Unpacking Prose

Unpacking Prose: A Short lesson in Expanding Action and Suspense in Your Writing

One of the things I find that some writers do is to write a story from what I would refer to as stream of consciences. Some people call this writing by the seat of your pants, but I feel that it goes a bit further in that often times the story has been revised many times by the author. The problem is one that is inherent in humans. When we read words we have written we apply knowledge about the situation to the prose and often times neglect to let the reader in on the secret. When we do this the action that the words convey seems to be accurate, but in reality it falls flat to an outside reader. This short lesson will help you understand what to look for during the revision process, so that you can find areas in your prose that can be unpacked to create a better floe to the story and to help increase tension throughout the story.

When I write I am guilty of what I call condensed writing. I don’t consider myself to be an outliner when I write, but typically what I wind up with is merely an outline for the actual story that lies underneath. Ernest Hemmingway postulated that a story is like an iceberg and that there is more of it under the page than there is on it. This concept is popular in short story writing where economy of words is paramount in storytelling, but with longer works like novels, realizing that this is true can help us when we look for ways to unpack the prose.

I went back through my files and found this piece that I started a few years ago. Let’s use it as an example for this lesson:
We had three major fires in our town that year. The two main lumber yards were

set on fire. They were terrific blazes: flames leaping into the sky, big metal drums

exploding, hot ambers drifting on the breeze into unsuspecting neighborhoods. These

were magnificent blazes but their impact on the youth of the village was small compared

to the burning of The Place.

This selection is one paragraph long and consists of sixty-three words. It introduces a town where there have been fires and where a sanctuary of sorts exists for local youth. Let’s look closely at this paragraph:

We had three major fires in our town that year. The two main lumber yards were
set on fire. They were terrific blazes: flames leaping into the sky, big metal drums
exploding, hot ambers drifting on the breeze into unsuspecting neighborhoods. These were magnificent blazes but their impact on the youth of the village was small compared to the burning of The Place.

The first sentence “We had three major fires in our town that year” works to pique the reader’s interest. It is short and to the point and works to create a bit of tension. The in the next sentence we learn that two of the fires were in lumberyards. Then we are told that they were “terrific blazes” and what those blazes looked like. It continues on to touch on hot ambers raining down and then it introduces The Place and the idea that it burned down too.

While this opening does create tension and set a scene, it can be unpacked and shown to the reader rather than told to them.
An example of this would be to do away with the opening line, even though it is strong and does its job well. This is called killing our babies and is one of the most difficult parts of revision for most writers. The bottom line is that just because what we wrote is good doesn’t mean that it will survive the revision process. We need to be able to assess our work objectively. This being said let’s unpack this prose:

The night was a hot and steamy one, and I was hitchhiking my way from downtown back up to my house. There was a faint smell of smoke in the air, but I paid no attention to it. For all I knew it was someone having a campfire or something like that. I walked up Church Street, which ran for about three miles and was uphill from start to finish. Typically there weren’t many cars on the road at one in the morning, but the people who were out were more inclined to pick up hitchhikers than most. I heard the car screeching around corners down on main street and listened as the engine sound grew louder and louder.
Please let them turn up Church I prayed to the patron saint of road travelers.
Soon I saw the headlights growing closer to the stoplight on the corner. The car appeared to be picking up speed as it came up the block. I figured that this meant they would continue straight up Main, but when it got to the corner it suddenly turned right and headed in my direction.
I thrust my arm out and extended my thumb upward to the clear, star filled sky. The car swerved around me and continued right past. I figured they would just keep going up the hill, but then they stopped. I ran up to the passenger side door and opened it wide. Inside I saw a middle aged woman who appeared to be in a hurried state. I jumped in the front seat.
“You going up to the fire?” she asked.
“What fire?”
“It’s all over the police radio, the other lumber yard is on fire.” She put the car in gear and tore off up the hill.
By the time we arrived at the scene there were fire departments from all the surrounding towns there working to contain the blaze. It had quickly spread to the entire yard and was now sending fifty-five gallon drums exploding into the sky like a fourth of July fireworks festival.
This was the second lumber yard to be set on fire this summer in our town. It rained hot ash down on neighboring houses and threatened to engulf them too. I stayed there watching as the pumper trucks poured water on the flames and the remaining drums exploded. By first light they had the fire under control, and I headed down the road trying to catch a ride home with my thumb.
Thinking back on the lumberyard fires of 1977 I remembered how they impacted the local adults. There were news stories about possible arson and insurance monies. There were complaints about the ash that landed on peoples’ houses up to five miles away doing various amounts of damage to their precious property, but for the youth of the town the impact of these fires would pale in comparison to the one that took their local sanctuary, The Place.
The key to this unpacking of prose was for me to visualize what it was that the words were telling me and then to translate that imagery that I was seeing in my head back into words on the page.

