What I learned from John Irving - I

As many of you know, John Irving, an unknown novelist at the time I knew him, was my instructor when I was a graduate student at the Iowa Writers' Workshop. I've learned more from John in the last year than I did while attending his reading classes and workshops in the early 1970s.

Being an undiagnosed moderate-to-severe ADHD at the time (that disability being completely unknown), I noticed I grow bored easily; thus, as a young writer I projected the belief that my readers would rapidly grow bored with whatever I wrote if every sentence did not contain some fresh display of creativity. This was not the most nurturing soil from which one can grow warm, enduring relationships with readers. In fact, as I soon learned, readers "smell" fear in a writer, and if they detect it, readers will abandon their work faster and in greater numbers than rats off a sinking ship.

In truth, I'm perversely proud to say John Irving would bore me silly. The stories he would tell, for example, about his experiences in Germany and in Paris about meeting other writers and about art in general would go on and on far too long—long enough for my boredom to grow into a case of yawns that might lead to an in-class nap.

At the same time, many of the stories I was writing, my teachers and fellow students would point out, were far too short and, in their opinion, "undeveloped."

I remember vividly writing a short story about an "actor" who plays a "badman" in "Western reenactments" of train robberies, cattle rustling, and "prairie wars" at one of those tourist traps just off the Interstate in the 1970s.  My readers thought it was funny, entertaining, if "rather slight." I described my actor-character as dying three times a day in "shoot-outs" at 1:00 pm, 4:00 pm and 7:30 pm, but I never once considered that deep down I wanted to write this story so I could talk about death and the inevitability of it that we all face. If I were rewriting this story today, I would introduce a character actor who dies of cancer while he's also dying three times a day in these "Western skits." Now there you might have an interesting story, but the story I wrote played it for laughs and never had even a hint of actual death, in it. In retrospect that seems rather strange.

The passage of time cures many ills, and clears up others, and one sickness that I may have cured was my warped notions about how soon readers will "bail out" on writers. Given John's proclivity for writing long novels, he was absolutely right to go on and on in his stories and I was totally wrong to believe most readers would become bored as soon as I would.

There's nothing readers love more than a writer who insists on letting his writing take the space it needs in order to develop into a style, while the style, in turn, has the space it needs to give birth to unforgettable characters. I could sum it up this way: John's approach of finding a universe in a bottle was far more rewarding than mine of continually jumping from bottle to bottle. That was where my approach and my ADHD-thinking led, to me creating a rather strange universe that was difficult for readers to follow and not all that satisfying to read.

Now, if I currently had writing students and taught a writing and reading classes comparable to the ones John taught me (I don't), the stories I might tell might cause me to appear as boring to my students as John appeared to me. Hopefully, my novels will have as much appeal to modern-day readers as his novels had to readers back in the '80s and '90s.

It has been a privilege for me to begin taking ADHD medication in the late 90s, and over the ensuing years, to gradually grow to appreciate the world for what it is; to see it in a new light, and to train myself to write relatively normal stories readers can appreciate. Next month, more about what I learned from John Irving.

Editing and the Life-changing magic of tidying up.

That little book by Marie Kondo entitled The Life-changing Magic of Tidying Up? Have you heard of it? It has sold three million copies worldwide and was a NY Times Best-Seller.

I came across it the morning of January 1, 2020, while I was looking at discarded belongings in the recycling room in my apartment building. I might have passed the book by had I not watched Marie Kondo being interviewed on my favorite Sunday morning show some weeks before.

As I was sifting through the pile of stuff, I was engrossed in thoughts about finishing my novel; mainly I was thinking that the considerable task that lay before me in the year 2020 was the editing of the novel to arrive at a final draft.

Perhaps it was no more than a case of propinquity, a number of random thoughts coming together: Tidying up is sort of like editing, isn’t it? And it being New Year’s Day and finding that book being one of the very first things I did in the year 2020 (besides sleeping) and my New Year’s resolution being, Finish that novel already! Get done with it! Get it out into the world where it belongs!

So as I plucked that book out of the junk pile, The Life-changing Habit… , all those thoughts did come together and out popped the notion that perhaps it might contain some wisdom for me.

If there were a way I could finish my novel before midnight of December 31 2020, it would certainly change my life. I was open to my life being changed, very open to it. Something good was already happening: The thought percolated in my brain: Hell, if it’s only a matter of tidying up my novel, I can certainly do that and finish before New Year’s Eve, couldn’t I? Of course I could! Perhaps her magic was already working? That was my state of mind as I began reading Kondo’s little book.

