This Itch of Writing

Comma-nd Performance

In my grumpiest moments, I wonder why I bothered to spend four years of work and hair-tearing to get a PhD in Creative Writing, when I now spend so much time explaining comma splices and other minutiae to students, only to find them still doing it in the next assignment. But, of course, comma splices and other conventions of punctuation are only minutiae in the way that molecules are minutiae: barely discernible, but without them the story couldn't exist. So I reassure the new, nervous writer that a text-book, testable knowledge of punctuation and grammar is not a requirement before you're allowed to do the imagining-on-paper that is writing a story. But I also try to explain why, actually, this stuff does matter, because it's about making sure your writing has the effect on the reader that you want it to.

We normally think in terms of having creative ideas, and putting technique at their service. But if you remember my post on how a subordinate adverbial clause of purpose might just help you to sing, you'll know that I believe that unpicking the grammar and puncutation can illuminate the different creative possibilities. Lots of writers who are beginning to understand the rules and logic of punctuation still find it difficult to "hear" how commas work, but I think perm-ing and con-ing the possibilities can also train your intuition, as I was doing for word-order here. 

So when a student asked how he should punctuate this sentence, I started to look at it, with a quick dip into the goldmine that is the University of Bristol's site for this stuff.

I walked down the street then as it started to rain dug my umbrella out of my bag and opened it.

One comma:

1. I walked down the street, then as it started to rain dug my umbrella out of my bag and opened it.
2. I walked down the street then, as it started to rain dug my umbrella out of my bag and opened it.
3. I walked down the street then as it started to rain, dug my umbrella out of my bag and opened it.
4. I walked down the street then as it started to rain dug my umbrella out of my bag, and opened it.

Two commas:

1. I walked down the street then, as it started to rain, dug my umbrella out of my bag and opened it.
2. I walked down the street, then as it started to rain dug my umbrella out of my bag, and opened it.
3. I walked down the street then as it started to rain, dug my umbrella out of my bag, and opened it.

Three commas:

1. I walked down the street, then as it started to rain, dug my umbrella out of my bag, and opened it.
2. I walked down the street then, as it started to rain, dug my umbrella out of my bag, and opened it.

Four commas:

1. I walked down the street, then, as it started to rain, dug my umbrella out of my bag, and opened it.

The only one of these which is incorrect by the formal rules is no. 2 in the one-comma set; all the others are correct, althouth the more rule-bound copy-editors may not be willing to acknowledge it. Some of the rest read better than others, although we might disagree about which. But the point is that they are all available to you, depending on what you're trying to express. And that's the point I want to make: where to put the comma(s) in this sentence is really about what the action of this sentence is: you start thinking about commas, and you end up being more forensic about what you're really trying to say. 

So what are you trying to say? Is as it started to rain a "weak interjection", just explaining the action of umbrella-digging, slightly out of the main action of the sentence? Then you want the parenthetical commas of two-comma/1.

Or is then as it started to rain the next instalment of the action, after the walking down the street? Then you want one of the ones where the comma comes before the co-ordinating conjunction then, where the new clause starts. Mind you, how many commas you use also comes into it. You need to keep an eye on how many you end up with, or the sentence gets so broken-up that it loses forward movement (which is one reason I don't believe that short sentences are necessarily more fast-moving than long ones.). And that might mean having to choose between a comma which is more "correct" for the fussier editors*, and more expressive for you.

Or is the walking down the street and the starting to rain the first part of the action, the digging out of the umbrella and the opening it the second? In which case you want the comma after rain, jointing the sentence into the two equal halves.

And as a side note, it's interesting to see "as" changing its meaning, from "because" to "during", depending on what you're trying to say, and where you therefore put the commas.

Or is what really matters the fact that the character opens the umbrella ... using the hand for the first time she damaged a month ago when she was trying to commit suicide? Then you want a comma just before and opened it. I'm not mad about the whole sentence before that late comma being completely un-articulated, because it begins to lose its rhythm and forward movement as it gets ramblier. But if you want it to have the maximum effect, you could make that late one the only comma in the sentence. 

These are what I mean about using punctuation for expressive purposes, not only grammatical meaning. You could also, of course, re-cast the sentence altogether. Sometimes trying to get something technically correct shows you that, actually, you should be saying it a different way, and that's good too. But there's a reason we say that people who speak intelligently and fluently are articulate: they know where to put the joints in their sentences, for the most and best meaning and expression.  What is your punctuation trying to articulate?

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*I'm talking here as if you can ignore fussy editors, but as I was discussing last week in Real Readers Won't Notice?, if readers are sensitized to technical things, you can't just ignore it. As I suggested there, you do need to make sure that your "incorrect" punctuation reads to those who matter as a creative decision, not just as sloppiness or ignorance.

