Turn Up the Quiet: Day 3

Meander Spiral Explode

By Jane Alison

I hope…that thinking about patterns other than the arc will become natural, that evolving writers won’t feel oppressed by the arc, that they’ll imagine visual aspects of narrative as well as temporal, that they’ll discover ways to design, being conscious or playful with possibilities. How can you spread color across a story? Make texture with different kinds of words or sentences or zones of white space? Create repetitions or symmetries to strengthen (or trouble) a sense of movement? Even arcing fictions can be designed, with texture, color, symmetry, or repetitions graphable as wavelike stripes, these elements working beyond or with narrated incidents to create further motion and sense.

Craft Notes: Volume

The work of revision is akin to the work of a sculptor. The first, second, and maybe even third drafts are the raw clay. I have to have that raw clay in order to make something beautiful. And making something beautiful is largely about shape.

Think of your favorite song. What is its shape? How does it move? If you have to map its arc, what would it look like?

How would you map its volume?

Likely, it has peaks and valleys. Likely, it has some swirls and eddies. Likely, it is not a clear arc. It’s probably not 100% loud, which is sometimes what we ask of our writing. I’ve seen advice that you should cut out anything that’s boring in your writing, anywhere that it lags. But silence is not necessarily boring.

Think of an exceptionally wonderful first kiss with a new partner, one in which both parties took their sweet time, drew out the anticipation. Was the silence before lips met boring? I sincerely doubt it.

My mentor Rachel Thompson encourages writers to go through their work and chart the emotional resonance of each line or paragraph to see that the work has an emotional journey, that it’s not all bleakness or all joy, that there are peaks and valleys. I think this is important because, if you’ve ever listened to the same pitch hummed for several minutes, you’ll know that hitting the same note again and again can be numbing.

I encourage you to the same with your draft, but to do it with volume. Next to each paragraph, line, or idea (depending on the genre and length of your piece), rate its volume on a scale of 1-5, with 5 being the loudest.

Go back and look at your 1-rated parts. Is anything happening in the silence? Is the heart beating in the silence? Don’t leave your reader hanging in the silence. Make it buzz; make it electric.

Films can dwell in silence because the silence is never still. The silence always moves. Watch this trailer and jot down everything that’s occurring in the silence, in the spaces between speech.

A lot, right? Waves crashing, gazes lingering… I won’t write the whole list here. Why does a quiet film work? It’s not so different from what makes silence work on the page. Here’s what The Verge has to say (among other great points about the power of silence):

“In Portrait of a Lady on Fire, silence is used in the same way negative space is on a canvas. Through portraiture and conversation, Marianne and Héloïse draft and smudge and attempt again to understand one another, to build an accurate representation of the other that they can carry onward despite its impermanence. The answer they come up with makes plain what queer audiences have been quietly telling us forever: that their lives have always been present, even at times where their existence has been vehemently denied. Even in the face of a suffocating culture of repression, there are ways to be seen by one another, even if there aren’t ways to openly exist.”

Artfully used silence can amplify what is both said and unsaid, just as a canvas half-filled contains the promise of what should fill it by way of encouraging close observation of what has already been painted.

So, some questions to ask as you revise a piece that’s full of silence:

If I had to chart the volume of this piece from beginning to end, how would it look? Does it build toward silence, is silence interspersed, does silence form a valley? You can make a sculpture look however you want, but to skillfully manipulate the clay, you have to know what shape you are building.
What is the silence amplifying? What does it lie in opposition to?
If I were filming this silence, what would be happening onscreen? Would the silent protagonist be chewing her fingernails? Would the white space be a sharp intake of breath, a slow exhale?

One idea is to write the inverse of the piece. Write a quick companion piece in which all that is quiet is made loud, and all that is loud is made quiet. This can work really well with dialogue. Make the characters say everything they’re not saying. Make them hold all they’re saying inside, like a secret. See how the dynamic changes. See what your first version can learn from this new version.

Craft Notes: Shape

As I mentioned yesterday, all written work has a shape. Much of what we say in a piece consists of white space. Without white space, we would not be able to easily distinguish individual words. Imagine a gallery with zero white space between paintings. (There’s actually one like this at the Art Gallery of Ontario.) Then think about a blank wall with a single painting on it, and a bench before that painting, which encourages you to sit awhile and really look.

The spaces within and around the words we write are just as important as the words we write.

This is where prose writers can learn mightily from poets. I mean, it’s one place out of many, many, many. (I say this as primarily a prose writer.)

I feel like the good folks at the Poetry Foundation say it pretty well in this piece on “functional white” and this one on “Learning the Poetic Line.” I particularly love the idea of taking a chunk of text and trying to break it into lines in six different ways. You can expand this, as well. Try different margin sizes. Try different versions with tabs as blank spaces mid-line (or mid-paragraph, prose writers). Use slashes. Use ellipses. Explore the clay of the words. Throw them on the wheel, shape them, then ball the clay up again and start over. See what comes of it.

In studying the shapes that writers use to convey silence and absence, it’s best to carefully read the work of those who do it well. Below, find three pieces in each genre that use space and structure in different ways to build energy and meaning into silences. What do you notice about the choices they are making?

My mentor Rachel Thompson (again) encourages “writerly reading,” in which you write down how each “movement” or part of a piece makes you feel and why. Then, go back and reread the piece, jotting down the choices the author made to create that feeling within you. Remember that writing is about getting words down on the page; revision is about making choices about what shape of vessel will best hold the feelings and ideas you wish to convey. It’s all about choices. What choices did the authors in the pieces below make to convey feelings and truths?

Miscellaneous Resources

https://www.readpoetry.com/hidden-meanings-the-power-precision-of-erasure-poetry/

https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2019/12/10/the-silence-of-witches/

https://lithub.com/the-magic-sentences-of-lauren-groff-action-without-verbs/

http://haydensferryreview.com/blog/2020/2/9/space-exploration-garrett-biggs-2da2g

Meander Spiral Explode

By Jane Alison

Craft Notes: Volume

Craft Notes: Shape

Recommended Readings

Miscellaneous Resources

Kate Finegan

Turn Up the Quiet: Day 2

Best Small Fictions Roundtable: Part 1