Writer's Update/Writing Craft: Focalisation

A quick little writer's update before I get stuck into the second half of what we learned in our lecture last week; I was happy with the mark I received for my second Writing Craft assignment, in which students had to use a memory as a basis for a 1,500 word piece. I got a High Distinction and good feedback. Yesterday, I started writing my piece for the third and final assignment of the semester, in which we have to pick a place (real or imaginary) as the setting for an encounter, again, to make a 1,500 word piece. I've decided to challenge myself and write in second-person point of view and present tense, while my default is usually third-person and past tense. So far, I am really happy with it. It's my turn to workshop again next week, I believe, so I'm looking forward to some criticism and feedback from my writing group.

As of last week, I have also become a sort of unofficial active representative of the Deakin Writer's club. I have volunteered to spread the word about the Deakin Writer's Club to people in my Writing Craft tutorial, including to my tutor. While I haven't had anything published in it myself (mostly because I haven't really submitted anything), I am looking forward to introducing more writers to the circle.

The Gardiner's Creek track between res and the campus.
You honestly wouldn't know that I live near the city...
I love going for walks along the creek. Very relaxing.

Who? Focalisation

First of all, on Australianisms: our lecturer and tutors etc. are trying to encourage us to not use American spelling, because, well, we're not American. That means they are actually taking marks off us if they find 'colour' spelled 'color' or 'realise' spelled 'realize' in our work. Because that's just the Australian way, so there. I actually didn't realise that the 'z' instead of an 's' was a thing until they started pointing it out. Doesn't that just go to show how infected by American culture Australia is becoming? So I spell it 'focalisation' with an 's' and those of you who aren't in Australia can spell it 'focalization' with a 'z'.

When we think of focalisation, my lecturer says we should think of who is seeing (similar to point of view), but also, that we should think of who knows. Our lecturer told us about this guy called Genette who described focalisation as "a selection or restriction of narrative information in relation to experience and knowledge of the narrator, character or other, more hypothetical entities in the story world." Genette distinguishes between three different degrees of focalisation:
- Zero focalisation: a narrative with an omniscient narrator, who knows more than the characters do. This is also described by some narratologists as 'vision from behind'. It's really only relevant if you're writing in third person.
- Internal focalisation: when the main character(s) and the narrator know the same amount. This is also called 'vision within', 'narrative with point of view', or with 'restricted field' because we are restricted to what the character knows. This can be relevant for both third person and first person, because in first person, the main character is the narrator.
- External focalisation: when the narrator knows less than the character, also known as 'vision from without'. This style is more objective and behaviourist. It works well if you want an unreliable narrator, who cannot clue the reader in on what a character's silent motivations are, etc. Relevant for first and third person.

But is this really an definite definition of what focalisation is? Nope! Congratulations, my dear readers; you have fallen into the same trap as me, thinking that education will answer questions, when it really has an awful tendency of creating more. According to our lecturer, the definition and explanation of focalisation is one that is often debated and lots of modifications, counter-theories and extensions have been made to what Genette originally proposed as a framing. It's a confusing area of writing and now a whole lecture theatre full of students have joined in the chaos, and so have you!

Personally, I am happy to stick with Genette's framing of it.

What would you consider focalisation to be? 

- Bonnee.

Writing Craft: Point of View

I big apology to all my fellow bloggers who haven't seen much of me lately, but I guess this is what happens when I study. Also: I forgot to bring a pen to my lecture last week and only just watched it online to get some notes. I love taking notes! So this post, I'll share some of what I learned in our eighth lecture. We looked in to point of view and focalisation this lesson, but I'll put the two topics into separate posts, because there was a lot to take in.

Who? Point of View

Readings for week 8 were On Seeing the 100% Perfect Girl One Beautiful April Morning by Haruki Murakami (pages 68-72) and Revisions: A Found Story by Frank Moorhouse (pages 250-258).

My older followers will know how much I love Haruki Murakami. I got way too excited when I saw that he was in the readings for the week. I was not disappointed.