Real readers won't notice?

Shortly after a bunch of aspiring writers start wrangling over the rules (which aren't rules, but tools, of course) someone will say, "But real readers won't notice, so why should I worry?" This is particularly true if some professional feedback has indicated that something technical is awry: point-of-view, say, or showing-and-telling. One way of fending off such feedback is to say that it's missing the point: who cares, if it's a good read? And it's backed up by the first handful of books you grab off your shelf. If it was good enough for Woolf/Rowling/Dickens/wotsername-who-wrote-50-shades-of-grey then it's good enough for us.

To a degree it's true, of course. As Mark Lawson said a propos Michael Crichton, of the three aspects of fiction - narrative, ideas and prose - a weakness in one can be made up for by the other two's brilliance. Aristotle points out that story is king, so a good story with limited/unconvincing characters-in-action is better than the other way round. But, still, truly gorgeous prose and/or thought-provoking observation will keep me reading (for quite a while) even if the story is apparently quite small-scale, and a fantastic storyteller can carry the reader too well for jolting changes of point of view to spoil things ... or not too much. But one of the side-effects of working on my own writing is that I find merely-functional writing does spoil my experience even of a good story; leaving Eden like that is both a good and a bad thing. And I can see how infuriating it is for Lorrie Moore who says that she suffers sometimes from doctrinaire editors who won't let her move point of view at all; most of us would say, "But if it works, why not?". Only, of course, it hasn't worked for that editor: once you're sensitized to technical things, you can sometimes trip up on them to the point where you just can't get into the story - even though another reader would read on happily.

But, it seems to me, there's noticing, and there's noticing. One of the reasons I enjoy CD Review on Radio 3 is that when they compare different recordings of the same piece, I begin to learn what my intuitive reactions to a performance are made up of. Few of us have perfect pitch, only some of us will consciously notice that a choir isn't in tune, but many, many more will just not feel/get/enjoy/be-swept-away by the music as we would be if it were. And the same goes for rhythm, or timbre, and above all by the musical thinking and understanding that are controlling them. There is a reason that the Berlin Phil gets the recording contracts and your nice amateur orchestra doesn't, and it isn't that Simon Rattle has a better publicist. So I'd argue that beyond those few, and those some, there are many/a majority whose experience of the story will be affected by technical things, even if they're not conscious of them at all.

So I don't think it's a matter of noticing the tense, or point-of-view, or psychic distance, or any other technique, in a conscious way. Yes, we've trained, as writers, to notice consciously what writers do, but that's not really what the author wants of us, or why they use the techniques we all work with. Only writers who have totally lost touch with what storytelling is for write novels mainly in order to express their interest in technique. (And I'm very interested in technique, but that doesn't mean I want or expect my reader to be, and that's not why I write my novels.) For all other writers, technique is a means to an end. And, as ever, you know that a writer is writing really well when even as a fellow writer you stop noticing how they're doing it.

So one of my criteria in judging competitions is that, among the 2% of the entries which are good enough to make the longlist, there are a few in which I stop noticing technical things and become an eager reader again. It's those those which will probably win, not because their technique is so good, but because the technical engineering is working so well to express the writer's project that the engineering is invisible, even to the likes of us writers. 

So what can you do, if you have become super-sensitized, but don't want to become the kind of reader or editor or teacher who judges only by rules kept or broken because they don't know good writing when they see it? The best I can come up with is to "think in pencil"... which is how I mark my students' work: prepared to re-consider a "mistake" in the larger context. Because students and other aspirers are supposed to be learning technique, I can't just ignore places where they don't put those techniques into practice, even if this time it's doing no harm, or even doing good, in the story. So you will, often and often, find me writing something like, "Normally I'd say that these comma-splices (or this Telling) should be sorted out (or made Showing), but here I think it works, because you want her to sound confused and incoherent (or bored and office-speak-y)." On the other hand, often and often a comma-splice is a just comma-splice, not an effective creative decision, and office-speak is a hangover from the day job.

Of course, hearing the "mistake" alarm-bell, and then trying to see if it's actually a good "mistake", takes longer, and explaining it takes longer still, than either ignoring or just "correcting" the comma-splices or the Telling, to what they should be by orthodox standards. It's confusing to some aspiring writers, too, to be told that X is wrong, except when it's right, because you're taking away their life-raft of certainty. Sorry.

How would you describe it?

Aspiring writers often seem to agonise about the thing they call Description, as if it was a whole, separate kind of writing from the rest of the narrative. They know they should have some, but they can't seem to get it right: it's "floppy" as one such writer put it, or "slows things down" as one of my students said. And most of all, there's the looming fear of cliché, of off-the-peg words or settings, which every aspiring writer knows they should be trying to avoid, without actually knowing how to do so.

