read directions below....... 500 word response(liberty university) writing assignment
CHAPTER FIVE ENERGY
Are you creating work readers are excited about reading? Or are you writing stuff people read only because they feel they have to: It’s for class, or they’re polite, or they’re your friend, or maybe they’re in love with you.
As readers, we get bored easily. Competing for our attention are pages and pages of great writing, social media, and many responsibilities, distractions, and endeavors. As writers, we have to be creative to capture and keep our readers. You can make everythingyou write more interesting and attractive to readers by paying attention to a single concept: energy.
Think of the fierce energy concentrated in an acorn! You bury it in the ground, and it explodes into an oak! Bury a sheep and nothing happens but decay.
— GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
THE PRINCIPLES OF ENERGY
Writers work with three principles in order to increase the energy and interest level in all types of creative writing.
1. Subjects. A good writer can make any topic interesting. Subjects that will lead to energetic writing are those (a) that you experience firsthand, (b) that you wonder about passionately, and (c) about which you are the sole expert. If you are into it, your reader will follow.
2. Leaps. Writers leave gaps on purpose so that the reader has the pleasure of filling in pieces of the picture on his or her own. Leaping is one of the most effective energizing techniques available, and one of the simplest to master. Visual artists use negative space to add drama to their work, and so do writers. If you are explaining everything, your reader will lose interest. You have to stay one step ahead of your reader.
3. Words. Some words spark and sizzle and pop (like the words spark, sizzle, and pop). Words in unexpected places create energy, too. The words in some documents (think of a legal brief, a handbook, or anything boring you have read lately) make the reader’s eyes glaze over (“Faculty research abstract platform decisions will be considered …”).
PRACTICE
Locate a piece of writing (yours, someone else’s) that you find exceptionally boring: directions for assembling a desk, a tedious textbook, a poorly written travel blog. Also locate a piece of writing you find extremely interesting, lively, a joy to read and reread: the first page of your favorite novel, love letters, juicy texts or song lyrics, your favorite piece from this textbook or this course so far. Contrast the two pieces. Can you find in each an example (good or bad) of each of the three qualities of energy? Compare your findings in class.
Subject: Focus on What’s Fascinating
As humans, as readers, we’re automatically drawn to the new. If you write about something you alone on the planet can write about, your writing is going to be interesting and energized.
What to choose for a subject? What only you know about, and no one else. Everyone knows what it is like to grow up, turn seven years old, struggle with your mother’s rules. But no one knows what it was like to turn seven inside Apartment 8R on Prospect Avenue, where a kid sat on a cake, and the mother drank three martinis, and all this happened before noon. And your Superman underwear was really, really itchy.
I merely took the energy it takes to pout and wrote some blues. — DUKE ELLINGTON
Most people know high school graduation, loneliness, flat tires. But no one knows your specific experience. It doesn’t matter if you are writing poetry, fantasy fiction, love letters, short stories, or screenplays. And you do not need to write autobiography. It’s your specific repertoire of emotions and details that makes good writing good. The American playwright Edward Albee is gay, but he writes male-female marital discord better than anyone else. Writers use their own firsthand experience—with their parents, friends, coworkers—to create an energetic backdrop, landscape, and engine for original creative writing.
If you can put yourself there, using only the power of your mind, you can write it. You can tell you have chosen a good, alive subject if it gives you energy to work on it. A good creative writing topic unnerves you a little. When a subject in this class is alive, it’s going to shift as you work, too. You’ll start out writing about your relationship with a lover, and realize you are also writing about your parents! You’ll start out writing about how ridiculous your relationship was, and realize, by the end of your piece, how complex two people really are. Some students feel uncomfortable with that fact—s ubjects shift and drift. But good subjects are alive. Good subjects aren’t static (if they are, they are B-O-R-I-N-G). If you already know what you are going to say about your subject, you’re going to struggle to keep the writing energized.
There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening, that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique.
