Category: Courting the Muse

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Courting the Muse

Why All Writers Should Read in Translation

In my last year of college, I took a class that destroyed my trust in translation. For our first session, the professor passed around a thick packet of poetry, full of lines that echoed one another — crying or singing ospreys, ladies gentle or modest, the flowering of duckweed or cress. Though they pulled from a common pool of imagery, each poem felt different, in the structure of the lines and the texture of the vocabulary. But in truth, they were all the same poem.

In those five or six different versions, we encountered the same classical Chinese, retracting through the minds of five or six different translator-poets. Filtered through their understanding, ornamented by their artistry, the original verse seemed to shatter and burst into a multitude of different colors, like white light forced through a prism. The resulting translations didn’t read like different versions of the same poem, they read like different poems entirely, even though the same bright-voiced birds called from within each of them..

That single, ninety-minute class taught me that translation was more daring and less precise than I realized — not so much like distilling mathematical truth from an equation, more like carving an image out of living wood. Two artisans, shown the same flowering tree can whittle it down to reveal two wholly different shapes.

Precisely when I lost faith in translation as an exact science, I started seeking out more translated texts to read. I was fascinated by all the literary choices they represented — why this word, out of all the possible synonyms? Why this phrase to convey an idiom that doesn’t exist in English? If something must be lost in translation, why sacrifice this element of the text, instead of that?

As writers, we’re forced to make challenging stylistic decisions of our own, even if we work only in our native tongues. Reading in translation, I’ve found, brings these choices to the forefront and helps us conceptualize them as the challenges — even dramas — that they are.

Suppose you write a scene one way, out of all the ways that you could have rendered it. What are you giving up by doing that? What possibilities for your story are you closing off — and what possibilities are bringing into being?

All writing, in a way, feels like an act of translation: not between languages, but from the rush of images and moods in an author’s head to a cluster of words that can be parsed by outsiders. Like translation it’s about opening up something that was inaccessible.

A translator proper has to consider whether their decisions do justice to the text they’re bringing to new life. As writers, we’re not beholden to a true source text — just the visions we harbor inside our minds. But the relationship between the words we write and the imagined text we’re writing toward can be just as fraught as the twisty opaque connections between translation and source text.

At the end of the day, no translation is perfect — at least not the way a mathematical proof is perfect. By the same token, no story will look exactly how the author envisioned. But they can still be striking and moving in unexpected ways. By reading in translation, we can learn to appreciate those beautiful imperfections.

Lucia Tang is a writer for Reedsy, a marketplace that connects self-publishing authors with the book industry’s best editors, designers, and marketers. To work on the site’s free historical character name generators, she draws on her knowledge of Chinese, Latin, and Old Irish —  learned as a PhD candidate in history at UC Berkeley. You can read more of her work on the Reedsy Discovery blog, or follow her on Twitter at @lqtang.

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Courting the Muse

How Academic Articles Can Help You Craft Your Frame Stories

Pilgrims travel to a martyr’s shrine, swapping stories on their journey to pass the time.

The freshly installed tenant of a rundown estate asks his housekeeper about the history of his troubled new home.

A sea captain writes to his sister about a disturbing encounter he had en route to the North Pole.

If you’ve got a taste for classic literature, you might recognize — in broad strokes, at least — the openings to some of English literature’s most notable works: The Canterbury Tales, Wuthering Heights, and Frankenstein. respectively.

All three of these classics show the power of frame stories at work. Also known as frame narratives, these introductory tales enclose another story (or set of stories), supporting and emphasizing them like gilded wood embracing a painting.

As you might have gathered from the examples above, a good frame story isn’t just a throat-clearing before the author begins to speak in earnest — a preamble to the story they really want to write.

For one thing, frame stories help orient the reader. Their protagonists are often as lost as we are, stumbling into astounding situations they don’t yet have the context to parse. The tenant arrives in the aftermath of Heathcliff and Cathy’s ruinous love; the sea captain rescues Dr. Frankenstein from the cold, long after the monster has already escaped his custody. As strangers to the scene, these baffled observers allow us to nestle into their curiosity and bewilderment, giving us a perspective to latch onto as we ease ourselves into the book.

