Friday morning

Patricia’s craft talk

We’d read The Progress of Love by Alice Munro for this one. Patricia started us off by reading a bit of the beginning, then wondered what we would have been “cheeky” enough to say to Munro had she been in workshop with us. “You can’t change tense like that.” “This story is begging to be a novel.” “How can Fame speak so authoritatively about events she wasn’t there for?” Good thing, says Patricia, Munro didn’t come to our workshop.

Then she discussed scene and summary. A scene, according to Patricia, is an unbroken flow of action. Usually. Sometimes you’ll choose to break it, but for simplicity’s sake, let that lie, she said. If you change time and/or place, you’re probably writing a new scene. Good scenes include: Discoveries. Recognition. Reversals of fortune. Disasters. Suffering. Crises. Clashes of will. Wounds. Illness. Death. Birth. Sex. Seduction. Disclosure. Decision-making. Good scenes answer, “How would it really happen?” Good scenes are built of action, dialogue, ruminations, bits of description and characterization. Good scenes contain the stakes. Good scenes move the action forward.

Summaries, on the other hand, give the bigger picture. They can span a long period of time in a few words. Patricia defined two types: circumstantial and chronological. Circumstantial tells your reader about your character’s life. For example: Phoenix was a proud woman and a passionate one. She liked to think she was good at the things she did; after all, most of them were the result of years of practice. She lived like an explosion, like a hurricane, all unassuming quietness until the spark hit. Chronological summary moves us through a period of time in chronological order that doesn’t need to be built into scene. For example: For years after that day, she loved Allegra. She wrote her letters that she didn’t send, daydreamed about being important to the other girl. Every summer, she tried to get over her, and every fall, she discovered that she had failed. Unrequited love does fade, though, and she was ready to move on by the end of her senior year, just in time to meet the girl of her dreams.

Basically, said Patricia, stuff that isn’t important to the story is summarized. Don’t be afraid of summary, though. It’s necessary to keep your story moving along. We don’t want to experience every moment of five years of stasis, as in the above example.

The last thing she covered was timeline. Progress of Love isn’t told in chronological order, by any means. But it’s told in a way that makes sense, following a path of memory, and that’s okay. What works best next to what? That’s a better way to look at it.

I use most of this instinctively without knowing the words for it, but it’s nice to be able to define what I’m doing at any given point. For example, I write entire fanfiction pieces in summary, and majorities of short stories in summary. That makes the scene at the end pop that much more, and it’s good for really short work—when I say short story, I can mean as little as 1050 words. I do change tense, as well, sometimes stylistically—I have a short story where the narrator tells the entire history of her relationship in past tense, and describes ‘now’, both in the first lines and in the last scene, in present. (Sometimes I do it by accident. I find it ever more difficult to stay in one tense now, and have just about given up on keeping it straight during the creative process. I go back later and switch to whatever makes sense. ) I generally write more or less in chronological order, but I do have one story that begins ‘now’ and then flashes back four years to tell the story up till the point it started at. Good to know that’s allowable.

Liz’s craft talk

            The first note I have is that Liz doesn’t believe in spondees. Those are consecutive syllables equally stressed. She thinks that the stress falls more heavily on one or the other.

“The possibilities for tune in the Germanic tones of meaning struck across the rigidity of a limited meter are endless.” ~?

“Accentual-syllabic is where it’s at, man! It’s like splitting the atom. Something just happened.” ~Liz

So we started off proper talking about accentual-syllabic verse. Accentual counts only the number of accented syllables. Syllabic counts only the number of syllables. Accentual-syllabic counts both and places them in a fraction format, stressed over total. She did a scansion (that’s what looking at the stresses of a poem is called) of some iambic pentameter, iambic tetrameter, common meter, trimester, dimeter, and monometer, the last two of which I’d never seen before.

She defined some easily-confused terms.

“meter (cut) is merely a prescribed number of accented and unaccented syllables in a line; abstract, mechanical, controlling

rhythm (flow) is the rise and fall of stress in spoken language w/ or w/out meter; bodily, musical, alive, rebellious

accent is determined by meter

stress (or speech stress) is a component of the rhythm of language w/ or w/out meter

substitution refers to the replacement of one kind of metrical foot by another

variation refers to the varying speech stress of syllables across a metrical line”

She told us a story about having a dog who she needed to play with enough to wear out the dog every day before leaving for work. So she invented a game. She would hold up the stick as though she was going to throw it, and then she would wait. Finally, she would actually throw it, and the dog would go racing after it as though it was the best thing. The dog, said Liz, is the natural rhythm of language, and the game is the meter, imposed upon it to get it to do new things.

Syllables can be accented or unaccented depending on what syllables are around them. Stress is just a natural part of language. Take a look at Shakespeare’s sonnet 73. Stressed syllables are in caps, accented syllables are red:

That TIME of YEAR thou MAYST in ME beHOLD

When YELlow LEAVES, or NONE, or FEW, (do) HANG

UpON (those) BOUGHS which SHAKE aGAINST the COLD,

BARE RUined CHOIRS, where LATE the SWEET BIRDS SANG.

First line: Accents and stresses line up to make a pretty perfect iambic pentameter. Second line: ‘do’ gets a little bit more stress than some of the other unaccented words. Third line: ‘those’ gets a little extra stress too. But on the last line, you have two syllables with a lot of stress that aren’t accented, which makes us stop and look at this line differently.

In case anyone was wondering, an iamb is two syllables that run unstressed-stressed. A trochee is the opposite: stressed-unstressed. An anapest is three syllables, unstressed-unstressed-stressed. A dactyl is three syllables, stressed-unstressed-unstressed. An argument could be made that I should be using ‘accent’ instead of ‘stress’ in this entire explanation, but you get the picture.

Finally, she talked about messing with meter. There’s a line in MOLY, by Thom Gunn, that goes, “Parrot, moth, shark, wolf, crocodile, ass, flea.” Almost impossible to figure out the meter. As it happens, it runs a simple stressed-unstressed pattern until ‘wolf’, and a caesura fits in between ‘wolf’ and ‘croc’,  both of which are stressed, and then returns to alternating. Another line goes, “I push my big grey wet snout through the green.” Lots of stress in ‘big grey wet snout’ there. In James McMichael’s EACH IN A PLACE APART, on the other hand, the iambic pattern emerges from prose-sounding free verse.  

I liked learning the difference between meter and rhythm, and all the other words that associate with both. The dog story helped me understand how meter isn’t something words magically fall into. It was interesting to see how all the different poets played with meter and got it to do different things for them. It might be interesting to try going back to poetry with meter. I’ve written free verse almost exclusively for a long time, relying on raw words and imagery to provide the punch, but it seems to me that’s a baby poet’s way of writing. No finesse, no subtlety, no style. The Hulk as opposed to Black Widow, perhaps.