— MARTHA GRAHAM
Good writers choose a topic they know a lot about—relationships, travel, growing up, bedrooms, hotels, restaurants, the mosque on 42nd Street—and they trust (this is the hard part) that they will discover things about the topic as they work.
You also create energy and grip your readers by engaging with powerful subject matter that may be quite far from your own everyday experience—but you still have to be up close to your subject, able to write what you see before you, and from firsthand knowledge. It’s very hard to write about war, death, torture, or apocalypse if your sole source of information is media and not witnesses. In fact, poet Carolyn Forché terms her work “poetry of witness.” When she traveled with Amnesty International to El Salvador, she found the country in crisis: in the midst of a civil war. She witnessed hospitals and clinics in shambles. She learned, from parents, about the sexual mutilation of girls. She learned, firsthand from talking to people there, about torture and brutality going unreported in the news. When she set pen to paper, she wrote about her experience, powerfully. When you read her famous prose poem “The Colonel,” notice where the energy comes from. This piece also provides a terrific example of “Going Cold,” a technique discussed on page 322.
Carolyn Forché
The Colonel
What you have heard is true. I was in his house. His wife carried a tray of coffee and sugar. His daughter filed her nails, his son went out for the night. There were daily papers, pet dogs, a pistol on the cushion beside him. The moon swung bare on its black cord over the house. On the television was a cop show. It was in English. Broken bottles were embedded in the walls around the house to scoop the kneecaps from a man’s legs or cut his hands to lace. On the windows there were gratings like those in liquor stores. We had dinner, rack of lamb, good wine, a gold bell was on the table for calling the maid. The maid brought green mangoes, salt, a type of bread. I was asked how I enjoyed the country. There was a brief commercial in Spanish. His wife took everything away. There was some talk then of how difficult it had become to govern. The parrot said hello on the terrace. The colonel told it to shut up, and pushed himself from the table. My friend said to me with his eyes: say nothing. The colonel returned with a sack used to bring groceries home. He spilled many human ears on the table. They were like dried peach halves. There is no other way to say this. He took one of them in his hands, shook it in our faces, dropped it into a water glass. It came alive there. I am tired of fooling around he said. As for the rights of anyone, tell your people they can go fuck themselves. He swept the ears to the floor with his arm and held the last of his wine in the air. Something for your poetry, no? he said. Some of the ears on the floor caught this scrap of his voice. Some of the ears on the floor were pressed to the ground.
Read the prose poem aloud. Read it two more times—a lot of energy is packed into these few lines. Notice the simple title, shining like a flashlight down the spine of the prose poem. This is a portrait poem, and it’s a terrifying portrait of a brutal military leader. The speaker, a writer, probably the poet herself, writes very plainly, addressing the poem to “you.” Instead of talking in general, which causes energy to dissipate, she confines the energy in the form of an intimate letter-like address: “What you have heard is true.” Contrast her opening with a typical report, devoid of energy, which might begin something like this: “In today’s society, there are many examples of brutality.”
Forché’s use of energy entices us to keep reading—we feel we are being let in on a secret or a private confession between two people. As the piece progresses, she shows in each line what she sees. She doesn’t write emotions or feelings: We watch as she watches the details of a domestic evening unfolding—nail filing, son going out. Moon on cord. There’s energy in the descriptions because they are active, precise, and unusual, too. Moon on cord? In line 6, there’s a turn. This place is not a safe place; this is the home of a dangerous and brutal man, where instruments of torture are also items of decoration. Forché doesn’t put in her emotions: She wants the energy to leap off the page of the poem and into the reader without her own intervention to soften the blows. She builds the energy by juxtaposing horror (scooped kneecaps) with beauty, pleasure, and sustenance (mangoes, parrots, bread).
She writes in short sentences, not quite breathless, but with one action or observation per sentence, the piece reads very quickly: boom, boom, boom. “It came alive there. I am tired of fooling around he said.” These leaps from observation to dialogue create energy, too.