Our lecturer started off by stating that writers, especially beginners, often don't realise how much they can play with and move around in point of view. The point of view is the position or vantage point from which a story is given. It's the WHO that is speaking and it can often be defined in grammatical categories. I think those of us who have been writing for a while already know the basics, but for those who don't:
- 1st person: the 'I'.
- 2nd person: the 'you'.
- 3rd person: the 'he'/'she'/'it'.
- The plurals: 'we'/'they'/'yous'

As writers, point of view is a tool we use to transform the same plot, narrative arc, characters, or setting. The point of view we choose to write in will contribute to the style or the 'feel' of the piece and can be related to the ratio of telling:showing that is acceptable.

One guy our lecturer told us about by the name of Lubbock made two categories for point of view in terms of having a narrator:
- The traditional method of relating a story, in which the narrator is prominent, called Plato's diegesis. Here, the narrator outright tells the story.
OR
- A newer method in which the narrator retreats into to the background, called Plato's mimesis. Here, the story and characters and what the reader is shown is a copy or reflection of life.

Lubbock continued to list his four points of view in order of most telling to least telling.
- 3rd person narration with prominent or authorial narrator;
- 1st person narration;
- 3rd person narration from the point of view of a character;
- 3rd person narration without comment or inside views ("the dramatic method").

Lubbock also wants people to differentiate between telling int he voice of the authorial narrator and telling in the voices of the characters, suggesting that mimesis is a form of diegesis, rather than opposed to it.

The lecturer went on to discuss the different points of view. 1st person is potentially the most intimate point of view, using 'I' as the narrator and as a character at the same time. However, the 'I' narrator should not be confused with the writer themselves, unless it's an autobiographical piece. Within the 1st person, the 'I' narrator can call another character 'you' and speak of 'you' and 'I' as 'we'. Does this constitute a separate point of view? It is debatable. This use of 'you' and 'we' in 1st person is common in song lyrics. The 2nd person also uses 'you' and can use 'we', but more than in 1st person. The reader seems to be addressed by the writer and this implicates the reader, forcing them to participate in the text. However, this can be risky, because the reader might not want to be so directly involved with the text. The 3rd person uses 'he'/'she'/'it' and there is an absence of 'I' except in dialogue. This can distance us from the characters to an extent, and can allow for an omniscient narrator who can see deeply into the thoughts of many different characters.

Our lecturer advised us to take note of what point of view we use in our writing and what point of view is being used in the things we read. An interesting exercise could be to re-write a passage from a book in a different point of view and see how it turns out.

Which point of view do you normally write in? Which point of view are you reading at the moment? 

- Bonnee.

Writing Craft: Audience and Voice

Getting out of bed this morning was hard for a reason... 

Anybody else just love Game of Thrones?

Our lecturer has decided to push all the weeks back one seeing as we missed out on the lecture last week and had an extra week at the end of the semester. So while it is the 8th week of classes, today we completed week 7's lecture and tutorial.

Who: Audience and Voice

Readings for week 7 were Rich chocolate cake á la Irvine Welsh by Mark Crick (pages 20-28), Everything is illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer (pages 1-7), Blonde by Joyce Carol Oates (pages 1, 3-5, 7, 9-25) and The white tiger by Aravind Adiga (pages 3-42).

When we talk about 'voice' in writing, we're talking about that thing about a piece that makes it seem alive; the thing that seduces us to keep reading and/or writing it. Having a good voice is what will stop the reader from putting the book down and never giving it a second glance, and it is what stops the writer from getting bored of a project they've started.

The difference between voice and style can be hard to distinguish, mostly because they reflect on and feed off each other. My lecturer believes that style can be imitated, but voice can not. My tutorial group discussed the difference after the lecture and my tutor asked us to consider a few things: Does the writer's style change or stay the same over different pieces they write? Does each separate piece have it's own unique voice? Is it possible for writer's to have more than one voice? My tutor agreed that style could be mimicked, but questioned whether or not the same could be said for voice. Personally, I think that each piece has a unique voice that can't be replicated, and that writers might have multiple styles and voices.

