So You Want to Write

by Marge Piercy

  I wrote that in my journal ten months ago when I arrived in Manila. At the time, I was battling my grandmother, Lola Flor, who wanted to impose her medieval notions of order on me. In her house, every day was regulated according to the canonical hours of a monastery: breakfast was served at lauds, just as the sun rose; I left for school at prime; we recited the rosary right after I came home from school at none; we sat down to supper at vespers; and at complin Lola marched around the house turning out the lights. At school, she wanted me to listen for the bells of St. Andrew’s and take my lunch when terce sounded, but that meant eating during math class. I tried it once just to see what would happen. I’d no sooner unwrapped my chicken wings than Mrs. Siew sent me to the principal’s office.

  In descriptions, it is the language that tips us off as to what is happening, the connotations of the words that tell us what to expect, subliminally, the way a score in music will set a mood in a film of suspense, impending doom, romance, serenity. The connotative language is the movie score working on you as you read. The shorter the description, the more power you must build into each word, the harder each phrase must work. Chapter one of Lycanthia by Tanith Lee begins with the description of a fast moving train passing through a comforting world of villages and small farms, cottages and sheds and busy peasants, then suddenly plunging into a land of winter, of ice and emptiness and sinister black forests. As the protagonist steps from the train at his station stop, the air is so sharp and cold he can hardly breathe and the train’s whistle seems to cry as it leaves him absolutely alone. Such a description connotes imminent harm, a land where nothing familiar, and probably nothing good, will happen.

  Some Exercises:

  Write a one paragraph description which is powerfully connotative, which is leading to a murder, a frightful revelation, a disaster. Do not tell the reader what you are trying to convey but do it by language and the objects you choose to describe. Watch your verbs and make them do a lot of the work. Do not rely only on adjectives.

  Exercise:

  Write a one paragraph description in which you convey the emotional attributes of a place; the way it makes you feel or the way you remember it, the way you want the reader to feel about it. Fearful, angry, cozy, lost. It can be a room, a neighborhood, a school, a town, a large city. Don’t name the emotion but attempt to choose words and images, objects and sensual details that may trigger the reader’s own feelings about the place.

  Exercise:

  Write a short scene in which your viewpoint character is encountering a person. Give us a strong sense of that person through what you choose to include about them, what your viewpoint character observes or senses about them—perhaps their clothing, their walk, their attitude; the way they hold your character’s stare or avoid their eyes. What do they smell like? What are they clutching? How do they act in the presence of other people: a bag lady? a cop? Here you are using description to characterize.

  Exercise:

  Create a room or a place that invokes the character who created or inhabits it. Do the work of making us feel the character first through the objects you include. Not a chair but a leather club chair with cracked upholstery smelling of dog. Or a particular type of designer chair, expensive and trendy. Or a horsehair couch in purple evoking the Victorian era in a period house or—more strangely—in a high rise apartment building in a room painted stark white. Not a bed but a narrow metal cot or a sumptuous king bed with a velvet patchwork quilt and swag draperies on the wall behind it or a fake Colonial canopy bed with an off white chenille spread.

  What’s on the walls? Are they bare? Is there a girly calendar, Elvis on velvet, a reproduction of Van Gogh’s sunflowers, a landscape in oils in shades that match the couch, a portrait of the hostess? What’s on the floor? What does the room smell like? What sounds do you hear when you enter it? Does the person play the piano or is a piano there for show? Are there music components visible and CDs? If so, what kind? You need not go about and catalog every object in the room, and in fact there is no reason to do so. But choose your furniture and your decorations carefully so that we know what’s important to the character who lives in that room. Or keeps it for show.

  Exercise: The Spirit of Place

  Try writing a dynamic and engaging description of a city, a landscape, a resort in or out of season, a mountain cabin (be specific about the mountain range), a village you visited on vacation. You can introduce yourself as a character experiencing this place or you can provide us with another narrator or protagonist. Or you can make the place itself the primary actor in the scene you are creating by having your narrator react to elements beyond her control: speeding taxis, aggressive panhandlers, freezing rain, and onrushing commuters streaming out of a busy London tube station.

  In any event, let your language do a great deal of the work. Select your images carefully. Be as specific as you can—not trees, but sugar maples or Joshua trees or bristlecone pines or royal palms. If you have birds or animals, make sure they are native to the place and name and describe them accurately and vividly. Is there a particular kind of music you hear in those streets or cafés? Are there shutters? What times of day do they open and when are they shut? Make the right kind of architecture inhabit your place—brush huts or high rises with lavish balconies or clapboard three-deckers or pastel stucco buildings of two and three stories with courtyards whose fountains you can hear dribbling on their pebbles.