Of course as a novelist I couldn’t help but believe there was an untold story here: Had the previous book’s owner thrown Kondo’s out in a fit of rage on New Year’s Eve? Was he or she enraged at how unhelpful the book had been? Or did that person learn how to tidy up her life to the point there was no longer a need for this book on her bookshelf? I hoped she had read the book, gotten out of it all she could, and then discarded it because it had become clutter. And so the untold story might be that what was the end for her was a new start for me.

Within the first few minutes of cracking open this little tome, a world of parallels between tidying up and editing my novel opened up to me. Kondo’s advice is to “Start by discarding. Then organize your space, thoroughly, completely, in one go.”

Likewise with editing: Look at all the chapters in your novel, setting aside all the chapters that don’t directly support the story you set out to tell. There is no “nice to know” information about your characters that should wind up in the novel. Only those events described that put across the story belong.

Once you’ve paired down your chapters, you can look at pacing and overall story structure within the remaining chapters: Does your chapter support a rapid escalation of tension and character development, so that as the story continues, we see the main protagonist in conflict and/or in danger or in a state of development. By the end do we see a new person emerging, functioning as people function in real life?

Then you can look at individual chapters; make sure each of them contribute to a chapter story arc. You can discard anything unnecessary and fill in gaps.

The other key thought that Kondo advocates and that I can attest applies one hundred percent to editing a novel is this: gradualism doesn’t work. You can’t organize a kitchen one day and the living room the next, and hope to ever escape the grind of continuously organizing; nor can you edit the first chapter one day and a middle chapter the next day and hope to wind up with a comprehensible, cohesive, and a single engrossing work.

That means you must edit the whole thing, the entire thing all at once, in the blink of an eye. Like Michelangelo, you must look at a large hunk of marble you’re about to start carving and see your finished sculpture within it. That happens in an instant. The concerns expressed on page one must be the same as on the last page, although obviously what the principal character learned from living the story must also be present.  The basic style of writing should be the same or very similar. The manner you use to tell the story must be consistent. The tone (the attitude behind the writing) should be different but must be reminiscent of the tone that you use on the first page. It certainly should serve to acknowledge how far the character’s consciousness has been transformed by living the story.

Some might say, “My character has changed by the end of my story. Is it any wonder that the style of writing has changed by the end?” While that argument might seem plausible, I’ve found that pulling it off in a novel is extremely difficult without inadvertently giving the impression that the end was written by a different author.

In order for your story to have emotional impact and credibility it has to work as a single, unified artistic whole. It truly must give the impression of being told by a single voice.

Kondo equates tidying up with putting one’s house in order and that it shouldn’t take that much time. It should happen all at once. She advises, “Start by discarding. Then organize your space, thoroughly, completely, in one go. If you adopt this approach… you’ll never again revert to clutter again.

Next month, more about what I learned from reading John Irving.

“When you have no further use for characters, kill them. Knock ‘em off.”

One of the high points of my time at The University of Iowa’s Writers’ Workshop (where I was a fiction writing student between 1970 and 1972) was having John Irving as my instructor.

Like the powerful narrative voice one finds in his novels, John was a powerful presence in the classroom. He was always empathetic to the plight of a novice, unpublished writer; always ready to share advice, tips, thoughts about writing fiction and living the writer’s life.

One of the tips he said more than once: “When you have no further use for characters, kill them. Knock ‘em off.”

This apparently useful if not ruthless advice for plotting a novel was of no use to me at the time. Sometimes, as in this case, his words were so boiled down, I wasn’t able to apply them in my writing, except as a “handy plotting tool.” That was the case until yesterday morning at 6:30 a.m. when I learned that in the hands of a great novelist, a beloved character’s death can elicit genuine emotion within a reader, which as Donald Maass says in his seminal work, The Emotional Craft of Fiction is why we read fiction.

I’m reading John Irving’s A Prayer for Owen Meany, and at about 6:30 a.m. this morning. I was on page 128 when I came across a paragraph that broke my heart and gave me insight into how fiction works that I did not have when I was in my 20s. The paragraph describes Johnny Wheelright’s feelings (Johnny is the narrator-character of the novel) at his mother’s funeral after she was struck and immediately killed by a foul ball hit by Johnny’s best friend, Owen Meany:

“When someone you love dies, and you’re not expecting it, you don’t lose her all at once; you lose her in pieces over a long time, the way the mail stops coming, and her scent fades from the pillows and even from the clothes in her closet and drawers. Gradually, you accumulate the parts of her that are gone, forever. There comes another day and another specifically missing part.”