An audience for writers are their readers, but each writer has a different set of readers or person they are aiming to please when they write. With a little bit of practice, it can become quite easy to automatically adjust our language or our 'voice' for whoever our readers are. After all, audience has a crucial effect on how we write. While we all automatically write for an audience, it is not always clear in the first instance who that audience is. Although some writers are super-ultra-organized and plan out everything about their next project to a T, many do not and when the urge to start writing strikes, a lot of people will go for it without considering who we are writing for.

Who do you write for? 

We brainstormed some possible answers in the lecture and tutorial. While the obvious answers of "teenagers", "young adults", "my best friend", "my mother" or "myself" came up, there were some more interesting contributions. Our lecturer suggested that sometimes we write for someone who once strongly praised us or someone who once harshly criticized us. Or in the case of 'anxiety of influence', some of us feel that we are writing for the whole of literary history, with the weight of all the other awesome authors who came before us resting on our shoulders as they peer at the pages before us and tut quietly under their breaths, shaking their heads... or whispering encouragement to us from beyond the grave. They can't ALL be mean and filled with superiority.

The final thing we touched on in the lecture was 'Audience as the addressee of your narrative'; a technique in which we mobilize the notion of an audience to produce a particular effect in terms of voice, by letting your narrator talk to/write to/complain to/fantasize to etc... a particular person.

My tutor left us on a note of caution: Don't try to please EVERYBODY when you write. You can't write for EVERYBODY at the same time. Pick your age group, gender, or whatever demographic makes up your target audience and aim to please them before anybody else. Otherwise you'll just turn into a hopeless too-far-stretched mess trying to please too many people and most likely not succeeding.

Who do you write for? Do you think you have a style of your own yet, or are you still finding it? Do you think each of your individual pieces of writing has its own voice? 

- Bonnee.

Writer's Update: WALLS

(Not the original by Pink Floyd, but a cover which I prefer by Korn.)

My Writing Craft lecturer was sick this week so I don't have any notes to share with you at the moment. I'm eagerly awaiting the lecture slides to be available online, or for the recording of the lecture from another campus to be put up. I was very sad not to have that lecture.

After I got back to my room from the tutorial and watched an episode of Game of Thrones (oh my goodness, this is seriously the most amazing T.V show ever!) I was overcome by the urge to write. I'd tried writing during the cancelled lecture while I was hanging around campus with some of my Writing Craft friends who hadn't gotten the memo before we'd arrived, but it didn't come out the way I wanted it to.

So I sat down when I got back into my room, turned on my laptop, thought for a moment and opened up the file containing the first three chapters of WALLS, which I started planning and writing months ago. I haven't added to WALLS since around January/February if I remember rightly. So I read over the first three chapters, opened up the planning document and cranked out the fourth chapter.

It felt so good to be writing again! Like, for my own purpose instead of for an assessment. It felt good to be working on my W.I.P again. What made it even better was that I noticed myself applying (or at least trying to apply) what I've learned in my Writing Craft classes... and I think my philosophy brain must have found its way in there too because I found myself thinking, writing and talking deeper than I usually do, without sounding melodramatic and cheesy. I hope it wasn't melodramatic and cheesy anyway.

2,499 words up! I'm pleased with this progress and hoping to get more done soon.

What are you in the blogosphere doing? How is your writing? 

- Bonnee.

ANZAC Day/Pace Workshop Exercise

Today (25th of April), people of Australia and New Zealand have a public holiday known as ANZAC Day. This is a day where we remember those in the Australian New Zealand Army Corps who served, and especially those who lost their lives, in World War I and especially in Gallipoli. Since the day was first established, it has extended to ANZACs in general, no matter when they served.

In WWI, the ANZAC's objective of capturing the Gallipoli Peninsula was met by strong resistance by the Ottoman Empire, one of Germany's allies during the war. Instead of the successful capture of Constantinople that was aimed for, troops from both sides suffered eight months of combat and high numbers of fatalities. While the ANZACs were unsuccessful, the day is remembered and celebrated because of the strength, courage and mateship shown on the battlefields.