Energy is an essential requirement of any piece of creative writing. To hone energy skills, it can be helpful for writers in any genre to study plays and screenplays. Screenwriters, along with playwrights and graphic/comic writers, have to focus very carefully on energy when they create a new piece. In these genres, there is simply nowhere to hide, no room for a long descriptive passage or a foray into theme. Every single syllable has to crackle. Screenwriters know to choose settings and characters that spark and bristle with aliveness. They begin their pieces with action. Above all, they make sure to put enormous energy in the dialogue—each line spoken aloud in a screenplay or a play must sizzle with energy. Think about energy in dialogue this way: Let’s say you speak about three thousand sentences in a day. Of these sentences, how many would be energized enough to make it onto the page, lively enough to create a spark for a reader? Twenty? Ten? One? (Many writers carry around a writer’s notebook in order to catch energized details, actions, and lines overheard, and these observations and quotes feed life into their works.)
PRACTICE
Read the excerpt from Charlotte Glynn’s “Duct Tape Twins” (p. 218), written when she was a student, and make a list of all the places you find energy. Does the screenplay have any subtext—information for the reader that isn’t spelled out on the page?
Guidelines for Increasing Energy
Provide Interesting Information.
Deliver information-rich writing, using specific insider details and expert vocabulary. Be generous with details. This is a valuable way to keep your reader interested in your work. We read for many reasons, but one is to learn. Smart writers include interesting facts and weave in startling, unusual, and specific details.
Read the poem “What Every Soldier Should Know” by Brian Turner (p. 217). Notice how Turner provides images from the war, and notice how lively the poem is. The Arabic words he utilizes teach the reader something of the language, the culture, the danger, and the complexity. RPGs, parachute bombs, how much it costs to kill a man—this poem is jam-packed with interesting information.
Avoid the General,
which always lacks energy: Strive for specifics in your subject. Good writers always get the real name, the actual address, the specific phrase, the right translation, because the power in writing lies in that exactness.
Write about Lively, Particular Subjects You Know Intimately.
Some topics are hard to make interesting, though clever writers always find a way. Homeless people you know nothing about, historical figures you’re mildly familiar with, general types, indistinct locations—these are all energy black holes. Subjects that force you to write about passive conditions—dreaming, falling asleep, driving—are all hard to infuse with energy. Conversely, you can write energetically when your focus is last night’s brawl at the Dirty Parrot. Your rich aunt’s summer visit to your trailer park. A pack of high school punks wreaking havoc, Robin Hood-style, in the Sunset Heights subdivision at the edge of Detroit—that’s the kind of subject that is already infused with energy.
In sum, you don’t need to reveal your deepest, darkest secrets, but you do need to make readers feel you are giving them your best stuff. What’s juicy? What do you know about that is strange, interesting, unusual? What kinds of things have you seen that are outside normal day-to-day experience? Use a microscope to view your life, the lives of people you know, your past. If you haven’t been to a war zone, it may be very difficult for you to create energy in your piece of writing; if all your images come from what you have learned from television, video games, and movies, your writing is likely to be flat and not energized with interesting, closely observed specifics. However, if you observe normal day-to-day experience closely enough, you will create energy.
PRACTICE
Make two two-column lists. First, list all the places you have lived (include summer camps, extended vacations, weekend stayovers). In the second column, list the most dramatic thing that occurred at each location. Next, make another list, of the outdoor settings of your life from ages five to eighteen. Start with your backyard on Jenson Street. Pan your mind’s movie camera (you have to “flash” or see the location in order to put it on your list) across the kindergarten playground, the big plastic slide. Then, slowly panning the exterior shots of your life, to the grocery store parking lot, then the sandlot where you played baseball, then the creek where you went every day in fifth grade. Your secret woods spot in middle school. The train tracks where you kissed. In the second column for this list, write down the name of one or two other people who were also there.
You now have subjects. Mine these lists for the rest of the semester, for fiction, poetry, nonfiction, or plays. You can invent situations, but they will always be based in a real, energized scene. That’s the secret of subject: grounding in the real.