Done right, frame narratives offer a way into the plots and characters they frame. But beyond that, they also offer occasions for storytelling — justification for each word that follows. Why am I reading this? What makes this important? These are the questions a good frame story will answer.

These days, I often find frame narratives in mystery novels and ghost stories, where they depict a naive outsider’s first encounters with the enigma at the heart of the work. But actually, I tend to stumble on my favorite frame narratives in a less intuitive genre: academic articles.

At its core, academic research isn’t unlike the plotting of mystery novels. The scholar-sleuth, encountering an ambiguity, undertakes an investigation. They work methodically through clues, subjecting them to rigorous analyses and synthesizing them through flashes of insight.

In my field of history, researchers don’t tend to present their findings in the form of conventional frame stories — that is, by narrating the discovery of their sources. However, historians often do deploy a rhetorical strategy that reminds me of the frame narrative at its best. In some of my favorite scholarly articles, the researcher begins with a punchy anecdote, a narrative that orients me to the concepts they’re working with and eases me into the analysis to come.

The book historian Susan Cherniack, for example, uses this technique with spare, elegant style in a classic 1994 study of textual transmission in Song China. The 120-page article opens on the striking story of “five [Song] woodblock-engravers who were struck by lightning after changing the texts of prescriptions in a medical book they had been engraving”. This startling one-liner gets right to the center of Cherniack’s inquiry: how texts change as they’re copied and circulated; which changes are “allowed” and which forbidden.

When Cherniack pulls this anecdote and places it at the beginning of her article, she’s crafting a narrative frame for her ideas, much like Mary Shelley opening Frankenstein on a sea captain’s rescue of a scientist. Cherniack doesn’t belabor her point — she moves on from this opening salvo quickly enough. But she does offer us a striking, narratively rich indication of why we should care about her study.

As fiction writers, we use our frame stories to introduce narrative, not argumentation. But examining how historians contextualize their arguments through storytelling can make us better storytellers too, by keeping frame stories compelling and tight.

Lucia Tang is a writer for Reedsy, a marketplace that connects self-publishing authors with the book industry’s best editors, designers, and marketers. To work on the site’s free historical character name generators, she draws on her knowledge of Chinese, Latin, and Old Irish —  learned as a PhD candidate in history at UC Berkeley. You can read more of her work on the Reedsy Discovery blog, or follow her on Twitter at @lqtang.

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Courting the Muse

How to Level Up Your Descriptions Through the Ancient Art of Ekphrasis

Some writers are blessed with a vivid visual imagination. Just by willing it, they can render scenes in their mind’s eye with the pixel-perfect fidelity of CGI. They see their characters with photographic precision, from the slope of their shoulders to the snarled ends of their hair. Their settings have the texture and specificity of real asphalt and dirt.

I’ve always envied this ability, but I can’t say I’ve ever enjoyed it myself. In fact, I’ve been cursed with an incredibly impoverished visual imagination. Even as a reader, I never instinctually convert the sentences I encounter into pictures in my head. Learning that a character is “blonde”, or a farmhouse “weathered” just gives me an abstract bit of info to file away— no different than being told that she’s a Sagittarius or that it was built in 1897.

Despite my inability to conjure up mental images, however, I’ve never been told that my writing comes across as excessively abstract. In fact, I’ve been praised for the precision and evocativeness of my descriptions. I’m determined not to let my lack of visual imagination prevent pictorially gifted readers from connecting with my work. That’s why I’ve learned to work around my inability to see pictures inside my head.

