REVIEW: “Diversity Plus: Diverse Story Forms, Not Just Diverse Faces” by Henry Lien

Review of Henry Lien, “Diversity Plus: Diverse Story Forms, Not Just Diverse Faces”, in Tod McCoy and M. Huw Evans, eds., Pocket Workshop: Essays on Living as a Writer (Hydra House Clarion West Writers Workshop, 2021): 93-100 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

The take-home message of this essay (one of the ones I was particularly interested in reading when I looked over the table of contents) is simply this:

Diversity can (and should) also icnlude different story forms drawn from diverse traditions (p. 93).

So simple, it almost warrants the response “duh” — but sometimes, the simplest facts are the easiest overlooked if they are never made explicit.

Of course, Lien doesn’t leave it at that: This fact is the opening of his essay, not the conclusion of it. In the remainder, he introduces the East Asian four-act story structure, contrasting it with the “Western three-act story structure and the five-act Freytag pyramid variant” (p. 94) (if you, like me, don’t know what the Freytag pyramid variant is, that’s okay, knowing what it is doesn’t seem to be essential). Like a lot of the other essays in this anthology, Lien takes a very practical, demonstrative approach, not content with simply describing the structures and talking about how they could be instantiated, but taking a concrete example — My Neighbor Totoro — and showing exactly how it does.

Lien’s piece leaves me itching to try this new structure, and thanks to his essay, I have all the tools I need to give it a go.

Sara L. Uckelman1 Comment

REVIEW: “The Three Laws of Great Endings and My Two Shameless Hacks” by James Patrick Kelly

Review of James Patrick Kelly, “The Three Laws of Great Endings and My Two Shameless Hacks”, in Tod McCoy and M. Huw Evans, eds., Pocket Workshop: Essays on Living as a Writer (Hydra House Clarion West Writers Workshop, 2021): 87-91 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

I read this essay with great interest, because endings are something I struggled with. The rules seem anodyne enough, but I look forward to trying out the hacks on my next story. I also found it instructive to read Kelly’s advice while thinking of endings that I personally find particularly successful (for some value of “success”; if “still be thinking about it next Thursday” (p. 89) is a measure of success, then the ending of Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot-49, which made me angry enough to throw the book across the room and still makes me angry some 20 years after I first read it, totally counts).

The first hack is to “dissect your ending into three parts: climax, resolution, and denouement” (p. 87), with Kelly giving specific guidance on what he means by this dissection — concrete questions to ask yourself about each part once you’ve identified them. It’s the sort of exercise that sounds like it would be rather horrific to do the first couple of times but I can see how it would pay off (rather like reading your story out loud to proofread it; terribly cringeworthy when you start, but soon you realise the value of the process and you can’t do without it).

The second hack is “to make up ten different endings to your story…[but] you must spend at least twenty-four hours on this process” (p. 89), and unlike the previous one, this exercise sounds like loads of fun, and I can’t wait to try it.

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REVIEW: “The Old Marvellous” by John Crowley

Review of John Crowley, “The Old Marvellous”, in Tod McCoy and M. Huw Evans, eds., Pocket Workshop: Essays on Living as a Writer (Hydra House Clarion West Writers Workshop, 2021): 79-85 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

This piece has less practical advice and more ideas and issues to reflect on. Crowley’s focus in his essay is the distinction, and relationship, between allegory and symbolism. It’s hard to talk about allegory without talking about Christian theology, and there is rather more religion, and reference to C.S. Lewis, than one might have expected to find in an anthology of advice about writing. Crowley makes the astute point, though, that while “realist fictions are full of struggles between persons whose moral and spiritual parts are mostly hidden or unfixed”, in fantasy fiction these “same moral or spiritual energies” are embodied and made explicit in the story itself (p. 82). That doesn’t mean that all fantasy fiction is allegorical (nor that all allegory is religious) but that allegory is always much closer to hand for the writer (and reader!) of fantasy fiction than of realist fiction.

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REVIEW: “Neowise” by Paul Park

Review of Paul Park, “Neowise”, in Tod McCoy and M. Huw Evans, eds., Pocket Workshop: Essays on Living as a Writer (Hydra House Clarion West Writers Workshop, 2021): 73-77 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

This is another piece that shows, rather than tells, how to write well. Lots of truth, a good deal of fiction, and plenty of space for the reader to take away the lessons they need to hear.

Sara L. Uckelman1 Comment

REVIEW: “Status” by Helen Marshall

Review of Helen Marshall, “Status”, in Tod McCoy and M. Huw Evans, eds., Pocket Workshop: Essays on Living as a Writer (Hydra House Clarion West Writers Workshop, 2021): 63-72 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

As both a writer and a teacher (but not — usually — one of writing!), Marshall’s piece really spoke to me. There is little in terms of explicit advice or guidance in it; rather, it’s more like Marshall is telling a story about telling stories, in a way that feels both real and familiar. It’s a piece to read and reflect on, with the moral being found in whatever the reader brings to it themself. For me, that moral is that there’s more similarity between teaching and writing than I think Marshall gives credit to.