Leaps: The Power of Gaps
Remember Amy Fusselman’s memoir (p. 76) of her father, her pregnancy, and her daily life as an itinerant musician? In those short sections, Fusselman leapt from topic to topic. She kept cycling through key moments in the three braids, those three stories. The short sections create energy. When you look at the page, your eye leaps around, as with a poem. The interplay among the white space, the numbered sections, and the tinier sections within the numbered parts invites the reader to leap.
Readers like short sections.
Readers are attracted to movement. Fiction writers, essayists, and poets employ the method of leaping in order to leave plenty of room for the reader to engage with the material.
Spelling everything out, providing detailed transitions, explaining and reviewing and going over it again: That may be effective for your chemistry textbook, but it’s death to art. Art is more like a game, a pleasing game, one that’s got a bit of a challenge in it.
The artist never entirely knows. We guess. We may be wrong, but we take leap after leap in the dark.
— AGNES DE MILLE
The reader wants to figure things out. The reader wants to play. So creative writers leap because leaping creates energy. Notice in “What Every Soldier Should Know” on page 217 that the couplets (two-line stanzas) force the reader to make leaps from section to section—fourteen leaps! The poet, Brian Turner, didn’t want the lulling calm of a prose poem or the warmth of long stanzas. Rapid-fire couplets keep the reader hopping, on the move, an effect that suits Turner’s subject extremely well. Leaps create a lot of energy.
PRACTICE
Read Brian Arundel’s “The Things I’ve Lost” (p. 216). Make a list of the leaps, and analyze how leaps energize this piece.
When you employ leaps in your work, you are comprehensible and interesting on the first reading, but the aware reader knows there’s more there. The reader gets a full, confusion-free experience the first read. On a second and third reading, the piece reveals more information, more connections. Leaps leave room for that dynamic between a reader and a work.
When in doubt, make a fool of yourself There is a microscopically thin line between being brilliantly creative and acting like the most gigantic idiot on earth. So what the hell, leap.
— CYNTHIA HEIMEL
Read the following excerpt, from Jessica Shattuck’s story “Bodies” (p. 263).
In the fluorescent light of the refrigerator, the halved parsnips look naked—pale and fleshy as limbs. Annie pauses before pulling them out. A refrigerator is like a hospital, a bright place that is not cheerful. A protective but uncertain place to wait.
Compare the writing above to this prose excerpt from another writer.
When the alarm clock went off, I woke up and I reached over and turned it off and got out of bed. I walked across the room and I went to the bathroom which was close by and when I went in, I turned on the light so I could see. I was wondering what I was going to do today. I was just waking up.
Which piece has more energy? Why?
In the second excerpt, we find a blow-by-blow description of a fairly typical morning. This example shows the opposite of leaping. Here, things are filled in completely, with no surprises. Everything is predictable and explained. The reader may read along, but what is the point of this piece? Would you read it again? Does it have any energy?
Don’t explain. Leap—from bathroom to office, from something interesting to the next interesting thing. Leaps are the places where the writer purposely leaves something out, skips ahead, or changes topic. Leaps, like dotted lines, trace complete thoughts, but gaps allow the reader to actively participate in creating the image, thought, or meaning.
We readers like to be set up for success. We want to feel smart when we read, not clueless, and we want to make sure you the author know what you are doing. We don’t want to be set up for a fall (there’s no pattern, there’s no point, or you don’t really let us see). To follow the random associations of someone thinking out loud can be confusing, boring, or pointless. To be provided with planned surprises—that’s energy.
Adjust your focus: Write what you see; leap, leave out filler sections (or simply take them out before sharing your work with others). Once you start using the leaping technique, you will be amazed at how much explanation you can leave out. Readers are pretty savvy—they figure out a lot from just a few hints.
By writing what you see, you allow the reader to form an image and draw his or her own conclusions.