In this revision the first sentence “We had three major fires in our town that year” is gone and is replaced with a scene setting opening line that introduces us to a character and is plight to get home late at night. While it is not the same as the original line it still works to pique the reader’s interest. Instead of just stating the facts about the fires we are then taken on an adventure where during the action of the scene we learn all of the same facts that were told to us in the original paragraph. By the end we know that there were two lumberyard fires, and that they damaged other property, we are also told about the sanctuary for the youth of the town and the fact that it too burnt down. But instead of flat telling prose we have rendered the scene in action and have created tension throughout its entire length.
While this new opening is not perfectly polished yet, it has succeeded in unpacking the prose. What once was a short 63 word long telling introduction to a world of a story has now become a 494 word showing, not telling, adventure that pulls the reader into the story and its world.
What this shows us is that Hemmingway was absolutely correct with his iceberg. There is truly much more below the surface of a story than is on the page for writers who tend to write from the seat of their pants. In the world of novel writing it is our job as writers to dig deep and pull that good stuff to the surface.

This tool is one that will take practice and hard work to master, but once you do your prose will improve exponentially. Give it a try.

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We firmly believe that an author who has put in the necessary work of completing a book-length manuscript deserves to be fairly treated by any publishing company:
At Cawing Crow Press we feel that an author’s work should be carefully considered and never rejected by a first or second reader. Once a manuscript is submitted to us for consideration, only the owner can make the final decision not to offer the author a contract for publication. Even in these cases the author’s work is not flat-out rejected. Instead, he or she is given a sheet of general comments on how to bring the manuscript up to our publication standards, invited to make the necessary rewrites, and given the opportunity to resubmit the reworked manuscript directly to the owner for further consideration.
To help make this philosophical vision a reality, we have created a  publishing company that, using a collaborative process , seeks to take authors from submitted manuscript to published book.
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Creating The City Character a Slide Show and Work Sheet

This Post consists of three parts: A link to a  slide show, the text for the slide show, and a worksheet to go along with it. 

I suggest printing out the post and reading along with the slide show. 

Slide Show Link:

The City as a Character from Cawing Crow Press

Making setting breathe or come alive.

First: If I were to ask a group of up and coming writers what comes to their mind when I say the setting what do you think some responses would be?

A chance to show off descriptive abilities.

The world of the story.

Or, to be more precise, the place where the story happens.

As we can see in most of these answers when we talk about setting/city we usually express it in terms of something descriptive usually how it is described. We say things like is the setting believable?  (advance Slide)

What makes a setting believable?

Description.

As you can see we have fallen into the trap of defining setting as merely description once again.

What we will learn by the end of this  module is how to make our settings a step further than description so that they function as a character in our stories.

From here on out, this will be an interactive lesson, so please have a pen and the handout, Creating the City Character, ready.   (Advance Slide)

The first thing on the list is to name your setting.

Begin thinking about an appropriate name for your setting.