What’s my secret for faking it until I make it? I think of it as a spin on the ancient technique of ekphrasis, from the Greek for “calling an inanimate object by name”. The etymology makes it sound incredibly poetic, and it’s true that ekphrasis has been used to greatest effect in verse. But at its core, this rhetorical device just means to describe a work of visual art in detail. As an example, you might look at John Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” possibly the most famous instance of ekphrastic poetry in the Anglophone tradition. But I prefer John Ashberry’s “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror,” based on a 16th-century painting by Parmigianino. It opens with the following lines:

As Parmigianino did it, the right hand

Bigger than the head, thrust at the viewer

And swerving easily away, as though to protect

What it advertises. A few leaden panes, old beams,

Fur, pleated muslin, a coral ring run together

In a movement supporting the face, which swims

Toward and away like the hand

Except that it is in repose….

I’ve never written ekphrastic poetry myself. But to work around my lack of visual imagination, I use a trick that feels analogous to ekphrasis: I write using reference images, much the way an artist might consult them when they sketch. You see, my problem lies in mentally conjuring up images from the blank canvas inside my head — not in translating extant images into language. That means that, if I want to describe something accurately, I need to be looking at it, the way an artist might consult a photo to get a pose just right.

Sometimes I do write about a work of visual art, in the traditional ekphrastic mode: I might model a bit of scenery off a landscape painting, or give a character the face of a marble bust. Most of the time, though, I just use a photo from the internet to get a detail like the right texture of driftwood, the exact shape of a snarl.

Even if you’re not cursed with my particular brand of imaginative inability, give this spin on ekphrasis a try: it’ll make your visual descriptions that much sharper. And if you find yourself wading deeper into the art historical archive in search of references, you just might find yourself inspired to write a whole story — or a poem — based on a painting.

Lucia Tang is a writer for Reedsy, a marketplace that connects self-publishing authors with the book industry’s best editors, designers, and marketers. To work on the site’s free historical character name generators, she draws on her knowledge of Chinese, Latin, and Old Irish —  learned as a PhD candidate in history at UC Berkeley. You can read more of her work on the Reedsy Discovery blog, or follow her on Twitter at @lqtang.

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Courting the Muse

Why Your “Bad” Writing Holds the Key to Curing Writer’s Block

Long before the pandemic began, I used to drop into the occasional adult beginner ballet class. There, I’d stretch out vertebrae accustomed to being crunched together over a laptop, and curl fingers stiff from typing around a wooden barre. I stopped going after a while, but the monotony of sheltering in place made me want to dance again. With the studios shuttered by COVID, I turned to YouTube. Now, I tendu and plié at home in my yoga pants, clumsily mirroring the dancers I call up on my TV screen.

One Youtube dance teacher, the Miami City Ballet soloist Kathryn Morgan, posts follow-along stretching routines alongside her virtual barre classes. In one such video, Morgan stretches her legs long-wise on a Tiffany blue yoga mat. She rounds her back, hunching over with her spine forming a C-shape.

She says, “We’re doing this first” — with the curved spine — “so that when we do the normal head-to-knee stretch, the back doesn’t take over.” Then she straightens and hinges over, reaching for her feet. At home, stretching on a hardwood floor, I copy the curves and flats of her spine.

Morgan teaches us to sit in the “wrong” position first, releasing the distracting muscles in our back so we won’t be held taut by their tension. Doing the stretch badly, sinking into your comfort, allows you to do it well the next time.

I’ve written in the past about the virtues of bad prose, how reading ungainly sentences or ill-plotted stories can teach us to spot the flaws in our own writing. But, stretching with Morgan, I can’t help but think about how writing badly can sometimes be helpful too.

We all have questionable habits as writers. For me, it’s a shapelessness to my plotting, an overuse of metaphor, and a tendency to let my stories sort of… peter out instead of ending them with intention. For the most part, it makes sense to guard against these impulses toward sloppiness. But sometimes, thinking too hard about how not to write makes it hard to write at all.

I think, again, of ballet. Sometimes, the impossibility of turning out at the hip and pointing the toes and straightening the knee and tucking the pelvis, all at the same time, can freeze me in place before I even begin to move. To start dancing at all, I have to give myself permission to do it badly. Sometimes, I’ll even move in a deliberately off-kilter fashion, allowing my knees to knock together and my feet to flex. I’m letting my body have its way, before I subject it to balletic discipline.