One of the most important places this principle occurs is in dialogue. Good dialogue leaps. Nothing is deadlier to creative writing energy than dialogue that explains and tells.
JOEY: What’s wrong, Emily? You look really sad. Are you blue because you got a D–on your history test this morning in first period? It seemed like you were really struggling with that test.
EMILY: Thanks for noticing, Joey. That test was so hard. I’m really feeling bad about this.
JOEY: This is terrible. Is it going to kill your average?
EMILY: It may cause me to fail the class.
JOEY: What can you do?
EMILY: I don’t know.
Here, the author is using one character to get information out of the other character. In good creative writing, dialogue bristles with energy when each character has his or her own agenda, and the agendas conflict, causing gaps, leaps. Good dialogue (as you know from being in great conversations) is like a tennis match. The energy moves back and forth, with equal force on both sides. Each person is trying to win. Here, no one is even in the game. Emily did poorly on a test. Okay. Why should I care? Unless she cares passionately, I’m not going to. And what’s Joey’s angle? Does he want to sell her an answer key? Drugs? Get a date? Unless he wants something that directly conflicts with what Emily wants, there’s no energy. There are no leaps. Both characters are on the same topic, plodding along. Explaining. Carefully, slowly, boringly, filling in all the gaps.
In dialogue, you’ll be able to leap if your characters are at cross purposes. They’ll each be going in a different direction. Your reader will have to move quickly to keep up—that’s what you want.
Compare this example of crisp, energetic dialogue from The Sopranos by James Manos Jr. and David Chase. Tony and his daughter Meadow are visiting colleges. Meadow comes out of the admissions office, and her father asks her how it went.
MEADOW: They’ve got a 48 to 52 male-female ratio which is great—strong liberal arts program, and this cool Olin Arts Center for music. Usual programs abroad—China, India—
TONY: You’re just applying here and you’re already leaving?
Notice the energy. Meadow is specific. She broadcasts her agenda. She leaps from social benefits to infrastructure to study abroad. Tony’s agenda probably isn’t for his daughter to enjoy the benefits of an equal male-female ratio. When he asks her for more information, the reader leaps: We know he doesn’t care how she answers the question. He is not asking her for more information. There’s a gap in what he says—on the surface—and in what he intends. Meadow lists what she likes about the college. She doesn’t really care what her father thinks at this point. Tony doesn’t want her to go away, to be too far out of his control. No filler. No explanation. The leaps and gaps leave plenty of room for the reader to figure things out—that’s the pleasure of energy. We readers are set up by the author to know more than the characters themselves. The dialogue leaps, and we scoot along to keep up.
We must walk consciously only part way toward our goal, and then leap in the dark to our success.
— HENRY DAVID THOREAU
The Tony-Meadow conversation continues like this as they stroll across campus:
MEADOW: It’s an option, Dad. Junior year.
TONY: What do you study in India? How to avoid diarrhea?
MEADOW: They don’t require SAT scores but mine’ll help ’cause they’re high. Socially—I don’t know. This one girl told me there’s this saying, “Bates is the world’s most expensive form of contraception.”
TONY: What the hell kind of talk is that? You mean the girls at the other colleges we been to just put out?
MEADOW: Oh, my God.
TONY: And another thing—every school we visit there’s the gay/lesbian this and that—the teachers know this is going on?
MEADOW: Oh, my God. (Stops, admires campus.) Pretty, huh?
TONY: (Agrees, then—) Two to go. Colby up. (They walk through the leafiness)
MEADOW: Dad … how come you didn’t finish college?
TONY: I had that semester and a half at Seton Hall.
MEADOW: Yeah? And?
This dialogue emits a high level of energy because the characters leap just as we do in real-life conversations. Meadow is simultaneously thinking out loud, signaling her father to stop being an idiot, and admiring the college. Tony leaps from social criticism, to fatherly overprotectiveness, to homophobia, to the next college on the list.
