by Lawrence Coates | May 5, 2015 | Language, Techniques of Fiction
Anthony Doerr graduated from Bowling Green State University with his MFA in Creative Writing in 1999, and he has published a long string of exceptional books since his graduation. His first book, The Shell Collector, won both the Barnes and Noble Discover Prize and the New York Public Library Young Lions Award, and his latest book, All the Light We Cannot See, won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction. Doerr’s work in general, and All the Light We Cannot See in particular, is justly celebrated for its prose style. I’d like to take this blog post to analyze some of the rhetorical figures he uses in his work, and I chose to look at one single chapter, the one that begins on page 12 with the title “Number 4 rue Vauborel.” I chose this chapter out of the many beautifully written chapters for the somewhat arbitrary reason that it was read aloud on the Diane Rehm show. As readers of this occasional blog on the techniques of fiction know, I have benefited greatly from Arthur Quinn’s book Figures of Speech, and I’ll be using his definitions and examples to analyze All the Light We Cannot See. I hope you’ll find this useful for writing your own fiction. However, I don’t mean to suggest that simply knowing and using figures is the same as writing graceful prose and creating a compelling narrative with great characters, as Anthony Doerr has done. Knowing and understanding techniques will only take you part of the way there. Anaphora – Repetition of beginnings In this brief chapter, scarcely a page and a half in length,...
by Lawrence Coates | Mar 16, 2015 | Language, Techniques of Fiction
I continue in praise of Figures of Speech, by Arthur Quinn. He describes the classic rhetorical figures, as Richard Lanham does, but with a light and engaging manner. And you can use these in contemporary fiction, as do some of the finest writers, like Marilynne Robinson and Cormac McCarthy. I wrote last time about going over the copyedited version of The Goodbye House and discovering that the copyeditor saw both asyndeton and polysyndeton as grammatical errors to be corrected. If polysyndeton is the addition of conjunctions, asyndeton is the opposite, leaving out conjunctions where they might normally occur. Arthur Quinn uses one of my favorites as an example, from The Gettysburg Address: That government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth. By leaving out the conjunction, Lincoln avoided any sort of hierarchy within the three clauses and rhetorically supported the notion that all three are inter-dependent and equally important. Quinn points out that asyndeton is used not only for a series of clauses but also for a series of nouns. For from within, out of the heart of men, proceed evil thoughts, adulteries, fornications, murders, thefts, covetousness, wickedness, deceit, lasciviousness, an evil eye, blasphemy, pride, foolishness: All these evil things come from within, and defile the man. Mark 7:21 Note how asyndeton makes this seem less like a simple laundry list of human failings and more like a jeremiad. Asyndeton is used not only in classic texts but also in contemporary fiction. Consider this example: He would live to look upon the western sea and he was equal to whatever might...
by Lawrence Coates | Feb 13, 2015 | Language, Techniques of Fiction
Copyediting and polysyndeton As I continue blogging about the techniques of literary fiction, I will sometimes highlight books that have been important to me. And one book I certainly want to mention is Figures of Speech, by Arthur Quinn. Quinn’s book describes the classic rhetorical figures with a light touch, and illustrates them with quotations from Shakespeare, and the King James version of the Bible, and other writers like Augustine, Montaigne, Bacon, Cicero, and Dickens. He sometimes ventures into the twentieth century with quotations from Joseph Conrad or T. S. Eliot, but most of his examples come from the more distant past. I love Quinn’s book for many reasons. It helped me analyze and understand the prose of some of our finest writers, among them Cormac McCarthy and Marilynne Robinson. And it also helped me develop my own prose, especially in The Master of Monterey. I’m writing about this now because I have just finished going over the copyedited version of The Goodbye House, scheduled for publication this fall. And some of the “corrections” the copyeditor made had to be changed back because she clearly was unfamiliar with the rhetorical figures of asyndeton and polysyndeton and saw them as grammatical errors to be corrected. Let me state that copyeditors should be esteemed and valued. Every writer who publishes a book benefits from a careful copyeditor, and the manuscript I’m working on had some mistakes that my copyeditor caught. For instance, a street in my book was at times called “Prospector Street” and at other times called “Prospector Road.” My copyeditor, quite logically, asked me to pick one or the...
