Your style is as unique and distinctive as your face, your voice, except that you can choose it, you can can work on it, enhance it. In this course we will introduce aspiring writers to the art of putting pressure on written language. We will study the use of metaphor and imagery, and demonstrate how clarity, grace, and inventiveness in word choice are imperative to a story’s success. Writers will emerge with the revision skills essential to all writers of good stories and good prose.
The Reader-Writer Arc
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From the course by Wesleyan University
Creative Writing: The Craft of Style
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From the lesson
"No Ideas But in Things"
In the the final module of the course, we learn to balance the drive to get at ideas and feelings, with the need the story always has for concreteness, realness. We learn to express ideas in the form of physical things in a narrative world, to produce a style that speaks as much to the world of the senses as to the world of the mind.
Meet the Instructors
Salvatore ScibonaFrank B. Weeks Visiting Professor of English
Okay let's give this visible form with one more diagram from Frank Conroy.
Again this is my interpretation of a diagram that
he gave all of us at the Iowa Writers Workshop years ago.
He put on the board an arc.
It looked like this.
And the arc was divided in three parts.
Over here is a reader.
Over here is the writer.
Now, the writer, in reaching the reader, can
go say, this far, and
go through the portion of this arc that is closest to her.
And then could conceivably go this far, going across
the period that the portion of the arc that's shared between the two of them.
And the could conceivably go this far and then stop here.
Yeah now that's one possibility.
Or the writer could go this far and then stop.
And then there's a third possibility.
So when the writer goes so far here, he traverses or
she traverses all this portion and then the middle portion and then stopping here.
The reader in order to reach her doesn't have to do too much work.
Yeah, because the writer has done so much of it.
He included in a, in work like this perfectly sensible,
reasonable forms of work like journalism.
Where the writer, but the reader very often picking up a newspaper in
the morning just wants to get the information across as simply as,
just wants to receive the information as simple as possible.
But if you're working in story writing our priorities are a little bit different.
Something that you might, if you as a literary writer are trying to get over
here and you go all the way over to the point where the reader doesn't have to do
any work at all, you might be working in what he called propaganda.
That is where you're the doing work for the, all the thinking work,
all the judging work for the reader, and the reader is sort of enforced
to think of things the way you want to think of them so
that the surfaces are you could say over-determined.
The imagery is over-determined.
Okay, so, now, on the other hand.
Over here, if you're stopping only this far, there's a problem,
which is that the reader traversing the portion of the arc that is closest to him.
And then traversing the portion of the arc that is possibly shared,
at this point the reader runs out of steam.
The reader can't reach you.
So you've got this gap, right?
In here, he put something called private writing.
He also put a diary, for example.
You know, a diary is of course addressed to yourself, and
you're not going to be trying very hard to be exceptionally clear all the time.
You might refer to hes and shes without clarifying who you're talking about.
And that's fine because you're not trying to reach a reader.
In the meantime with private writing, sometimes you're working on a story where
it's coming so much from your own feelings that you're not
thinking about the reader and you're not trying to leave spaces open for
the kind of work that you're wanting the reader to do.
Now then there's, as you can imagine, as you might have been expecting,
this magic zone.
Where the writer has done all of the work most appropriate to him or
her and then done much of the work in this sort of middle zone,
but then stopped right here, yeah?
And then that means that the reader has to do a significant amount of work to get,
to use all of his own faculties and
then to do a little bit more to reach where this writer is, yes.
So, in other words, we have a portion of the arc that is appropriate to the writer
and then another that is appropriate to the reader
And we get this splendid middle zone.
Now what he would say is that in this,
what the writer is doing here is implying.
And what the reader is doing, remember imply and infer are not the same,
the writer implies and the reader infers.
The reader is inferring and coming up and meeting the writer here.
Now these are of course, not fixed points in any sense.
Sometimes the writer is playing very close to this edge, and
sometimes the writer is maybe playing very close to an edge over here.
The reason I'm bringing this up, however, during this
particular segment is just because we've been talking about no ideas but in things.
And fiction is, of course, a very, fiction and non-fiction stories,
are a particular kind of writing where we're trying to dramatize things.
We're trying to communicate through drama, through story.
And we might have a bold vision,
we might have an idea that we're really trying to get across.
But then we might find ourselves sometimes going all the way
over here because we want the reader to get our interpretation of things and
not just our version of the story.
So work that fits right in here is work I think
that is dramatic,
has clear, vivid surfaces where you describe
what things look like, what things not like, what things sound like and so on.
Right, you lead it up here, and you let the reader know what all the sense data
is, because the reader can't make that kind of stuff up on her own,
she can't know that that the woman's dress was brown for example.
The writer has a responsibility to tell those things.
But the writer doesn't have a responsibility always to say
this is what it means.
This is how to interpret it.
That's the work for the reader to do.
So, one of the things that you might be thinking about in this exercise for
this class, when you're doing your peer review,
is where you find some certain moments on this arch.
Sometimes you might encounter
a piece of material in the story that's unspecified.
So a person or
an action seems hardly to happen because it hasn't been given physical texture.
In that case the writer's being over here.
The writer sees it in her mind but has maybe not put it down on paper.
In another situation, however, the writer might have told you what everything looks
like and then also tried to tell you what it was for and what it was about and
how you're supposed to feel about it.
Well, your feelings, your ideas, your judgments as a reader, that's the kind
of thing that the writer has got to learn to, that the writer's gotta respect.
So what we're trying to do is find some middle ground.
To try to land right in here or right in here or right in here.
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