As with any character the name helps us the writer to get a feel for what type of character they will be.

So, simply naming your setting “Setting” or Setting A, while sufficient for nomenclature, falls short in terms of creating a feeling for the setting.

For example if I named my setting any of these wouldn’t it create a feel for the story?

Iago, what sort of place would this be? A world filled with deceit.

Norman, Scary.

Cheech, comedic.

This sets the tone for your setting. (Advance Slide)

Some questions you could ask of your book are:

Think about your novel.

What sorts of things are happening?

Is there love/ Hate? Deceit?

What is the main thrust of your story?

(Take a couple of moments finish naming your setting before going on.)

Good, Now that we have a name we have a mood.  The next section on the handout is, Qualities of setting. Advance Slide)

To complete this heading, I want you to think about, and list, some aspects of your novels setting that are important to the story.

How is the setting written?  Is it Flowery, stark, bright, dark, or is it something else? If so what is it?

Why does it exist? What function does it serve? Is it there merely as a place for the story to happen?

Could I take my protagonist out of this setting and put them into another? Would they function there? This question is very important. Your protagonist should be so tied to the setting that they could not function outside of this world without major revisions to them.  (Once you have finished answering these questions, advance to the next slide.)

We as writers always strive to incorporate all of our characters senses into our stories, but what we often neglect is the source of these sensory inputs.

Think about the world of your novel as it is written.

What Can I touch in this world? How will it feel? Hot, cold, sharp. Are there trails of razor sharp bushes that lunge out and slash at me?

What do I see? Birds, fish, buildings.

How about smells? Sweet roses, cooking steaks, garbage.

What About taste?

And sounds?

(Once you have finished answering these questions, advance to the next slide.)

When we speak about adding all of the senses to our descriptions, why do we do it? I would venture to guess that we as writers want to connect with our reader in a world that they can also sense. So the reason we describe these things is to bring the reader into the world of the story. This in and of itself is a good reason to incorporate the five senses into our writing,  but what I propose to do is take it a step— no a leap— forward.  (Advance Slide)

Breathing Life into the setting

What do all of the things we have discussed thus far all have in common?

They happen.

When something happens in the real world it has an effect on the people and things that populate it.

What Happens when:

I cut my finger on a broken piece of glass?

How about when I prick my finger on the thorn of a rose?

What about if one of those slashing bushes gets me?

As you can see in these examples each cause of the bleeding connotes a different feeling in the reader.  In each of these scenarios the world has come alive and acted on a character of the story changing how the reader perceives things that are going on. These tools can be used for suspense, drama, conflict, foreshadowing. (Advance Slide)

What about if I cut myself on a rusty nail sticking out from a garbage heap?

More-so than the other examples there is a real interaction between the world and the character with this one. What would happen first? I would bleed. Next I would stop the bleeding somehow. Maybe I wouldn’t clean the wound well enough and some micro-organism will invade my body. I may grow sick and die. I may become infectious and sicken all of my family and friends. From this one little interaction in the environment the whole story may hinge. Of course for this to be believable as a haphazard occurrence the world needs to be portrayed as dirty, foreboding, dark.  This scenario would not work in the world of a happy romance or fairy tale. While these events might happen they would probably be perpetrated by a villain of some sort. But, in this example, it is the world that has begun to breathe and inserted itself as a character in this story.

Let’s look at an example from my novel A Walk Through Hell: (Advance Slide)

Clouds raced across the evening sky. Thick and grey, they made twilight seem like night. Earlier, a steady rain had soaked the area. Turning the ground, where Billy and Tony were hiding into a small swamp of cedar mulch and mud. With every movement the ground liquefied more.

What we have up to this point is a rough idea of what our world is like, but we need to develop this new character. You may use some tools used for character development here. (Advance Slide)

Much the same as we improve our characters we need to improve our worlds.

One tool we could use is to give the world a back story.

How did it get to be the way it is?

What are its strengths, weaknesses?