  10

  When You Have Research To Do

  Frequently you may have a fair amount of research to do on a novel or a memoir. Although there are a few sources particularly useful for personal narrative, there is a great deal of overlap and similar technique no matter what you are writing. For Woman on the Edge of Time, I had a lot of studying to do about the brain and psychosurgery, about how it feels to be in a mental institution, and a lot of research preliminary to thinking about the technology in a good future society. For The Longings of Women, I needed to study homelessness and murder trial procedure in Massachusetts; I had to make on-site visits to several neighborhoods that are featured in the novel, the Barnstable House of Corrections, the courtroom where Becky’s trial takes place, Lesley College where Leila teaches.

  But some novels take an enormous amount of research. While I was writing The Longings of Women, I was already doing research on the French revolution for City of Darkness, City of Light. It has a huge computer database, as did Gone to Soldiers, my World War II novel. The database for Gone to Soldiers was seven times as long as the novel itself. The database for the French Revolution novel covered thirty-two high density discs.

  Searching a database on a computer is fast, but it still takes time. However, it sure beats writing things in a notebook, where you have to go through everything to find anything. It beats ordinary file cards, because from each piece of information in a filing system that depends on spatial location, either in a filing drawer or in a card box, you can only get at that particular goody by one path, one label. It is under WOMEN or it is under HISTORY or it is under NINETEENTH CENTURY or it is under FRENCH COMMUNE or it is under LOUISE MICHEL. Some of those descriptors will prove useful at different times, but you might want a cross referencing system that will get you that little goody by any of those routes.

  Whatever system you end up using, I recommend some system to you. It is simply not useful to have the stuff you want and need on random pieces of paper, the backs of grocery lists or lost in the middle of a notebook. The disadvantage of that method, or lack of it, is that you wade through pages of extraneous stuff—stuff that was interesting enough to you when you wrote it down to make it likely you’ll get suckered into reading it again now. There goes the afternoon.

  I clip periodicals heavily and keep files on subjects possibly useful. Novelists are hungry for information. I am always way behind clipping things, let alone reading them. My house is always full of glaciers of yellowing newsprint creeping through the rooms. Perhaps half the subjects I clip will never become novels, b
ut some of them will, and what I save (I tell my very skeptical husband whenever we move stacks of old magazines to pinpoint the odor of a long petrified mouse) will eventually be useful for me.

  Most of my fiction is research intensive and even my memoir required a great deal of digging. But as we’ve mentioned many times, all writers approach the subject differently. Some are absolutely fascinated by their own lives and do no research at all. Some work directly from memory, some from snippets of inspiration. In the preface to The Spoils of Poynton Henry James talks about the problem of hearing too much about an incident, what he calls the “futility of fact.” He was at a lavish Christmas dinner one night in London when another guest mentioned in passing that an acquaintance of hers was “at daggers drawn” with her only son over the ownership of the furniture in an old house the son had inherited upon his father’s death. James was immediately stung with an idea for a story, “as if the novelist’s imagination winces at the prick of some sharp point.” As the guest went on with specifics, however, his imagination began to fizzle. James compares that initial story idea to a newborn baby, with all the potential that the metaphor implies, but as she proceeds to supply him with helpful details all she manages to do is “strangle it in the cradle even while she pretends, all so cheeringly, to rock it.” Others mine jobs for story ideas. Ira became a waiter, designed computer games and ran for public office in preparation for his three novels. He got a bus driver’s license and drove a school bus ferrying Black children into hostile white neighborhoods in preparation for The Last White Class, the play we wrote about the violent battle for school desegregation in Boston. The great critic Edmund Wilson used to research long articles about a subject before he tackled a book, a common practice today for non-fiction writers for the New Yorker, for example.

  Interviewing is an undervalued art. As someone who has a lot of experience with being interviewed, I can tell you it is something usually done poorly. It requires empathy and direction, tact and a sense of tactics, patience and flattery. The best interviewer I have ever experienced is Studs Terkel; the best I’ve ever watched in action is Barbara Walters on TV. Both are extremely skilled and both massage and stroke the object/victim/target. Neither means harm but both are relentless and yet open, curious, for the moment a little in love. Love is a form of attention and so is interviewing.

  I often ask people who have a specific expertise in an area I have written about to look over an entire novel or sections of the novel, to see whether I have committed obvious gaffes, whether I have handled the language or the jargon essential to one or more characters idiomatically. You want to master some of the jargon of a profession, but only use it as flavoring. You do not want to create something so dense that your reader has to take a course to read what you have written.

  I asked a historian who had been a bombardier during World War II (and before that had worked in a shipyard) and his wife, who had been a Rosie the Riveter, to go over Gone to Soldiers before the final draft and give me feedback on anachronisms. I also had a friend who was in New York during the war check out my milieu details. I had both a Holocaust survivor and a Holocaust scholar check relevant chapters. One of my old French professors checked my French and saved me some real gaffes. I had two other friends who had experienced different aspects of the war check the manuscript, also. In spite of that, a couple of errors got through; some of them I have heard about from readers and was able to correct in the paperback—about five boners, as I recall. A copy editor should have caught at least the most important of those, but they usually spend their time fighting with you about points of grammar they imagine they know more about than you do—and missing grievous errors you would be pitifully grateful if they caught. Copy editors are mad for commas but not so interested in fact checking.