I have never been to one of the dawn services until today. Not a fan of the 4:00AM wake-up, but it was well worth it. There was quite a sizable group of res kids going to the early session. This is also the first ANZAC Day service I've been to in the of Melbourne itself, and the service was held at the Shrine of Remembrance. It was inspiring to be there with so many others before the sun had even risen.

On a coincidentally related note, the pieces I wrote during my tutorial/workshop for Writing Craft when we were exercising our use of pace was set in a battlefield. Our tutor played music to set a fast or slow pace for us and this is what I came out with:

Fast-Pace, including all of my crossing out where I decided that it slowed the pace down. Just read the part that aren't crossed out. We were only given 10 minutes, so I was stopped mid-sentence too:

“Get down!”
Not even a second passed after the words left the commander’s lips before  The deafening screech of a bomb whistlinged down on us, the screech deafening. I lay pressed myself into the soil as. The earth around me rose and fell. I stood again with the others. Heads down, guns raised, we crawled forwards.
The blood-coated red-zone was a death-trap sprawled with disembodied limbs. We shuffled forward an inch, ducked as gun-fire rained down on us (from) above us, rose again, pressed forward.
“Get down!”
The deafening whistle sounded again, closer. The ground to my right exploded in a spray of spraying dirt. I waited. Someone pulled me to my feet as the rescue van came into view. We dashed forward, half-hopeful, terror-filled, but alive.
“Get down!”
I didn’t listen. My hands made contact with the metal ladder and. I threw myself up against the… 

Slow-Pace. I thought of a battlefield in slow-motion. Again, this contains all the crossing out I did, so the most important stuff is what isn't crossed out:

Not even a second A moment passed after the commander ordered us to get down. My body met the soft soil of the battlefield red-zone with a gentle thud and I saw the dirt around me rise in a graceful arch and patter back down. I lay for a moment, inhaling, and felt the pulse of the earth beneath my palms as I lay them flat. Someone’s voice called out, but it sounded muted, distant and ethereal. My cheek felt the tickling of blood form a nick somewhere above my eyebrow and I pressed it into the ground, closing my eyes as I exhaled. When I lifted my eyelids again, I could see Corey’s face, watching me from the his place in front to my right. Behind him, I saw the dirt flying up in another graceful arch, and felt the pulse of the earth beneath my fingertips again. That distant voice sounded again, but remained unheard as I watched Corey flash pass me as mall smile; something reassuring. 

I think slow-pace comes to me easier, but fast-pace is definitely useful. While slow-motion battle scenes are pretty cool in my humble opinion, we can't going into slow-motion EVERY time there is gunfire and explosions in our stories. I think that paces that contrast what is actually happening should only be used when necessary; if there is some important detail that NEEDS to be brought to attention during the scene through the pace.

If anybody else would like to try this exercise writing a piece in fast-pace and slow-pace and post in the comments (give it about 100-150 words for each piece?), my song suggestions for those wanting musical assistance are 'Kiss the Rain' by Yiruma (for slow-pace, lovely piano music), and 'Before I Forget' by Slipknot... or you know, pick your own songs, that works too! :)

I ask again, what do you think about using pace in your writing? 

- Bonnee.

Writing Craft: Pace / Writer's Update.

My list of assignments, because I'm organized!

Oh Mondays... 9am lectures when I haven't eaten red meat in over a month are not nice. A word of advice to anybody out there who has recently started doing their shopping/cooking for themselves: don't put off getting the red meat!!! Lack of iron makes you SLEEPY and DYSFUNCTIONAL! Luckily, I stocked up on iron-y goodness this afternoon... 

In other news, I am glad to say that I am HAPPY with the mark I received for my first Writing Craft assessment, 'Sketching with Words' and hope to get even better on the assessment I just handed in today, 'Memory as Seed'.  My third and final assessment for the semester isn't due until June, so perhaps I'll find time to write something else between now and then. 