In the details mentioned, and the senses tapped into we grasp the totality of the emotion gripping John at the age of nine; a boy who loses his mother and who missed her on the day she died and on every day since. Not only did Johnnie miss her, and continue missing her in new ways, but I’m left with the impression that John, the grown-up version of Johnny who is narrating the novel, now a man in late middle-age, is still missing her in new ways as each day passes.

As a friend of mine says, those who lose a parent at an early age become members of a club to which no one wants to belong; nevertheless, this is an exclusive club of sorrow and mutual understanding to which these children have no choice but to become and remain members even as they grow old. It’s a club that sets them apart from everyone else, both those of us whose parents are still alive and those whose parents died after a long life.

My point with all of this: If you’ve been reading my ExcitingWriting Advisories (EWAs) of recent months, this passage points back to craft-points Donald Maass makes in his book, The Emotional Craft of Fiction: How to Write the Story behind the Surface.

In A Prayer for Owen Meany, when Johnny’s mother dies, she had only been married to a man named Dan Needham for a year-and-a-half. Dan has already adopted Johnny, and after his mother dies there’s no question in Johnny’s mind that he loves Dan and wishes him to remain his stepfather, and for them to live together.

It’s been said, and I believe it’s true, in one way or another, every story can be understood to be either about the formation or the dissolution of a family. Many story lines depict a family coming apart only to somehow be reconstituted in a new form by the end. This is so for action movies where families are often depicted as elite teams or sometimes as teams of criminals; in romantic comedies where singles come together despite fate always pulling them apart; in horror movies where families of friends or loving couples are torn apart. My point: This family formation/dissolution theme is the most frequently used method authors use to encourage their readers to make a connection with a story.

In A Prayer for Owen Meany, we know at the end of the first chapter that Johnnie loses his mother to an errant foul ball hit by Owen Meany. In chapter two Dan is introduced; we see Dan and Johnnie’s mother, Tabatha, having a long courtship and finally getting married. Indeed, we cut directly from Tabithia’s wedding to her funeral a year-and-a-half later. Then we have the heart-wrenching paragraph I quoted above that begins, “When someone you love dies…”

The paragraph that follows directly after that one is telling because although clearly we already have a new family forming between Johnnie and his stepfather, the author resists doing the obvious of letting Johnny go home with Dan. Instead he lets the stepfather return to where Dan, Tabitha and Johnnie were living when Johnnie's mother was alive, and he lets Johnnie go in new direction that hints at Johnny seeking love and intimacy with a girl who is approximately his age. So there you have the hint of a new family forming. I find it to be extremely emotional and telling.

This is the paragraph that follows directly after the one I quoted above: “The evening after her funeral, I felt she was gone when it was time for Dan to go home to the dorm. (Dan is a teacher at a private school, and their home was literally an apartment within a dormitory.) I realized that Dan had choices… But as soon as I realized what they were, I realized that the choices available to Dan, regarding where he would sleep, would be imperfect, forever; and that, forever, there would be something unsatisfying about thinking of him alone, and something also incomplete about him being with me.”

This is the strength of John Irving’s storytelling: The truth of what he’s describing seems manifest to me: The only thing that sets us apart from animals is our ability to love. We have a choice: If we choose to love, in the end we will die, or we will be broken because the person we love will die before we do. If we choose not to love, we will inevitably be broken, beyond love; we will become asexual beings, touching no one, and untouched by anyone, truly an untouchable, hardly human at all.

Now when I remember John Irving saying in class that you must kill a character when you no longer have any further use for them in a story, he never pointed out what a powerful role the character’s death can play in the story after the death and after the funeral. Yes, there is an after-life, certainly in fiction there is.

To me, this is the stuff of a great novelist, John Irving, giving his readers strongly felt and movingly described, raw emotions. It was a moving experience that I began to understand all this at 6:30 a.m. in the morning. As though this was another layer of meaning John originally taught me forty-seven years ago at The University of Iowa.

John Irving and Me

By the time I first met John he had published two novels, The Water-Method Man and Setting Free the Bears, both of which had been well reviewed in The New York Times Book Review and elsewhere. While I was in Iowa City, he released a third, The One Hundred-Fifty-Eight Pound Marriage which was as I remember it was universally panned, and forthwith quickly removed to “the remainder tables.”

