Writing: Description, Details, and Delivering Information

Feeling a bit more caught up, some solid word count today. If I can bank a little more tonight, I’ll give myself a treat tomorrow and go down to check out the Santa Cruz boardwalk.

Today’s wordcount: 5102
Current Hearts of Tabat wordcount: 119160
Total word count for the week so far (day 2): 10976
Total word count for this retreat: 57637
Worked on Hearts of Tabat, Bloodwarm Rain, “Blue Train Blues”
Works finished on this retreat: “California Ghosts,” “My Name is Scrooge,” “Blue Train Blues.”
Time spent on SFWA email, discussion boards, other stuff: 45 minutes

From Blue Train Blues, completed today in first draft form:

The next obstacle presented itself a few miles further on. Fog covered the road, and the car swam in and out of it, a submerged salmon leaping through foamy water, curls and tendrils swirling in its wake. My lord drove slower, but barely, and more than once we swerved to avoid an incautious cow or deer. I tried not to think of how many things stood too low to be spotted through the fog.

We ascended to a hilltop and saw a basin of fog in front of us, an immense white bowl. I started to say something about the odd flapping noise that was just starting to creep up on my consciousness but before I could begin, my lord shoved me sideways, then rolled in the opposite direction himself. A massive claw flashed in the space between us and rasped against the metal before the dragon swooped back upward.

“Hold tight.” We leaped down the hill and into the fog.

My lord steered with face tense, watching the road flash by mere feet from our front wheels, not slowing. Overhead we heard the flapping of the wings.

Then the hoot of a train, off to the right, somewhat ahead.

“What are you thinking, sir?” I asked. “That’s not the Blue Train. It’s the train to the western coast.”

“I know,” he said. “But the crossing is up ahead, I can hear it.”

“But not see it.” Fog thickened and lessened around us; sometimes I could see his resolute face, other times he was lost to me. Overhead those wings flapped, and sometimes fire coiled, once a great wash of it directly overhead accompanied by a foul, sulfurous stench. My cap had blown off my head many miles ago, and I felt the hairs atop my head singe and vanish.

“Hold tight!” my lord yelled over the roaring of the wind and if he added anything to that, it was lost in the howl of the train and the sudden flap of wings and then somehow we were soaring through space just ahead of the train, so close I could count every bar in the cowcatcher in front of it and there was a vast scream and crash as the dragon and the train collided, and then a whoosh of flame, exploding outside, that cleared the world of mist and revealed chaos.

2. Hint at the conflict. The majority of great stories provide the reader with some clue to the conflict driving the story within the first three paragraphs. Here, for example, is the first paragraph of Kelly Link’s marvelous “Travels with the Snow Queen”:

Holy cow, talk about grabbing the reader with bravura and effortlessly stuffing them full of story. Second person is such a wonderful and reckless choice and it works here in a way not all second person narratives do. There’s physical pain, the bare bloody feet, and sensory beyond the visual with lavender and high-piled quilts and pleasant aches. And beyond that there is both an external conflict, the enforced journey, the drive in her dreams, and an internal conflict, a shame that, because the narrator is so careful not to look at it, makes us achingly aware of its existence: You were careful not to kiss the guardsman on the lips, so it doesn’t really count, does it. (The rest of the story is even better, and Link’s collection Magic For Beginners is worth picking up for its craftsmanship as well as the enjoyment its fabulous stories offer.)

3. Display your command of language. It’s worthwhile for a writer to think about poetry, and all its devices like assonance and alliteration, metaphor and allusion, internal rhythm, even meter. Save scraps of speech that you like, stud those paragraphs with wonderful things and spend with wild abandon from your store, because this is the make or break moment, when your reader decides whether or not to continue. You cannot lavish enough attention on your reader in the form of these paragraphs.

Look at how Carol Emshwiller’s “All of Us Can Almost…” begins, with a fancy hook made of punctuation attached to the title, like an elaborate latch on the door opening into the story:

…fly, that is. Of course lots of creatures can almost fy. But all of us are able to match any others of us, wingspan to wingspan. Also to any other fliers. But through we match each other wing to wing, we can’t get more than inches off the ground. If that. But we’re impressive. Our beaks look vicious. We could pose for statues for the birds representing an empire. we could represent an army or a president. And actually, we are the empire. We may not be able to fly, but we rule the skies. And most everything else too.

That conversational tone doesn’t come easily – it’s beautifully wrought, wonderfully precise.

4. Intrigue the reader while establishing the rules. Thomas M Disch’s “The Wall of America” sets the tone, narrative distance, and time frame (now to near future) while establishing a question (what’s the Wall?) that makes the reader want to keep going:

Most people got more space along the Wall than they could ever use, even the oddballs who painted leviathan-sized canvases they couldn’t hope to sell to anyone who didn’t have his own airplane hangar to hang their enormities. But if you did work on such a scale, you must have had money to burn, so what would it matter if you never sold your stuff? The important thing was having it hung where people could see it.

5. Use interesting, active words. You can never go wrong with this. Here’s James Tiptree Jr. at her best, full of poetry in “Your Faces, O My Sisters! Your Faces Filled Of Light!”:

Hot summer night, big raindrops falling faster now as she swings along the concrete expressway, high over the old dead city. Lightning is sizzling and cracking over the lake behind her. Beautiful! The flashes jump the roofs of the city to life below her, miles of cube buildings gray and sharp-edged in the glare. People lived here once, all the way to the horizons. Smiling, she thinks of all those walls and windows full of people, living in turbulence and terror. Incredible.

All of these count in titles too. Here’s an exercise: write down ten first sentences or titles, playing with one of these concepts in each. Then pick the most promising and go write that story.

(Reader notes: The stories cited here can be found in The James Tiptree Award Anthology 1, The James Tiptree Award Anthology 2, The Wall of America by Thomas Disch, and Her Smoke Rose Up Forever by James Tiptree, Jr. Sadly, none of these are available on the Kindle. The Kelly Link collection, however, is available on the Kindle.)