Notice what isn’t here, what isn’t explained. By leaping, a writer generates reader involvement. Information about conflict, values, and character comes out between the lines. We readers (or viewers) know, without it being said—this information comes through in the gaps, called the subtext—that Tony wants his daughter to have a good education and a conventional life. We know he is embarrassed by his lack of formal education. We know he is afraid of her leaving home. We know Meadow isn’t afraid of her father. She’s curious about him, and she doesn’t know a lot about his history. She’s mostly concerned with her ability to enjoy the social benefits of her educational experience. Is Meadow in some ways more worldly than her father? Is she embarrassed by him? Does Tony feel in over his head? Is he giving up fighting with her when he says, “Two to go. Colby up”?
Just when the reader has gotten the pace, the thread, the track, the good writer switches up again. Tony landed someplace different in that line, didn’t he? Not where we expected (Meadow’s interrogative). The leaps vary in length and pace.
Consider again Joey and Emily: We know so very little about their values, backgrounds, and conflicts. Their dialogue lacks energy—of subject, of gap (they mean exactly what they say). The dialogue is used to interview one character for one reason alone: to give information to the reader. There’s not enough energy in that purpose.
Which brings us back to words. Contrast the word choices in the Joey-Emily and Tony-Meadow examples. As you read in Chapter Three, words are a powerful way to energize your work.
Words
Words are what creative writers use to make their art forms. It’s worth taking a closer look at these building blocks.
All the words in everything you write are important. You might have a great subject and leap like Stephen King, but if the words you are using are dead, flat, or abstract, energy will leak out of your piece with a slow, steady woosh.
Writers are people for whom words are interesting. Writers like messing around with words, adjusting, fussing, trying out different ones. Use language like painters use their tools. Make a mess. Play around. See what combinations flicker with energy, see which ones beam.
Most creative writers find it easier to fine-tune, adjust, mess with writing as they are doing it. Few writers feel their first drafts are ready to share. Experimenting with different words—word by word—is part of the pleasure, and the challenge, of creative writing. Notice how you work best. Do you fiddle around with sentences, lines, and dialogue, testing different word choices as you go? Or do you work better when you write a whole draft and then go back and look for flat, ineffective, vague word choices?
Specificity.
Words that generate energy create a spark in the reader’s brain. These are fresh, lively, simple, clear, or unexpected words that capture our attention while aiding our apprehension of the image. Word packages are overly familiar phrases in which perfectly fine words lose energy because they are constantly yoked together: beautiful blue eyes, red rose, gaping hole, awkward moment. Good writers enjoy busting up word packages and recombining their elements to create original effects: gaping moment, awkward rose. See the difference? Avoid your thesaurus, and focus on moving words around into interesting, unusual combinations, and you will instantly energize your work.
PRACTICE
Rank the following words, using a scale of 0 to 10. A 10 is high octane, a 0 is very low pulse rate. Do you notice anything about what the 5+ words have in common?
|
Frizzed |
Blue |
|
Surge |
Beautiful |
|
Important |
Wondering |
|
Understanding |
Apartment |
|
Very |
Flapjack |
Abstract words (think SAT vocab words) clot your writing with low-energy spots. When the reader has to think, she’s not in your piece of writing. She’s working. Readers want to enjoy the reading experience, and you, the writer, need to do the work to make that happen. Fiddle around, don’t write from habit: Choose words that are surprising, fresh, unexpected, and different (but not distracting). Simple one-syllable words are going to make your writing pulse.
Consider the differences between the two words in each of the following pairs:
|
road |
avenue |
|
jerk |
unpleasant person |
|
party |
reception |
|
fun |
enjoyable |
|
tunes |
aural interlude |
Many writers, when they are starting out, feel obligated to sound “writerly.” They choose words that sound bookish and important. Their poor readers. Some overly writerly words include many adverbs (suddenly, finally, interestingly, absolutely) and clichéd shortcuts to rendering emotions: she furrowed her brow, he raised an eyebrow, tears streamed from her face, his jaw dropped. Use what you learned in Part One, and write what you see. What does your character really do when he or she is frustrated, skeptical, or shocked? Use the words that describe your actual scene, not the general population’s explanatory shorthand.