You know you haven't been utilizing your creative outlet often enough when you notice an increase in how often you zone out, daydream and talk to yourself when you're alone... Yes, I have noticed an increase. 

Have I mentioned how crappy the internet connection on campus is? It's really crappy. 

Also: I found the notes I lost from my tutorial last week. Yay! Moving on! 

When: Pace

Readings for week 6 were Trouble is my Business by Raymond Chandler (pages 7-23), The Anthologist by Nicholson Baker (pages 1-17) and Astronauts by Tim Richards (pages 239-251). 

The first thing the lecturer wanted to stress was that pace was mostly about variation. It is a composition of speeds and slownesses. In writing, pace is the effect or effects of how time passes for the reader. How do we experience time in our bodies and minds when we read? Pace could also be described as imitating or upsetting the rhythm of things. Our lecturer had us listen to some different musical compositions when she told us this. One of them had a beat that was like an imitation heartbeat and it infected everybody in the lecture theatre. But something that all of the pieces of music she shared with us had in common was that the pace varied. There would be lulls in the fast-paced pieces and then it would pick up again. The slow-paced pieces would speed up suddenly and then slow down again. It was interesting to take note of. 

Some tools for manipulating pace are:

- Sentence length (Longer sentences can be good for slow-pace scenes, using lots of clauses separated by commas, making it hard for the reader to catch a breath, but perhaps making a more detailed image, especially when describing something. Short sentences work better in fast-pace scenes, forcing us to pause more often and breathe, making the clauses feel more fragmented or simplified.)

- Word length and word choice

- Paragraph length 

- Register of vocabulary (whether it is posh, jargony, rigorous, vague...)

- Punctuation (This can give the writing a certain personality.) 

- The white space on a page

- Strategy in description 

Our lecturer described somebody who constantly keeps up a fast pace in their writing as similar to a teenage rock band who never plays slower music, because mistakes are more likely to be recognized, but eventually it gets boring and monotonous. Faster is not always more desirable and variation in pace is important. Important details can be caught more easily between the fast-pace scenes of a story, but you need something slow-to-medium-paced to put between them. 

Pace can also be set by dialogue. We can get a feel of whether the character is a fast-pace character or a slow-pace character by their dialogue. Dialogue should always be deliberate and purposeful and it is important to remember that readers don't want the typical conversation full of ums and ahs you'd have in real life; dialogue in good fiction is often unrealistic. Of course, that doesn't mean disregard realistic dialogue all together, but you should try and aim for the more witty, meaningful, influential words when your character says something; not necessarily something that you'd be able to think of on the spot in real life... unless you happen to be one of those unrelentingly witty, meaningful and influential people. 

Something that can catch us out and slow our pace in a bad way is when we overload the detail. So if you read over a scene that you feel should be fast-pace, but you find it's dragging, remember that you don't need to tell your reader EVERY linking detail between Point A and Point B, because our own brains will fill in the obvious details for us. Always be aware of your pace and whether it is working or not. 

Useful links: 

Kurt Vonnegut's 8 Rules of Writing 

Measuring the Pace in Writing (Andy Shack) 

Have you noticed different paces in your writing? Try writing a scene while listening to fast-paced music, and then try writing it again while listening to slow-paced music. Try to match the pace of your writing to that of the music. I did this in my tutorial and I'll share it later in the week.  

- Bonnee. 

Writing Craft: Structure: Sentence, Paragraph, Story... and Tense!

Greeting all! As well as being inundated with university assignments and being forced to further neglect my blog, the blogs I follow and my own creative writing and reading goals, it appears the beautiful Australian summer weather has all but vanished as winter reaches out to us down in the Southern Hemisphere. I am wrapped up in a giant blanket with cold feet and a half-eaten packet of chocolate ripple biscuits while I try and motivate myself to get an essay on the power of social media underway...