John was unfazed by this career setback. The faith he had in his writing talent was unshakable. I don’t think he ever expected all his novels to be successful. If they sold well, he was grateful. I got the impression he thought if some of his novels were not roundly criticized, even booed, he could not be doing his job, which included continually expanding the boundaries of storytelling in interesting ways and not relying on prefabricated formulas.

All this is to say: He gave himself permission to be a great writer.

The model he presented to his students—we were all in our mid-twenties while he was in his late-thirties—was that of an emerging novelist just a few years older than we who was doing a yeoman’s job of managing his career. To me he always appeared calm; he was and remains incredibly intelligent. Even now I don’t know how he did it all. Like his character Owen Meany he had tremendous strength of character and faith, only in the case of John Irving his “way” (like the Buddha “way”) was fueled by faith in himself to do his best, knowing his best was always improving. It was an honor to be in his student.

I was visiting him once in his home in Iowa City where he was spoon-feeding baby food to his youngest boy while talking to me about the writing life. His older boys entered the kitchen from outside saying the family cat had gotten out. I went outside with the older one (Later John coached them to be All American Wrestlers) and retrieved the meowing cat from under dense shrubbery in front of their house. Then we trooped back inside and, as I remember it, he and I went back to discussing fiction as he finished putting his baby down for a nap. As I said, I don’t know how he did it all.

Yes, he was a powerful presence in the classroom, but he never believed in class participation. He would talk non-stop for one-and-a-half hours. He had prodigious powers of concentration. He’d tell stories about writers, himself included. Some of his stories were fascinating. Some lulled me into a late afternoon nap.

He was mindful as a writer; he always knew, or seemed to know what he was about; he was committed to following his writing chops wherever they might lead him, even as it turned out to be on the stage of the 1999 Academy Award presentations where he accepted an Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay (based on his own novel, The Cider House Rules.

He was a sometimes tennis partner of mine. After beating me in a match, he would run home with the racket in one hand. I would drive home. Now I understand why he ran. For the same reason I ran home after exercising this morning, for the pure joy of doing it.

The Emotional Craft of Fiction and Why It's Important.

Donald Maass, who has in the past authored a number of widely praised how-to-write-fiction books, in his newest work says that writing novels isn't about showing or telling per se; also that it's about much more than simply describing what your characters are going through.

Rather, he writes in his book The Emotional Craft of Fiction that it's about asking, "How can I encourage my readers to go on emotional journeys of their own?" That's Maass's thesis, that if as an author you encourage readers to go on these emotional journeys of their own, you will connect with them at a deeper emotional level; the novels you write will be more readable, memorable, accessible and important to them.

In this blog issue I review The Emotional Craft of Fiction: How to Write the Story Beneath the Surface by Donald Maass, Writer's Digest Books, Cincinnati, Ohio, 2016.

Donald Maass states, and I believe he's correct, most readers believe that when they read an engrossing novel, they are living out the story at the same time as the characters in the novel are. But, observes Maass, what is actually going on is this: As readers become engrossed in a novel, they may be weaving their own personal experience into a story that, as they read on farther, becomes more and more personally meaningful to them. Although what they experience is extremely involving to them, he writes that what they get out of it may have little to do with the novel they're reading.

If you accept Maass's view of how great novels work, you might come around to his belief that writing a best-selling novel may not be about writing stories readers want to read, per se; instead, it may be about writing the stories in such a way that they open a floodgate of emotions for readers which, in turn, makes it exceedingly easy for them to embark on their own personal journeys as they're reading. And again, it's important to note Maass's belief that the personal journey the reader goes on may not have that much to do with the book that prompted them to go on that emotional journey.

As Maass expresses it: "The purpose of this book is to delve into the ways and means of creating a powerful emotional experience for readers as they read."

Maass mentions the enduring power of classic novels to involve readers and cause them to gain potentially life-changing experiences and wisdom: "When a plot [of a classic novel] resolves, readers are satisfied, but what they remember is what they felt while reading it. Hooks may hook, twists may intrigue, tension may turn pages, and prose may dazzle, but all of those effects fade as quickly as fireworks in a night sky. Ask readers what they [most vividly] remember about novels; most will say the characters, but is that accurate? It's true that characters become real to us but that is [only] because of what they cause us to feel. Characters aren't actually real; only our feelings are.

According to Maass, "Emotional impact is not an extra. It's as fundamental to a novel's purpose and structure as its plot. The emotional craft of fiction underlies the creation of character arcs, plot turns, beginnings, midpoints, endings, and strong scenes. It is the basis of voice." It's everything, in other words.