  Most of your research you’ll have to do at the library, through interlibrary loans, through on-site inspections and visits. You can get bibliography and some sorts of research on the Internet, but books are the most convenient and efficient way to find out what you want to know. The Internet is great for medical information, I’ve found, but not so great on history. However, there are listservs and forums for almost every conceivable subject, and you can put queries on ones you join.

  If you need to interview people, do them the courtesy of finding out as much as you can about them before you meet. Do not lie and do not get caught in oily flattery, but act even more interested than you are. You are taking up someone’s time and you owe it to them to be prepared. Never try to make a person replace reference work. It is not right to ask someone to answer questions you could do yourself with an hour in the local library. Remember also that what people remember is highly selective and highly subjective.

  Understand that we create the past and recreate it as we examine it. Even small facts are often unknowable. Again, using Gone to Soldiers as an example, there is a convoy in the third Duvey chapter, “The Black Pit.” I researched the list of ships in that convoy in Washington and in London and in every available historical record; every single list was different. This is a well attested to convoy that should be a piece of cake to track. History fades under our hands. History changes. You must get used to entering the realm of the Maybe So. The finally unknowable.

  Although this seems almost too obvious to mention, one of the worst things you can do is borrow a piece of equipment and use it for the first time while conducting an interview. I can’t tell you how many interviews have failed because the interviewer was unfamiliar with the tape recorder or microphone and wasted at least fifteen minutes of the hour available fiddling with the equipment. If you must borrow equipment, use it first and try it out until you are familiar with it. Be sure you have enough cassettes with you. Be sure you are carrying spare batteries. You would be surprised how many interviews are lost because of mechanical failure on the part of the interviewer. You want your recorder to be unobtrusive, just sitting there quietly recording. Be alert for the time you must turn the tape or change the cassette. You cannot reasonably expect any person to repeat what they have already said. If they told a great story full of charming detail the first time, they will give you a dry synopsis the second. If you are using a new digital recorder, you don’t want to be monkeying with it, calling attention to it, stopping a natural flow to make sure you are recording properly.

  In writing a memoir, you may imagine you do not need to do research, but memory is fallible and you want the flavor of the times as well as the facts. To jog your own memory or perhaps even that of someone you know, try songs from the period in question. Often songs are associated with an era of our lives. Movies work less well, but they may work for you. Smells—the smell of a particular flower or perfume or soup—jumpstart your memory. That usually happens without conscious preparation, but you can use a scent to recapture a period.

  Old magazines (often available in libraries and sometimes on microfilm) can prove extremely useful in recalling or creating details; so can newspapers. By looking at ads or illustrations, you might recall your mother’s dress or your father’s hat, or some particular outfit you were dressed in. Ads are useful. So are news stories of the time. Such research can provide you with vivid details, the bits of image, of sound and phrase that make the past real to your readers—because they make it real to you.

  Doing research with your family when you are writing a memoir or a piece about your family requires persistence and tact. You need to keep focused on what you are trying to find out (unless you are simply interested in recording everything). Mostly you won’t have trouble getting people in your family to talk, once you have persuaded them that you are genuinely interested; but there are stories they do not want to tell, and often those are the ones you want to hear. It takes persistence and it takes tact and it takes a kind of flattering attention, but you will probably succeed in the end. Transcribing interviews, by the way, is one of the most tedious and annoying activities you will engage in and by far the least fun element of your research. But unless a
nd until you transcribe interviews and notes, they are useless to you. I have known people who did many interviews but never wrote a book or even an essay, because they could not bring themselves to deal with the cassettes they had accumulated.

  Sometimes reading a children’s book that was important to you may bring back pieces of your childhood. Was there a radio program you listened to regularly or a television program you always watched? Did your family regularly watch some program together? Often you can find DVDs for old TV programs that have some significance to you and may be useful. I found cassettes of news broadcasts from World War II that were invaluable.

  If you cook a particular dish that your mother or grandmother made, that, too, may bring back memories you have forgotten or render sharper and with far more significant sensual details some memory you do possess, but has faded. Old photographs are an obvious source of information and emotion. You may use them to refresh your memories and use them as a device to get someone else in your family to talk about a particular family member or a particular era or event in which you are interested. You never know what may help. I have a tin box of buttons I took from my mother’s sewing drawer after she died. I have found that certain of those buttons inadvertently brought back entire experiences because they recalled to me what my mother had worn on some special day or trip we had taken and which gave me an entire scene. I have a poem called “Unbuttoning” that came from that tin of buttons. For you, perhaps sports memorabilia, old comic books, a book of period toys, rock or movie posters might help. If you jitterbugged or waltzed or watusied, doing it to the right music could bring out bygone times and faces.