Moving on! Something I've been meaning to do for a while is give a shout-out to Victoria Simox, who recently had a give-away of her middle-grade book The Magic Warble, which I won an ebook copy of a about month ago (yes, I am very behind schedule here, I know!). You can find Victoria on her blog at www.victoriasimox.blogspot.com. 

Victoria was born in Scarborough, Ontario, Canada, to an Austrian immigrant mother, and a Dutch immigrant father. She now lives in Western Washington with her husband, Russ and their three children, Toby, Kristina, and William. Her other family members are a Chihuahua, named Pipsy and two cats, named Frodo and Fritz. Besides being an author, Victoria is a home-schooling mother of twelve years and an elementary school art teacher of eleven years. In her spare time, Victoria enjoys managing her two older children's Celtic band. She also loves writing, reading, painting watercolors, hiking, good movies, and just simply hanging out with her family and friends. 

Today I'll summarize what we were taught in weeks 4 (When? Structure: Sentence, Paragraph and Story) and week 5 (When? Tense) of my Writing Craft classes. 

Structure: Sentence, Paragraph and Story

Readings for week 4 were Triptych by Merlinda Bobis (pages 119-121), The Book of Sand by Jorge Luis Borges (pages 117-122), and Flying to Belfast by Dermot Healy (pages 319-331). 

Our lecturer explained the difference between 'story' and 'plot', which is that 'story' is anything between the first and last event of a narrative; events unfolding in chronological order, without links, the the dot-point or 'and then... and then... and then...' feeling, whereas 'plot' is how these events are put together and linked and how their arrangement emphasizes the relationships between them (cause and effect), which creates a reader's reaction of surprise or suspense, etc. 

Our lecturer talked a lot about 'time' and how it is hard to talk about; how we can't access human incidents in time without narrative. We humanize time when we write so that we can structure it for ourselves; although time is a constant thing, we talk about time freezing, stretching, disappearing etc. So how does our practice as writers raise questions of what it is like to exist in various kinds of time? We describe someone sitting in a boring lecture feeling as if time is dragging on and on and on. How might a practice of writing and reading influence our own and our readers' experience of time? We, as writers, have the power to control or at least influence the way our readers feel 'time' when they read our stories. 

Tense

Readings for week 5 were The Lover by Marguerite Duras (pages 3-16), and The Little Friend by Donna Tartt (Pages 3-13). 

This lecture focused a lot on verbs, their function and their importance. Verbs are doing words and any full sentence or independent clause needs one. When using verbs, writers also need to consider their place in time. The base form of a verb - or the 'infinitive' - can be found by putting the word 'to' first, eg: to bring, to run, to jump etc... however, the infinitive does not tell us details such as who, when and whether the action is possible, wished, completed etc; it is the pure notion of an event before detail is added. Who or what is the subject of the sentence? Who is completing the action of your verb? What tense are you writing in? These all come into consideration when giving the verb details. Writers should also consider the subjects gender and whether they are a singular or plural form. 

Correct and consistent use of tense is important to stop your reader from becoming distracted and ensuring that you writing flows as smoothly as possible. The two most basic and commonly used tenses are 'past simple' and 'present tense'. The 'past simple' is usually used to signify the story's present and is considered the simplest and often most suitable way to write. Present tense is less common in prose and often has interesting effects on the feeling of literary prose. 

A third type of tense our lecturer wanted us to look at was 'past perfect'. When 'past simple' relates to the now of the story, 'past perfect' is used to describe the story's past, as in memories and events that are being referred to which have already happened. We use this tense when we are describing something a layer further back in time. We can identify this tense when the word 'had' is used before the verb. Eg: 'I jumped' becomes 'I had jumped' or 'I'd jumped'. Slabs of text written in 'past perfect' tense can often sound clunky, but when referring to the story's past and the story's present, it is important that both the writer and the reader can differentiate between periods of time.  

I appear to have lost the notes I took in my tutorial. This is both worrying and disappointing, because there was a really cool quote I wanted to share with you all and some more cool examples... 

Does anybody have any interesting or useful tips to share on sentence, paragraph and story structure or tense? 

- Bonnee.