He continues, "Mastering the emotional craft of fiction starts with understanding how emotional impact is produced and then applying that in practice. It isn't magic, but the results will feel magical."

Maass realized that there was a need for his book when he "realized that in reading many manuscripts and also published novels, I was feeling little. The high action of best-selling thrillers often left me cold. Romance and women's fiction wallowed in feelings but frequently left me feeling indifferent. Literary fiction can be the driest reading experience of all. Beautiful writing may sparkle like a diamond necklace, but sparkling isn't a feeling. The greatest wish of editors today is a strong voice, and that's fine but even strong voices can fail to reach my heart. Strong writing doesn't automatically produce strong feelings. Paradoxically, poorly written novels can sometimes unsettle me, stir me to anger or send me reaching for a tissue. I want to feel more as I read. Don't you? That's why this book and the methods [described] herein matter."

In addition to this introductory essay, I'll be writing individual essays about each aspect Maass focuses on in this landmark work:

How to stir more meaningful emotions and elevate the moral stakes of any story;

How to create story arcs that impress readers as more authentic and meaningful because they illicit stronger emotions;

How to infuse the plots of your stories with additional emotional power;

How to think about the emotional journey your reader is on to increase the overall impact of your works.

And how to think more effectively about the emotional journey that you as the author of the work are inevitably on as you write your novel.

Unpacking this single book over the next six months: That is how important I believe Maass's book is.

Together, let's explore The Emotional Craft of Fiction: How to Write the Story Beneath the Surface.

How to Make Readers Fall in Love with your Novel.

Everything about Donna Tart's wonderfully readable novel, The Goldfinch, is designed to rivet your attention and break your heart. Early on in the story, Theo a 13-year old boy loses his mother in a terrorist bombing. Even before the start of the story, Theo's father, an uncaring alcoholic, has abandoned his family. Theo's mother was his only rock and heroine until she died. Now Theo is adrift, an orphan temporarily living with a wealthy, successful family because one of their children was a school friend of Theo's years earlier.

Theo is suddenly outside looking in at a privileged childhood that once was his before his father left; he's in a state of grief over that but, of course, primarily over losing his mother.

Theo's school friends in their blundering, haphazard, 13-year-old ways (our adult ways are not that much more sensitive) express their sorrow for his loss, but that only makes the pain more excruciating for Theo and, frankly, for us, the readers of this fine novel.

In the following passage, tell me if you don't agree that the subtext crackles with emotion. Here, Andy, one of Theo's friends, in trying to sympathize with his plight; but it only causes we readers to care about Theo and what will become of him all the more. (And don't you agree that this dialogue sounds true to how 13-year-olds talk to each other?)

"She was awfully nice," he said without looking at me.

"Yeah, well," I muttered, not anxious to continue the conversation.

"I mean, I miss her," Andy said, meeting my eye with a sort of half-terrified look.

I said nothing. Young, playful, fun loving, affectionate, she had been everything [that] Andy's own mother wasn't. [A passage follows here filled with wonderful, loving things Theo's mother did to help draw out the shy boy Andy was. And then Andy himself adds another.]

"Do you remember when she took us on the bus to that horror-fan convention way out in New Jersey."

He meant well, I knew. But it was almost unbearable for me to talk about anything to do with my mother, or Before, and I turned my head away.

  Let's unpack this passage: The nicer Andy makes Theo's mom out to be, the more Andy misses her, and the more poignantly and directly we feel Theo's loss; at the same time the more hooked we are on reading The Goldfinch and rapidly turning the pages of this fine novel. That's how page-turners work.

[Note: This blog entry continues my review of The Emotional Craft of Fiction: How to Write the Story Beneath the Surface by Donald Maass, Writer's Digest Books, Cincinnati, Ohio, 2016.]

And that's the whole point Donald Maass is making in his book about how to get emotions flowing in works of fiction. When it's done well, novelists and their works are ascendant, rising to the top of the best-seller charts. When it's not done well, books wind up on the remainder table.

In Maass's own words: "Emotional impact is not an extra. It's as fundamental to a novel's purpose and structure as its plot. The emotional craft of fiction underlies the creation of character arcs, plot turns, beginnings, midpoints endings, and strong scenes. It is the basis of voice."

It's everything, in other words.

And yet at the same time Maass is the first to say that in his opinion most novels are devoid of real emotion.

Maass starts out by explaining that there are three ways an author can handle emotions: 1) by telling (letting characters talk about the emotions they're feeling); 2) by showing (letting the reader intuit the emotions that must be going on inside the character's head based on his or her actions); or 3) by employing "another" mode that includes a conversation that goes on between the reader and the author about what emotions a character is feeling.

