retreat center.
The retreat center has filtered water for us to refill our bottles. Always check when opening the bottle that you are breaking the seal.
WILL I NEED TO GET A VISA/PASSPORT?
Seminyak and Canggu have everything you could ask for… restaurants, shops, bars, surfing, etc.
Yes, the retreat center has a laundry service at an additional charge.


A study, funded by the British Academy, aims to explore with technologists what facilitates or inhibits women working in the technology sector and how gender influences technology innovation. Using a cross-country perspective, comparing the UK and France, Dr Rana Tassabehji, senior lecturer in e-commerce and information systems at the University of Bradford, explains how cultural and social issues influence women working as technologists.
Sometimes you read about a study and think, "Someone's actually being paid to study that?"
This isn't one of those cases! The results are actually pretty interesting and not necessary what I would expect. I was surprised to learn that every participant had some household/family influence. I'm an exception to that - I had no family at home that were into technology or that encouraged me to look into it. It was an interest that I came upon myself.


This is a very yummy way to eat some veggies! 😉 And pretty easy too! Great for a lunch or for a party!
chopped veggies of your choice: broccoli, carrots, cauliflower, cucumber, peppers, etc.
Mix ranch dry mix with cream cheese.


Giving the gift of diamond heart necklaces is the perfect way to show you care. Not only does the thought count, but the gorgeous diamond heart will also help remind the recipient of wonderful memories. Women's diamond heart necklaces from JTV feature an array of styles, from concentric hearts to overlapping hearts, gold, silver and more! These necklaces are truly stunning, though the classic heart shape of the pendants gives a welcome warm feeling.
The beauty of diamond heart necklaces is that they are a great addition to almost any outfit. Many of the women's diamond heart necklaces from JTV are perfect for everyday wear, whether they feature champagne diamonds, white diamonds or diamonds of another color! Some of these necklaces include intricate swirls and patterns, telling a complex story with the gemstones. You may also find diamonds set in a heart-shaped locket-what better way to preserve your memories? These sweet, unforgettable necklaces are the perfect long-lasting additions to your jewelry collection. Keep love close to your heart with beautiful diamond heart necklaces from JTV.
Many of the women's diamond heart necklaces from JTV are pretty, simple pieces that are great for anyone, young or old. This collection of diamond heart necklaces include pieces that you can cherish forever. While you are checking out these necklaces, discover other heart-shaped jewelry, as well as other diamond necklaces. You may also enjoy JTV's collection of heart-shaped rings. No matter which pieces of jewelry you choose, know that they will be beautiful and affordable from JTV.


To make a booking choose from the dates below and call Peter on 07518161970 or email us at deeplens@aol.com. Please note that other dates are available for groups of 6 or more and we are happy to discuss special requirements in terms of itinerary and training.
Club visits and presentations can be arranged on request. All trips are personally escorted by Peter Collings.
Suez wreck hunting and Turkia Expeditions during 2018- new dates announced.
EL DOMIAT now added to our advanced weeks in the Gulf of Suez. THIS IS A DECOMPRESSION DIVE!
QTMOS 1 and RSS CORMORANT new additions for 2018- NO DECO REQUIRED!
Book early and choose your itinerary! We have 40 wrecks to choose from in the Egyptian Red Sea alone. Others may tell you these wrecks don't exist, that's why we dive most of them by ourselves!
Don't think you have the experience? We are happy to discuss your abilities and further your diving experience. Membership to the RSWA is free!
ADDITIONAL DATES PENDING due to pending assignments!
In 2000, in conjunction with Tornado Marine, Peter began an intensive program of exploratory wreck safari's using the superb Cyclone, the Diver 2004 Liveaboard of the Year. Initially covering the Northern Red Sea, 2003 saw the expansion into the Gulf of Suez and the southern regions of Egypt.
Peter has brought together over 50 of the leading wreck experts historians and archivists to form the Red Sea Wreck Academy and the group have been surveying the recently located El Arish, Scallaria, Zietieh, Turkia, Pride of Al Salam, Sarah and the East Star. At the end of 2009, this expanded to include the reborn Million Hope, El Qaher, Moma class and the Al Kafhain, ensuring up to date site intel to give you the very best experience in wreck exploration.
No less than 25 E book wreck guides are available featuring the wrecks listed. DOWNLOAD FOR FREE!.
For 2019 we have several dates confirmed for individual and small group bookings. Additional dates are available for groups. Please call.


Marketing Laws and Regulations in the U.S.
As marketers, we often develop tunnel vision in our work, focusing strictly on the strategic or creative side of marketing projects. We sometimes, unintentionally, overlook the legal aspects that could stop our campaigns (and careers) dead in their tracks. As marketers, it's our responsibility to know and understand the marketing laws and regulations that can affect marketing activities and the laws protecting consumers. If we ignore these laws, we can end up paying a hefty price in legal fee's, loss of company revenues, reputation, and even our jobs.
https://i2.wp.com/www.marketingbinder.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Marketing-Laws-and-Regulations-in-the-U.S..jpg?fit=850%2C360&ssl=1 360 850 Allen Stafford https://www.marketingbinder.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/Marketing-Binder-Logo.png Allen Stafford2014-03-08 00:50:462017-04-18 14:39:53Marketing Laws and Regulations in the U.S.


Brick and mortar stores are closing down all over the place. One of the reasons they are providing for this is the increase in competition with online retailers. Yes, I'm sure prices having something to do with it, but with the added cost of shipping and most places charging tax now, the prices aren't always that much better.
Customer Service: By going to a website, searching for what I want, and placing my order virtually, I don't have to deal with waiting in line or dealing with rude or unknowledgeable sales people.
I recently took a trip to my local Sears in search of a new microwave. I specifically stopped at Sears first as I know they aren't doing well financially, and I wanted to help them out. After looking at the microwaves and not having anyone offer assistance, I tracked someone down. That someone then called someone else to help who was supposed to be knowledgeable on the products. She was not knowledgeable. So I went to Best Buy and bought one.
Availability of Products: When going to a retail location, I try to choose a local business instead of a chain. This can be difficult to do at times, but can be accomplished.
Besides blogging, I have a few other hobbies, such as collecting coins. My collection isn't fancy, my coins are worth face value as they are circulated, but it's still a hobby. I decided to start collecting state quarters and presidential dollars. So, I went to a local coin shop to get a couple of albums for these collections. The proprietor of the shop had the presidential dollars for sale, at 3 bucks each, but he didn't have any albums available to put them in. And the one album he had for the quarters was lame, leaving me to do the thing I usually have to do, I went online and ordered the albums I wanted. Never to shop at his store again.