How does it change in your story? (Change isn’t mandatory)

How do the interactions between the world and characters affect the world?

What about the characters?

Sit down with these questions and develop the world as a character, giving it some qualities of character and world then you will be well on your way to making your setting breathe.(Once you have finished answering these questions, advance to the next slide.)

Let’s take a look at another passage from A Walk Through Hell.

Billy stood under the awning of a corner fruit stand as rain fell on the street in front of him. He had ducked under its shelter just at the right time. The large drops, which now were falling, formed little explosions as they hit the concrete sidewalk. In the dust they raised, city odors were thrust up to his nose. He always hated the smell of the city when the first raindrops fell. Its musty scent would sometimes cause a coughing spasm to begin.  It would take a while before the water would finish its job of washing the stench of urine and garbage into the sewers. Until then, to avoid a coughing fit, he would breathe through his mouth.

(Advance Slide)

What’s going on in this passage?

First a little back-story: Billy is the protagonist and he suffers from coughing fits. Billy is waiting out a rain shower. We have large drops of rain falling and forming little explosions when they hit the ground. These explosions raise city odors to Billy’s nose. He knows from experience that these smells sometimes cause him to have a fit and since the rain will take a while to do its JOB (Here by giving the rain a job I have breathed life into the setting) of cleaning the dirty streets Billy’s reaction is to breathe through his mouth.

What has been setup here is an interaction between the world and the character a cause and effect situation.

So, how do we get to this level of interaction?

We combine all of the things we learned today. (Advance Slide)

Name our setting: This step is very important because it gives us, as writers, a feel for what we want our setting to convey. We said that we should be specific in naming our setting in order for us to get a good sense of the mood.

Look at the qualities of setting:  Here we look at how the setting is written. Is it Flowery, dark? What function does it serve? Most importantly is it so intrinsic to our story that the characters cannot work outside of it?

Look at the senses and the setting: It’s important for us to incorporate all of the senses in our writing, but don’t forget the causes of these sensory inputs. This is the breeding ground for life in the setting.

Develop the character “World”: Much as we develop our characters we can also develop our world. This helps us to understand things like how the world got the way it is. What sort of influences does it have on the characters and how the characters influence the world?

Make sure that we have cause and effect working to make it live. : Most importantly we need to remember that there is always an effect when something happens and that to breathe life into our settings it is imperative that we use this in our stories.

When we put all of these things together along with good descriptive writing, we create worlds that pull the reader in and keep them turning the page.

Creating the City Character

Worksheet

1. Name your setting: ________________________________________________________

To help with this think about your novel, what sorts of things are happening in it? Is there love/ hate/ deceit? What is the main thrust of your story?

1. Qualities of Setting:
   1. Think about and list some aspects of your novel’s setting that are important to the story.  ____________________________________________________________
   2. How is the setting written? Is it flowery, stark, bright, dark?   ________________ __________________________________________________________________
   3. Why does it exist? What function does it serve?  __________________________ __________________________________________________________________ __________________________________________________________________
   4. Could you take your protagonist out of this setting and put them in another? Would they function? _______________________________________________

3. The Senses
   1. What can I touch in my world? ________________________________________ _________________________________________________________________ _________________________________________________________________
   2. What do I see? ____________________________________________________ ________________________________________________________________ _________________________________________________________________
   3. Smell? ____________________________________________________________ _________________________________________________________________
   4. Taste? ____________________________________________________________ __________________________________________________________________
   5. Hear? ____________________________________________________________ _________________________________________________________________

4. Now think about the sources of these sensory inputs. Where do they come from in the setting? _______________________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________________

5. Develop the character “World”: Use some tools of character development to bring the world to life.

1. Give your world a back-story
   1. How did it get to be the way it is? _____________________________________ _________________________________________________________________ _________________________________________________________________ _________________________________________________________________
   2. What are its strengths and weaknesses? ________________________________ _________________________________________________________________ _________________________________________________________________