I think the problem has two faces. First, you need to exercise your decribing-muscles, and since fiction takes the bits and pieces of the world and spins them into a new form, you need to exercise both skills. Then you need to be clear about what you're trying to do in this project, because it's that clarity which will mean the right words come.

Taking bits and pieces is the first step in learning to avoid cliché, too, because it's about getting back to the actual experience of things: you and the thing and no one else's words - second-hand words - trying to express it. Try taking an object and spending a minute writing down notes on everything about what it looks like - what you can see. Then hold it and write down everything about touch - what you can feel about it (that little dent in one side, the scratchy bit at the bottom). Then everything it sounds like (touch or bang it if you need to), then smell, then taste, (unless it's that old tin of rat poison) and finally what I call the sixth sense, which is proprioception, or body-sense: weight, balance, how something feels when you throw it or catch it, how your body feels as you lift it, and so on.

From that, move on to observing sensory information in a whole scene. Try noting down a journey while you're doing it, purely in terms of sound (what do you mean, you always travel with an iPod?) Or smell. Or maybe just list the abstract shapes you can see, the way an artist might: the rectangle of windows, the triangle of the little green where you stand to catch the bus, the pyramid-shape of that bag-lady in her dark coat.

And, yes, as you're experiencing these things practice figurative language for them - similes, metaphors - but your own, not the off-the-peg ones beloved of journalists. Here, you're just starting to spin something new: does that red bendy bus remind you of a lizard or a dinosaur or your favourite toy that your brother stole and put on the bonfire? How about the smell? The sound? What's the right verb for a skip lorry going too fast over a speed-bump or an old man with a severe hernia climbing the swimming-pool stairs? Then you need to practice re-calling, re-creating, re-imagining these things - a familiar journey, an object you know well - when you're away from them, so do all those little exercises about things and places again, but at home with a notebook.

Then move a step further into the real, re-creative imagining: think of an object which you've never seen, but know existed: the terrace your grandfather lived in, the medals your great-aunt sold. And a milieu you've never seen but know existed: the school your brother went to, the factory your mother served her apprenticeship in. Don't just copy out what you know from films orother people's writing; the gold-standard for description is what you could write about things you know, so make me believe you know these imagined things, by how vividly you re-create them.

Then stretch your imagination: How would a shell-shocked war-veteran experience that factory? How would an ex-prisoner see the medals? How would a fifteen-year old on her way to dump her girlfriend see the terrace? And here we are, writing fiction. And, as that last bit suggests, when it comes to writing the actual piece, it really helps to think about why you want to decribe this thing or place, and why just here in the story. Why do we need to know it? Does the narrator choose to tell us about the terrace, and why? Are we in the girl's PoV, and does she notice the terrace, or is she too busy working out how to dump the girlfriend? And what would she notice? How stuffy and tidy the houses look, with their gardens laid out with a ruler and the lawns shaved? Or how cosy and friendly they are, and now she'll never live in one? That's why it's also a mistake to think of Description as a lump of scene-setting before you can get going on dialogue and action. How is it part of the forward-movement of the story? How do the characters-in-action inter-act with the setting? Is the reader's experience of the place or person active, deliberately shaped to affect that experience: to ramp up the mystery, or give a sense of creeping evercloser? 

And you'd be amazed how little you actually need: this isn't a filmset which must fill the picture with the literal details of something. You need to think like a theatre director with an empty stage (page). Maybe you only need the chair he sits on, and the candlestick she kills him with. Maybe we need more: more things, more colours, more re-creations of place and substance... but which bits of the myriad possible kinds of more?

And it's not just about what you say being shaped and coloured by the point of view through which it's perceived; it's about your story-telling purpose. This scene is a building-block in the larger patterns and pace and rhythms of the piece, so what difference might that make to how you write it? I explored the business of clarifying your purpose in Singing the Story, so I won't go on here. Instead, I'll end with a classic exercise, which I can't recommend too highly: You write a paragraph of description of a place - real or imagined - which has a very strong atmosphere - spooky, cosy, threatening, joyful. Your aim is to write it so that atmosphere builds, sentence by sentence for the reader, to the end, but you're not allowed to name it; in fact, you're not allowed to use any adjectives, adverbs or abstract nouns at all. Then, when you've done that and got it as evocative as you can, you're allowed one adjective, and one adverb: you choose what will have the strongest effect on the piece, and therefore on the reader. See what I mean about how little you might need?

PS A couple of related posts: The Scent of a Snuffed Candle is about what you well might need to add, if your first drafts tend to be too pared-down and descriptionless. Over-done, Over-written and Over Here is about what's going on when you're over-writing.