Every word counts.
Good writers choose a straightforward, fresh, simple, lively vocabulary. Crisp nouns and simple adjectives, used sparingly, are energetic and produce a picture, like a movie or a dream, in the reader’s mind. One of the following examples uses words that are trying too hard to sound “literary” and abstractions that short-circuit energy instead of creating it.
Consider the following paragraph by Rick Moody, from his energy-rich short story “Boys” (p. 212).
Boys enter the house, boys enter the house. Boys, and with them the ideas of boys (ideas leaden, reductive, inflexible), enter the house. Boys, two of them, wound into hospital packaging, boys with infant pattern baldness, slung in the arms of parents, boys dreaming of breasts, enter the house. Twin boys, kettles on the boil, boys in hideous vinyl knapsacks that young couples from Edison, NJ, wear on their shirt fronts, knapsacks coated with baby saliva and staphylococcus and milk vomit, enter the house.
Compare this to the following paragraph. What do you notice about the differences in language choices?
They were just typical kids. You know kids. The normal American kind. The boy was thinking about how he just wanted the day to end so he could get out of school and get to the project. He had been dreaming about this project for years. It was so great to finally be so close. So close. And yet so far, too. It seemed as though he and his buddy would never be able to really get there. Those afternoons were slow.
PRACTICE
For the examples above, underline each word that has some spark, some specificity—some energy. Which words are vivid, energetic? Circle all the words in each passage that are deadweight, predictable, blocking energy rather than creating it. Which passage has higher octane? Reflect on where you “see” the writing, intuitively, versus where you use your intellect to make a picture. Does the higher-energy passage “pop” images into your mind’s eye?
PRACTICE
Reread the excerpt from Amy Fusselman’s memoir The Pharmacist’s Mate (p. 76), and read Rick Moody’s story “Boys,” which appears in full on page 212. In each piece, locate at least six phrases that do not usually occur in that combination. Wild horses and thin man are word packages. You are looking for fresh, unusual combinations (and energy), such as elephant pants, Sleeping Tubby and Snow Weight, shirtsleeves aglow with torchlight. You will end up with a list of twelve phrases. Number your pairs, with 1 being the most energetic, high-wattage combination, and 12 being sparkly, but not as much as
MANIPULATING ENERGY
Choosing energetic subjects, setting up your writing so that it invites the reader to make his or her own connections (to leap), and paying close attention to every single word: Whether you are a minimalist poet or a lush, expansive novelist, these are the basic principles that form the foundation for everything creative writers do.
As you practice these principles, notice two other tools for increasing and intentionally modulating energy in your work: pace and point of view.
Pace
By increasing the pace, you increase the energy, of course. However, once your reader adjusts to the speed, the energy flattens out again. Varying pace is a key to sustaining energy. After about three beats, three “points,” the reader is adjusted. It’s time to change things up again. That’s one reason the waking-up paragraph example earlier in this chapter falls flat. Everything is at the same pitch, the same pace.
Pacing means being attentive to how much time passes through your paragraphs or stanzas. In Rick Moody’s story “Boys,” the author presents the intense, fast coming-of-age arc of boys’ lives. Moody speeds time up and then slows it down, varying the pace. As the writer, use pace to create the effect you want on your reader. What you don’t want to do is just write, laying down sentences or lines of poetry block by block like so much cord wood, oblivious to pace.
Good writers, the ones we read again and again, use the full continuum of pace, the full range, just like good musicians do. Practice moving from slow to fast, and to medium. Change how far, how close you are when you are looking at the scene before you. Take a step back. What do you see now? Move closer than is polite. What senses are engaged now? Practice getting fluid with your camera, and watch what happens to the pace of your writing.
Vary the pace—one of the foundations of all good acting.