Then he posits his main theses by asking, "What is actually happening inside readers as they read? Each reader has a unique emotional response to a story. It's unpredictable," but he adds, "research shows us that consumers of entertainment are seeking more than anything to have an experience." "Research shows this: Readers expect their experience to be a positive one."

He goes on to write, "Entertainment works best when it presents consumers with novelty, challenge." This is central to Maass's thesis: "The emotional wallop of a story is created by its totality. Readers experience that wallop when they must not just form an opinion about the story, but when they must study, question and form an opinion about themselves. Simply put, they want, they must take an emotional journey."

In talking about the emotional world readers enter as they begin reading any novel, Maass insists, "We experience everything in our lives as feelings. It's funny then that so much fiction is written to minimize feelings or leave them out altogether. It's as if emotions are not a fit subject or writing about them is too simplistic. Even fiction that celebrates feelings can sometimes work with only a limited and familiar palette. We can wallow in emotional content yet feel curiously empty. It doesn't have to be that way," writes Maass. "The emotional experience of a story both for characters and readers can be far richer than it often is. When the mandate is to keep things visual, exciting, external and changing, how are you supposed to spend page-time on what is amorphous internal, reflective and static. Emotions aren't story. (My emphasis.)

Maass goes on to write inspiringly: "Despite that, great storytellers are able to make emotions as compelling as anything else on the page. They make the emotional life of characters the focus rather than the sideshow. They make familiar emotions fresh and small feelings large. They immerse us in the emotional worlds of characters. They stir the high human emotions that make stories memorable."

Some ways to accomplish that, writes Maass, is to write what he calls "Me-Centered Narration," that allows a first-person character to declare what he or she is all about with the edgy notion that this opinion may later turn out to be unreliable. An example of this technique: Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl.

Another approach is to purposely write about small, off-beat emotions instead of focusing on large, mainstream and standard emotions one usually runs across in most fiction. 

For example, in my novel, Charging the Jaguar, one of my adult characters determines he must climb a tree in order to save his life. There are many typical emotions I could have had my character feel, for example that he'll fall out of the tree and injure himself or die. But I take it in another direction: This character realizes that he hasn't climbed a tree since he was eleven years old. So first he must deal with the notion that although climbing trees might be childish, in this case, as an adult, he's climbing this tree to save his life, and, in a strange way, to grow up. As Maass contends, "small emotions equal a large experience."

A third way of magnifying the emotions and getting the reader to identify with the character is to have the character perform small but important good deeds that set him apart. Maass calls this "raising the moral stakes."

On page one of my novel, I let the reader discover that my principal character has taken in a feral cat to save the cat from large-cat predators, Jaguars and Mountain Lions, that live in the mountains above a small Colombian village. It's a minor thing, right? It hardly deserves mention. Only because it's the very first thing you learn about my character on page one of the novel it takes on added importance and subtly tilts the entire novel in the direction of always asking, "What is the right thing to do?"

Next month: How create a character so that his or her personality shines through, allowing the reader to feel he or she knows the character intimately.

Describing Toni Morrison's Descriptions.

When I graduated from the Iowa Writer's Workshop in 1972, I came away with a number of understandings that have not withstood the test of time. One of them had to do with showing vs. telling: When writing fiction showing is superior to telling, or so the belief went. I came away believing telling is a lesser form of storytelling. (If that's the case, now I wonder why we always use the term "storytelling," and never use the term "story showing.")

Over the last fifty years there's been a reassertion of telling over showing. We're no longer so silly as to believe that one is good and the other is bad; rather, I'd suggest the current belief is that there's a time for telling and a time for showing; we like writing in which both methods live side-by-side peacefully, each one helping the other to operate more effectively.

One undeniable reality: Showing requires more words than telling; thus, in the hands of a fine writer, by telling one can achieve stunning effects in very few words. Think of Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address.

As a Writers' Workshop graduate, I never considered that truth. My blind faith in showing over telling severely hampered my ability to write descriptions: I was under the impression that descriptions at their best should show a reader how someone or something looked or felt, perhaps relying on a metaphor. Looking back on it now, I can see how this orientation led to "arty writing" that now I might consider self-conscious and imprecise. If you had asked me at the time, "Well, how about writing a description that simply tells a reader what she or he should imagine?" I would have probably said, "But that's telling." I would have called it too crass for words, and judged it not sufficiently arty.

