The 5 Sins of Storytellingby Laurie Alberts

1. THE SIN OF THE BAD HEMING-WAY/CARVER IMITATION

When I was a graduate student in an MFA program and then later, when I taught undergraduate fiction writing, quite a few young, usually male, students were enamored of Hemingway. Their male characters were close-mouthed or terse when they had to speak; neither they nor the readers had much access to their emotions. They showed grace un-der pressure and took action when necessary. They were wounded by life but very brave. They wrote a lot of sentences using was and were, as in, the malls were very large but we didn’t go to them anymore. Soon these young writers became enamored of Raymond Carver and started writ-ing stories with imitative titles like “What We Talk About When We Talk About Sex” or “Will You Please Roll Over Please.” The moral of the story is, write your own story.

Of course, emulation of great writers can be a good way to learn craft. You can analyze how their scenes are built and discover how they show rather than tell in their scenes. But in the end, writers have to find their own voices and their own styles and put them to use in their own work. Some writers have such distinct voices and such unique visions right from the get-go that this isn’t a problem for them. If this isn’t true of you, and if you, like the majority of writers, have to struggle to find your own style and voice, you’ll need to be on the lookout for instances in your work when you’ve taken on the style and mannerisms of writers you admire. Just as you wouldn’t want to plagiarize directly from someone else’s book, you don’t want to inadvertently “steal” their voice or their story. For one thing, readers will notice the imitation and won’t appreci-ate it. For another, you’ll be cheating yourself of one of the great satisfac-tions of writing, which is to discover what it is you want to say and your own way to say it.

2. THE SIN OF STILTED DIALOGUE Dialogue sounds false whenever it contains information that the

characters would already know but the writer inserts as exposition, as in

“My mother, Geraldine, would be very happy to come to your house for dinner Uncle Joseph.” Obviously, the dialogue should be more along the lines of “Mom would love to come for dinner, thanks.” We assume the uncle knows the speaker’s mother’s name already.

Dialogue also sounds stilted when characters speak outside of their own idiom. When my first novel was being copyedited in manuscript, an overzealous copy editor wanted me to change a line in which an Alaskan fisherman in a bar jokes about committing “hari-kari.” The copy edi-tor changed it to the correct term for Japanese ritual suicide, hara-kiri. I argued that my character would use the familiar Americanized version, even if it were incorrect. Had the character called it the more formal term in Japanese, seppuku, the dialogue would have been even more stilted.

In that instance the dialogue was being criticized inappropriately for being too informal; when the dialogue is too formal, it also becomes stilted. While a certain academic might speak in term of dialectics and discourse modalities to his advanced literary theory class, if he spoke that way to his plumber it would either be laughable or pathetic. If not be-ing used for comic effect it would just be bad dialogue. As I noted in the dialogue chapter earlier, read your dialogue aloud. If you find yourself stumbling over the words your characters are speaking in your scenes, it’s time to revise.

3. THE SIN OF NOTHING HAPPENSIf a narrator or character takes her car for an oil change and no im-

portant events or interactions ensue, you could and probably should just skip the scene and summarize it. “I got my oil changed in the morning before I went to the grocery and the dry cleaner’s.” Or leave it out. Each aspect of the day doesn’t deserve a developed scene if none of these events holds particularly revealing information about the character, or advance the plot or themes of the piece. You don’t need to make the reader experience, via scenes, a character’s humdrum errand-filled life in order to make the point that the character’s life is indeed tedious.

Of course you could write any of these events in a way that revealed character—if the narrator got into a fight with the dry cleaner or spied her ex-husband with his new girlfriend over the produce display, for instance. Assuming that nothing as exciting as all that occurs, save the scenes for more important occasions and compress time through sum-mary.

You might use very quiet or slow scenes to set up for something to come later, but, in general, if the scene does little in terms of heightening the complications or furthering the plot or themes, consider summarizing

instead.

4. THE SIN OF CREDIBILITY PROB-LEMS

First there’s the simple problem of lack of continuity, as they say in the movie business—one scene contradicting another. If you have a mother with three kids in one scene and the same mother has seven kids in the next scene and it’s only six months later, there’s a credibility problem (or she’s done some mighty fast adopting). On a less obvious level, lack of credibility can occur in situations such as when children are preternatu-rally wise or always smarter than their parents, like those TV sitcom kids who talk with the ironic smarts of little Jon Stewarts or David Lettermans.