Sara L. Uckelman1 Comment

REVIEW: “Channeling Voices” by Andy Duncan

Review of Andy Duncan, “Channeling Voices”, in Tod McCoy and M. Huw Evans, eds., Pocket Workshop: Essays on Living as a Writer (Hydra House Clarion West Writers Workshop, 2021): 57-62 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

“Voice,” Duncan says, is one of those things where “we sure do recognize it when we read it or write it” (p. 58) even if saying what it is remains elusive. Duncan’s piece addresses two different types of voice that can be channeled: The metaphorical “voice” of the author, that thing which gives each individual writer something distinctive that no other author has; and the much more literal voices of people who speak, to themselves or to others. How can one preserve the former without erasing the latter? How can an author “channel” a variety of speeches, rhythms, patterns of exchange and interaction without losing what is distinctive about their own way of telling stories? Duncan gives concrete advice, on how to listen, how (and what!) to collect, what to pay attention to, making this a valuable practical piece.

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REVIEW: “Coincidentally…” by Stephen Graham Jones

Review of Stephen Graham Jones, “Coincidentally…”, in Tod McCoy and M. Huw Evans, eds., Pocket Workshop: Essays on Living as a Writer (Hydra House Clarion West Writers Workshop, 2021): 51-55 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

For every “rule” about writing you come across, you probably can find a story that breaks that rule, successfully. Jones opens his piece with a number of such rules and examples of stories that break the rules successfully, in his opinion, in order to set the stage for a rule for which he says “there doesn’t seem to be any wiggle room”:

Coincidence only enables, it never solves (p. 52).

After reading the rest of this piece, naturally I want to take this as a challenge to write a story that successfully, and essentially, breaks the rule. (I do like the idea of using coincidences as enablers, though, and will apply that liberally.)

Sara L. Uckelman1 Comment

REVIEW: “The Devil is in the Details” by Connie Willis

Review of Connie Willis, “The Devil is in the Details”, in Tod McCoy and M. Huw Evans, eds., Pocket Workshop: Essays on Living as a Writer (Hydra House Clarion West Writers Workshop, 2021): 45-49 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

Not all advice is going to work for all writers in all contexts, and Willis’s piece is one that doesn’t work for me. She rightly points out how it is the little details that can really make the setting of a particular scene, that allow the author to evoke a place or a period without having to spell everything out, and also how getting a detail factually wrong can utterly ruin a story for some readers. What I think this piece misses out is a recognition that sometimes it is the giving of the details, whether they are “correct” or not, that can break the story. She says that these details “have to be specific and vivid” (p. 45); but I’m sure I’m not the only one who has felt the incongruity of the insertion of details that are too specific, too vivid, where their specificity is becomes more important than the detail itself. I think perhaps my complaint comes from disagreeing with her about the purpose of these details. Willis quotes Joseph Conrad on the task of the writer, which is “before all, to make you see” (p. 46) the story through written words alone. This is an unfortunately narrow view of the purpose or point of writing, and does not take into account anyone for whom mental images are either absent or substantially impaired. Trying too hard to draw a picture in the mind of a reader, or to turn a detail into a symbol or metaphor for the story itself (Willis’s “telling details”, p. 47), can be as bad as not trying hard enough.

Then again, perhaps that’s just what makes details so devilish.

Sara L. Uckelman1 Comment

REVIEW: “Some Thoughts on Exposition” by Tobias S. Buckell

Review of Tobias S. Buckell, “Some Thoughts on Exposition”, in Tod McCoy and M. Huw Evans, eds., Pocket Workshop: Essays on Living as a Writer (Hydra House Clarion West Writers Workshop, 2021): 39-43 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

Buckell’s piece, an adaptation of an earlier piece, “Expository Narrative” published in It’s All Just a Draft in 2019, discusses five ways expository information can be delivered in a story, and identifies positives and negatives for each:

  1. Flashback
  2. Dialogue exposition
  3. Narrator exposition
  4. Exposition through a character’s internal voice
  5. Interacting with information

Most of the negatives for each of these focus on how they can cause the momentum of a story to come to a halt. The more effective ways are the ones that can provide the reader with the background info that they need without compromising the pace and momentum of the story, which is partly why (according to Buckell) dialogue exposition can be more effective than, e.g., flashback — so long as you avoid the “as you know, Bob” dialogue exposition! But as with any good writing, “the key to making exposition work is…in incorporating all of these tricks throughout a story and scattering them evenly in between” (p. 42). He suggests, as an exercise, taking a short story and highlighting all occurrences of exposition, and classifying them according to the categories above. First, it will teach you what is exposition and what is not; second, it will show which types of exposition are most effective in which contexts. I’m certainly going to try this, both on stories written by others and on my own work.

Sara L. Uckelman1 Comment

REVIEW: “Thickening the Plot” by Samuel R. Delany

Review of Samuel R. Delany, “Thickening the Plot”, in Tod McCoy and M. Huw Evans, eds., Pocket Workshop: Essays on Living as a Writer (Hydra House Clarion West Writers Workshop, 2021): 29-37 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

Delany makes an interesting argument in this piece, namely, that “plot” is an effect of reading, and not one of writing. If I were to put my philosopher’s hat on, I’d be tempted to describe what he is doing as arguing that plot is something that supervenes on a story, rather than is a basic structural component of the story. Thinking of plot this way immediately changes what advice one would give to a writer re: plot. Delany’s own advice is firmly rooted in his own specific process (cf. Connolly and Yoachim’s piece earlier in the collection), which is intimately linked, for him, with rendering in words visual representations in the mind. If you are like me and mildly aphantasiac, much of his process is not transferable; and yet, I still found value in reading through this piece almost precisely because it was so foreign to anything that I do or can do.

(Originally published in Those Who Can, ed. Robin Scott Wilson, 1973).

Sara L. Uckelman1 Comment