— ELLEN TERRY
As the writer, you calibrate pace based on the effects you want to achieve. Ignore pace, and you risk letting all the excitement evaporate. Most writers intuitively know that when you want to increase the energy of your writing, you use short sentences to describe a lot of action:
The man took the knife. He held it over her throat. There was a loud noise. Her eyes flashed in terror. Suddenly …
But what truly effective writers do is more subtle and more interesting. First of all, if you are moving fast—lots of action, lots of images per second—you have to be headed somewhere slow; the pace has to change if you want the effect to work. Writing everything at breakneck speed is just as boring as slow writing that drags on and on. It’s variety of pace—slowing down, speeding up, slowing way down—that keeps the human mind intrigued, on point. Think about how a roller coaster works. It’s not all whooshing downhill at 150 miles an hour. There’s the slow climb. A short fast dip. A quicker climb. A pause at the top—then the giant fall. Think about driving at exactly seventy-five miles an hour on the highway, your engine set on cruise. After a while, have you noticed how that speed feels almost slow? Compare the experience of idling along at six miles an hour, and then suddenly peeling out, getting to sixty in six seconds. You’re going slower than seventy-five, but which feels faster? Which is more exciting? The energy is in acceleration, not in top speed.
Rick Moody is a master of pace. Watch how he speeds up time in this passage from the story “Boys.” (Moody is also a musician.)
Boys enter the house carrying their father, slumped. Happens so fast. Boys rush into the house leading EMTs to the couch in the living room where the body lies, boys enter the house, boys enter the house, boys enter the house.
Notice how much detail he includes: Edison, NJ; balsamic vinegar; the Elys’ yard. Pump action BB gun, Stilton cheese, mismatched tube socks. When you cover a lot of time in a short space, you create energy. Bind the reader to your words by making every single one bristle with specificity. In fast-paced writing, you can’t afford to be general. We have to grasp, fully, each thing you name, completely, before you rush us on to the next thing. A common mistake, easy to avoid and easy to fix, is to write fast and without detail. Your first year as a writer, overwrite the detail. You can pull back on it later, if you need to.
TROUBLESHOOTING ENERGY
The troubleshooting chart below will help you evaluate and control the level of energy in your creative writing as you work on various pieces in various genres. If you choose all the tools from the “Decreases Energy” column, you might still write a great piece, but it might be harder to make that piece realistic for your reader. If you write about your sister’s cancer, for example, write about your experience of living with someone very ill. If you focus on your sister’s experiences, then you will want to choose from the “Increases Energy” column for your other tools so that you write from her point of view, close up, and with words only she uses, focusing on the tense, leaping scenes that reveal the most intimate aspects of her story. You won’t be able to include much explanation and still sustain your readers’ interest. If you are the main character in that story, though, there will instantly be more energy, so the reader will go with you to the doctor’s office, learn with you as you comprehend the details of the illness—just as long as you leap!
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Increases Energy |
Decreases Energy |
Depletes Energy |
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Subjects |
Subjects known intimately from real life. |
Subjects known secondhand from friends, family members. |
Subjects informed by television, movies, general assumptions and impressions. |
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Leaps |
Leaps from one juicy piece of information to another. |
Answers that fit the questions. |
Explanation. |
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Word Choice |
Specific, sharp, concrete nouns and action verbs. |
General words, filler words. Adjectives, adverbs. |
Abstract words, filtering verbs. |
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Conflict |
Conflicting agendas. |
Long answers. Agreement. |
One person alone with thoughts. |
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Pace |
Varied pace. |
Even pace. |
Lack of attention to pace. |
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Distance |
Close-up camera work. |
Long shots, pulling back, writing from far away. |
Camera in one spot. |
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Point of View |
Tiny details observed from a single point of view. |
Multiple points of view. |
Author talking, author reporting (point of view not a character or speaker). |
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Sentence Variation |
Variety in sentence length, word choice. |
Lack of variety in constructions. |
Lack of attention to length and shape of sentences, sections. |