In Toni Morrison's Beloved we see plenty of telling descriptions, especially of eyes. Critics call her eye descriptions "a motif" because they appear virtually every time a character appears.

Her descriptions tell us exactly how we should see a character's eyes. It's almost as though Toni Morrison turns the old-fashioned "showing" rules of writing descriptions on their head. With her, it's all about telling. Showing is forbidden.

Here are some examples:

One character has "the glittering iron punched out of her eyes..."

Another character's eyes: "...left two wells that did not reflect firelight."

When Schoolteacher (a character) catches up with another character, "her eyes are so black she looks blind."

After too much conflict with a character, her eyes "turn bright but dead, alert but vacant."

Notice the depth, complexity and ambiguity of that description. (Notice how few words it takes to write a truly complicated, involving description.)

The disturbing thing about another character's eyes was "not that the whites of them were much too white," but that "deep down in those big black eyes there was no expression at all."

When Paid Stamp (a character) recalls his time on the chain gang in Georgia, he remembers that "the eyes had to tell what there was to tell" about what the other prisoners were feeling.

When the schoolteacher comes upon the scene in the shed he decides to turn back for home without claiming any of the survivors (he was a slave bounty hunter) because "he had enough of nigger eyes for now."

Denver thinks of her mother as "one who never looked away, even from pain or death."

Paul D (another character) thinks he is safe from Beloved's (still another character's) advances "...as long as his eyes were locked on the silver of the lard can."

Yet another character thinks it's lovely the way a second character is "pulled into view by the interested, uncritical eyes of Beloved," which I take to mean that Beloved's eyes are observant and attractive but non-judgmental. If there is a tinge of menace in that description (the character being magically pulled closer) it's appropriate. Beloved is a ghost.

When Sethe sees Paul D after many years: "Except for a heap more hair and some waiting in his eyes he looked the way he had in Kentucky."

Paul D saw Halle "empty eyed..."

"For a man with an immobile face, it was amazing how ready he was to smile or blaze or be sorry with you. With less than a blink his face seemed to change; underneath it lay the activity."

What I got from reading Beloved was for me a revolutionary, new way to go about writing descriptions; I got a methodology, if you will, for how to go about it (telling rather than showing), and a tremendous number of examples.

If you call that "copying," I suggest it's more rightly called "stealing." I would suggest you read a little book called Steal like an Artist: 10 Things Nobody Told you about being Creative by Austin Kleon. It's a New York Times bestseller.

It shouldn't be forgotten that Toni Morrison won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Foremost among the many gifts one gets from reading Beloved are its powerful, succinct descriptions.

For all the "show-don't-tell" die-hards among us: That's telling, don't you agree?

Toni Morrison's Beloved bestows bounteous gifts in private moments.

In last month's ExcitingWriting Advisory I described how I found my way into Toni Morrison's Beloved. As you may remember, I didn't have an easy time of it, at first having to reread certain passages numerous times. Now in a private moment I ponder and compare the Beloved story to the Biblical Binding of Isaac story. I'll say more about that in a moment. But consider this wisdom: You can become a better writer by becoming a better reader. My method may have a touch of madness to it, but still, by refusing to read one word farther into Beloved than I was able to understand and appreciate, I have managed to become the recipient of a treasure trove of gifts. A careful reader could not ask for more. It's no wonder Toni Morrison's Beloved is ranked as one of the top one hundred best-loved novels in America by The Great American Read, a television show on PBS.org.

Since I began reading Beloved, I've made an emotional passage. Characters like Baby Suggs, Sethe, Denver, Halle, John D., Paid Stamp and the cruel, demented plantation overseer, Schoolteacher, are not just characters to me; they've become real. In my soul Beloved has transformed into a nonfiction work, although I know very well that it is fiction.

I've glimpsed what it might have been like for the ancestors of our African-American brethren when an escaped slave who by outrageous fortune somehow managed to make it north of the Ohio River, to Cincinnati, Ohio, was then subsequently tracked down by a bounty hunter determined to take the slave south of the Ohio, back into slavery. 

The novel provides an extraordinary number of instances where careful readers can discover for themselves the horrible realities of slavery in authentic, non-exploitative ways. We understand the horrors without becoming jaded by them. That's an accomplishment. 

Perhaps because I invested so much time in making the novel understandable to myself, those times when I put together insights based on hard-won understandings, they come off to me as very private moments even though there's nothing private about them at all; they are very public moments all readers can enjoy for themselves if they wish.