by Lawrence Coates | Jan 16, 2015 | Short-Shorts, Techniques of Fiction
I decided I should write this post while my story is still up as the winner of the Barthelme Prize for Short Prose, given by Gulf Coast. I’ve been teaching a techniques class at Bowling Green State University for more than a decade, and one exercise I’ve enjoyed has been the common image story. I got the idea from an anthology that came out in 1992, The Wedding Cake in the Middle of the Road. The conceit of this anthology is that every story included should include that element, a wedding cake in the middle of the road. Some fine writers, like Charles Baxter and Ann Beattie, contributed. The exercise is quite simple. As a group, we brainstorm about some image or notion that seems a bit unusual, off, and yet compelling. It should be something that at least suggests that a story is needed to explain it. Then, by the end of the semester, we all have to write a short-short that includes the image. I’ve arbitrarily defined a short-short as 1000 words or less, though my own exercises have generally been shorter. Here is a partial list of prompts my classes have come up with over the years: Chandelier in a vacant lot Raggedy Ann in a swimming pool Bricks in a baby carriage Baby doll in a wheelchair A bat inside a purse Panties in a pine tree Trombone in a shopping cart Lobster in a Laundromat This is one exercise in Techniques that I always do along with my class. It’s fun and challenging, and as I often tell the MFA’s, having some formal requirement...
by Lawrence Coates | Dec 19, 2014 | Book Biz, Techniques of Fiction
I’m working on a long, multi-post entry on Trauma and the Fragmented Narrative. But in the meantime, I’m going to post a couple of times on the Book Biz. I received a royalty check for The Master of Monterey not too long ago. Why is this significant, beyond the fact that it’s cool to get paid for work that was published more than a decade ago? It illuminates some aspects of the business, specifically advances, sales, distribution, and returns. When The Master of Monterey was put under contract, I received a small advance. The book was published, reviewed well in The Los Angeles Times, The Monterey Herald, and elsewhere, and sent out to bookstores. I did as many appearances as I could round up, landed one interview on KAZU, the Monterey NPR affiliate, signed stock wherever I went, and waited. After some months, I found that I’d sold enough copies to cover my advance, and I received another check. My publisher pays royalties bi-annually. That was the last check for ten years. Here’s what happened. When bookstores have books they want to rotate out of the store to make room for new releases, they ship them back to the publisher, and receive 100% credit for any unsold copies. Those returns were charged against my account, and suddenly I had a negative balance. It might be depressing, but books in bookstores are often treated like any commodity. Just as Campbell’s Soup pays for prime space in the aisle of the grocery store, large publishers pay for prime space – table displays, special endcaps – in bookstores. If a book hasn’t sold...
by Lawrence Coates | Dec 12, 2014 | Techniques of Fiction, Titles
Raymond Chandler once said, “A ‘good’ title is the title of a successful book.” That makes a kind of sense. If the book is a big success, that means the title was excellent. So a title that really makes no sense, like The Postman Always Rings Twice, is just fine since the book was made into a celebrated movie and still continues to sell. It’s true that a title is part advertisement. However, I’d like to think that the quality of the title is due to more than just the commercial success of the book it’s attached to. Here are a few qualities that make for particularly good titles: A good title can take on multiple meanings and do some artistic work for the story. For instance, A Farewell to Arms is about leaving the war behind. But of course, the main character also says farewell to the arms of his wife, who dies at the end of the book. Love Life, by my teacher, the late James D. Houston, is another good example. The novel is about a woman’s love life. But it’s also a command – Love life. The Children Act by Ian McEwan is yet another good example. The title refers, literally, to a law, a legal act that protects children. But it obviously is also a complete declarative sentence. The children are acting upon those adults who are trying to care for them. A good title can make use of metaphor in some way that does some artistic work for the book. The Blackboard Jungle and The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter are both good...
Lawrence Coates is the author of five books, most recently The Goodbye House. His work has been recognized with the Western States Book Award in Fiction, the Donald Barthelme Prize in Short Prose, the Miami University Press Novella Prize, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Fiction. He currently teaches in the MFA program at Bowling Green State University.