Lack of credibility is a real problem in memoirs or personal essays in which the first-person narrator, a stand-in for the author, fails to move us or fails to make readers trust and believe emotions or even facts. We’ve heard plenty about the controversies over falsified memoirs, such as James Frey’s or JT Leroy’s, but readers can find a narrator lacking in cred-ibility due to an attitude of self-pity or self-aggrandizing; if the narrator is always the victim of others’ wrongs or always wins the day, the reader is eventually going to feel resentful and distrustful. To be credible, a mem-oir narrator writing from an adult perspective must be self-aware.

Granted, in fiction we have the device of the unreliable narrator, as in Eudora Welty’s famous story “Why I Live at the P.O.,” and there are those memoirists, such as Lauren Slater, who have made a career out of unreliability, as in her book Lying. But these are cases in which the author deliberately invites you to mistrust the narrator. In most novels and mem-oirs, trust between reader and narrator is essential. Don’t risk losing that trust by making your narrator either too self-regarding or too villainous to believe in your scenes.

5. THE SIN OF SENTIMENTAL SCENES

What is the difference between sentiment and sentimental? I think of it as the difference between real sugar and artificial sweetener. Sen-timental scenes are as artificial as Sweet’N Low. A sentimental scene tries to manipulate emotion from the reader, usually pity or nostalgia or warm and fuzzy feelings. Of course you want your reader to be moved by the events in your story. What you don’t want to do is turn off your reader with scenes in which you attempt to squeeze out pity or nostalgia

or fuzzy feelings via mushy, maudlin writing. Most modern readers don’t have the tolerance for sentimentality that readers had in the days of Charles Dickens. Even before our day, Dickens’s novel The Old Curiosity Shop inspired Oscar Wilde to say that “One must have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without laughing.” It’s the perfect exam-ple of sentimentality backfiring.

Even today there are practitioners of the tearjerker scene, in which lovers must part with a lot of weeping or someone noble dies. Generally the sentimental death scene requires the dying person to be an angel of some sort—already artificially sweetened—or to have a deathbed con-version to goodness. Frequently last-minute forgiveness is featured. You can practically hear the harps playing. Please don’t misunderstand—I’m not at all against a scene showing emotion or provoking emotion in the reader. What I’m against is fake emotion—emotion that is forced in the characters and in the reader. How can you tell the difference? When you are moved by something you read, ask yourself if the emotional intensity in the scene feels earned. Does it match the level of intensity of emotion you felt when reading? If the characters are experiencing heightened emotions but you aren’t, the writer has left you out by not making those emotions convincing. The same goes for your writing. And be very care-ful about using such cliché and sentimental images phrasings as “a single tear ran down her cheek.” What happens when you use sentimentality rather than sentiment is that even though you’re creating a scene, you are still telling, not showing. You are telling your reader to feel something that you have failed to show in a convincing way. And that defeats the purpose of scenes.

Scene Exercises:a.) Create a brief scene in which conflict is apparent between two

characters. The conflict can be small, say, over a choice of restaurant, or large, such as a divorce.

b.) Write a scene between a cop and a driver he’s pulled over. Write it in present tense and then rewrite it in past tense. How do these tense shifts alter the tone of the scene? Which works better here? Why?

c.) Go to a public space and choose one detail (of appearance, ges-ture, voice, action) for each person you observe that reveals something important about that person. Write a scene in which details reveal char-acter.

d.) Write a short scene in which a parent and young or adult child re-turn to the parent’s childhood home. The first time you write it make the

scene occur in the winter, in the early evening. Then rewrite that scene in the morning, mid-summer. Consider the way time and setting affect the mood and tone of the two versions.

e.) Go to a public place where you can overhear but not see people nearby—a café with booths or public transportation work particularly well—and eavesdrop on a conversation. Write down as much of the dialogue as you need to establish the relationship between or among the speakers. Is there a power relationship? What is the nature of the infor-mation being passed? Is it merely chat, is someone trying to persuade, is there a conflict or does one of the speakers have an agenda? Can you individualize the speakers from their words alone?

f.) Write an animal death scene that is neither sentimental nor cliché.g.) Write a list of ten similes that are fresh and surprising.h.) Rewrite the parent and child scene, above, from a different point

of view. If you wrote in third person, rewrite it in first person. Or change the point-of-view character from child to parent or vice versa.

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