Here's a fact that will help you to understand and enjoy the novel, Beloved. Before the Civil War, if an escaped slave were caught by a slave bounty hunter in a northern, non-slave state, the bounty hunter could legally capture the escaped slave and forcibly return him or her to servitude. The laws of the time allowed an escaped slave one "out." As an alternative, the slave could "choose" to remain in jail for an undefined period of time.

Can you imagine what the mother of a newborn child might do to her child if she hated slavery worse than death itself and knew that a slave bounty hunter was about to return her and her newborn back back to slavery on a plantation ironically named, Home Sweet Home? (Everything I'm describing here was completely legal at that time.) If you haven't read Beloved, you probably can't imagine what a mother faced with this circumstance would do. Morrison read several personal accounts of bondage written by former slaves during the Reconstruction period. She also read actual articles published in the Cincinnati newspapers of the time recounting the story of what actually happened when one mother of a newborn confronted with this stark choice acted to see that her newborn would never be recovered as a slave. (The newborn baby, born into slavery, would also became the "property" of the slaveholder.) This is why on the first page of Beloved we learn that the spirit of a murdered newborn baby by the name of Beloved has possessed the entire household at 124 Bluestone Road in Cincinnati, Ohio. As you read Beloved for yourself, I'll bet the private moments you discover for yourself will cause you to witness the tremendous power of love that, in turn, is powered by Morrison's Nobel Prize-winning imagination. That imagination of hers splays open the cruel institution of slavery and expresses it in terms that are unforgettably vivid and moving. A good example is the description of Sethe's back: Whipped as many times as she had been for willful slave infractions, Sethe's back finally healed into a "chokecherry tree."

Here's the moment when Amy Denver, the "whitewoman," sees Sethe's back for the first time: "Amy unfastened the back of her dress and said, "Come here, Jesus," when she saw. Sethe guessed it must be bad because after that call to Jesus Amy didn't speak for a while. Sethe felt the fingers of those good hands lightly touch her back. She could hear her breathing, but still the whitegirl said nothing. Sethe could not move. She couldn't lie on her stomach or her back, and to keep on her side meant pressure on her screaming feet. Amy spoke at last in her dreamwalker's voice.

"It's a tree, Lu. A chokecherry tree. See, here's the trunk—it's red and split wide open, full of sap, and this here's the parting for the branches." It goes on like that. It can be argued I believe that the chokecherry tree image, with its leaves and blossoms as Amy describes it in dialogue, formed out of scar tissue on Sethe's back, allows us both to appreciate the amount of beatings Sethe survived, and "see" the healed damage done in the form of scar tissue while, at the same time, allowing us to begin to comprehend the amount of beatings and pain Sethe must have endured while a slave.

About one-third through the novel Beloved, a character named Beloved appears who is the same age as the baby girl Beloved would be if her mother had not murdered her as a newborn. Beloved helps other characters channel back through the past, for example, in this passage where Beloved "recalls" what it was like to be on a slave ship coming to America:

"Beloved closed her eyes. "In the dark my name is Beloved."

Denver scooted a little closer. "What's it like over there, where you were before? Can you tell me?"

"Dark," said Beloved. "I'm small in that place. I'm like this here." She raised her head off the bed, lay down on her side and curled up.

Denver covered her lips with her fingers. "Were you cold?"

Beloved curled tighter and shook her head. "Hot. Nothing to breathe down there and no room to move in."

"You see anybody?"

"Heaps. A lot of people is down there. Some is dead."

"You see Jesus? Baby Suggs?"

"I don't know. I don't know the names."

In my view when Morrison introduces the character of Beloved she rolls the dice and risks her entire novel by introducing an obviously magical character that allows her to move around in history at will. Morrison not only makes it work; in her hands it becomes a brilliant move. When the character of Beloved appears, Morrison suddenly has a magical figure at her disposal capable of channelling the past to us. Without the character of Beloved ever appearing, the novel would have been mediocre. Once Beloved is introduced, I sense the novel beginning to build toward what I imagine in the end makes this truly a great work. (No, I still haven't finished reading Beloved.)

But already I've happened upon yet another one of those gifts, the similarity between a mother slitting the throat of a newborn baby so as not to return the baby to slavery and the Biblical story of Abraham following God's instructions to bind and sacrifice his child Isaac to God. What could be learned by making such a reckless comparison? In both stories we have a "parent-cide," or near-parent-cide. Don't both stories suggest a divine intervention? Ah, but could they? Just mull that for a moment. You'll see why Beloved for me has become the gift that keeps on giving.

Next month: Describing Toni Morrison's Descriptions