• How does it change in the story? (change isn’t mandatory) _________________ _________________________________________________________________ _________________________________________________________________

1. How do the interactions between the characters and the world affect the world? ___________________________________________________________ _________________________________________________________________ _________________________________________________________________ _________________________________________________________________
2. How do the interactions between the characters and the world affect the characters? _______________________________________________________ _________________________________________________________________ __________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

6. Creating cause and effect in our character world relationship.

Remember that when something happens it has an effect on things that will take place. Use this cause and effect to your benefit to bring life to the setting

7. Combine the things we learned

1. Name our setting: very important because it gives us a way to get a feeling for the mood of the setting.
2. Look at the qualities of setting: by looking at how the setting is written and the function it serves we are more prepared to find ways in which to breathe life into it.
3. Look at the senses remembering that what our characters experience has its origins in the world of the novel.
4. Develop the character “World.” Just like any other character the world needs to be developed in order to come alive.
5. Make sure that we remember that for every cause there is an effect somewhere down the line.

Put all of these things together with good descriptive writing and a world is created that breathes.

How to Kill Adverbs and Adjectives

This is a great article on modifiers. The examples given make it clear that overuse creates prose that is difficult to read.

The Publishing Industry Today

In my opinion, publishing today has taken a turn that can only be described as exciting. However, while the opportunities that authors now have to publish their work by traditional means, indie publishers, or by self publishing abound, each avenue has its pitfalls.

Traditional publishing hasn’t changed much over the years in how books are ultimately selected for publication (although there has been a more profound focus on profitability of a single book rather than the nurturing relationship that looked at a writer’s potential for future books) hasn’t changed a whole lot. For the major publishing houses, the best path to publication is to get an agent. Anyone who has been through the process of trying to get represented by one knows firsthand the rigors of this process. And once accepted they have to agree to give them a percentage of their earnings.  A good thing about an agent is that they negotiate with the publisher for their advance, and they may be able to get a larger one than the author could have gotten on their own.  This system is tried and true, but it is only able to publish a limited number of books per year, and thus it must be very selective in what’s accepted.

Indie publishers are generally small publishing houses that strive to publish a few good, quality books per year.  These publishers often stick to only one genre of writing and look for quality writing that allows them to more easily publish the work. The rejection levels can be high, as many manuscripts that get through to these publishers are not vetted—as they would have been with an agent.  While these publishers’ slush piles can get quite large, they typically are staffed by only a few people and have to reject manuscripts on technical issues alone, rather than being able to read through the whole thing looking for potential.  This industry is one of hard-working independent people who have a vision for what types of books they want to publish and are able to realize that by being selective in what they accept.

Self publishing has really blossomed in this modern era. It is easy for authors to get their book in print using any one of a slew of companies that charge for each part of the publishing process. Authors must pay for editing, cover design, marketing, and many other things that come along with book publishing. These costs can run into the thousands of dollars and often times don’t result in a quality book being published.  There are other routes for the self publisher that don’t cost any money, but, more often than not, books that get published this way are replete with editing problems and don’t get good comments from readers.

These routes to publication all have their merits and drawbacks.  Until now it seems that there is no affordable path to quality publication. This is why I created Cawing Crow Press.

Cawing Crow Press is an indie publishing house that is approaching publishing in a unique way.

For more details about this unique path to publication go to:

Cawing Crow Press

and read through our site materials.

Welcome to Our New Blog

I would like to thank you for taking the time to check out this blog. Inside its pages (so to speak) you will find articles on writing and publishing in the current digital age. I will be adding new articles at least once a week on issues that I find in the current publishing industry and ideas on how to make your writing stronger. I look forward to engaging with writers on these topics and look forward to your comments.

Cheers,

Craig Grossman

Cawing Crow Press LLC

The Future of Publishing Today

http://www.cawingcrowpress.com