When I find myself blocked by writerly perfectionism, I’ve found it helpful to give my “bad” impulses free rein too. But instead of doing this in the text of whatever I’m working on, I use a “fake” story as a scratchpad, deliberately staying away from the setting, characters, and even themes of my “real” project.

In this new document, which resembles an actual story only in the loosest sense of the term, I force myself to write thoughtlessly and without shame. I let my metaphors starburst into absurdity, my sentences tangle up in one another, my characters run off and disappear without reason. Instead of worrying about endings at all, I keep plowing ahead, rarely even reading over what I’ve typed.

Like releasing all the tension in my stiffened spine, writing with abandon like this lets me get my bad habits out of my system. Only then can I approach my “real” project unselfconsciously. It’s the writerly equivalent of dancing alone with your eyes closed, not even looking at your own clumsy, joyful shape in the mirror. In my opinion, there’s no better way to get over writer’s block.

Lucia Tang is a writer for Reedsy, a marketplace that connects self-publishing authors with the book industry’s best editors, designers, and marketers. To work on the site’s free historical character name generators, she draws on her knowledge of Chinese, Latin, and Old Irish —  learned as a PhD candidate in history at UC Berkeley. You can read more of her work on the Reedsy Discovery blog, or follow her on Twitter at @lqtang.

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Courting the Muse

Why Advice Columns Might Just Give You Your Next Story Idea

These days, anyone who wants to write short stories of an unconventional bent has their pick of quirky venues to showcase their work.

By way of example, just look at Taco Bell Quarterly, a self-professed rival of the storied Paris Review. One of the hottest literary magazines to emerge in the past year, it only accepts work related to America’s favorite fast-food purveyor of Crunchwrap Supremes. Microverses, an even newer journal of speculative flash fiction, limits itself to “tweet-length work” — minute narratives of no more than 280 characters.

Then there’s r/relationships, a wildly popular advice forum on the social media giant Reddit. Frequented by some 3 million visitors worldwide, it’s come under fire recently for being filled with lies. As it turns out, many of those posting on the forum aren’t actually lovelorn sufferers in genuine need of advice — they’re fiction writers, flexing their skills in an unusual form.

That brings me to my favorite source of narratively rich and formally intriguing short fiction: the old-fashioned advice column. That’s not to say that everyone corresponding with the likes of Dear Prudence and Ask Polly is a fabulist, honing their craft in the inbox of an agony aunt (though readers have made a sport out of spotting the fake letters for years). Even if most letter-writers are seeking advice in earnest, this oddball genre remains fertile ground for literary inspiration.

Directly adapting a letter into a story might raise some eyebrows — especially if you assume the mind behind it belongs to a genuine advice-seeker, not a fellow fiction writer. But even if turning a stranger’s vulnerability into a literary project, detail for detail, doesn’t strike you as the right move, advice columns can still inspire good writing.

Glance at any given advice column, and you’ll find a treasure trove of emotionally resonant stories, from the heartrending to the absurd. For me, these accounts aren’t just intriguing because of their wealth of hyper-specific detail: the exact infractions committed by an overzealous homeowner’s association, the strange scent clinging to an adulterous spouse’s clothes. The little narratives they encapsulate are valuable to writers primarily because of their nuanced — even outright messy — depictions of human feeling.

Advice columnists, and the people who write to them, acknowledge that we don’t always react to emotional stimuli in ways that make sense. Betrayal can evoke relief as well as heartbreak, and the most passionate love can be complicated by mutual resentment.

When it comes to crafting complicated, true-to-life emotional arcs for your stories, there’s almost no better source of inspiration than the advice letter. If you find one that touches a nerve, consider exploring its palette of emotions through an analogous — but distinct — scenario of your own invention. All you need to do is meld the letter-writer’s narrative with your own experience, adding dash of imagination and empathy for good measure. You just might find yourself looking at your next short story.

When you try to turn that initial spark into a well-executed work, you might try seeking inspiration from the advice column in terms of form as well as content. While we don’t typically think of advice letters as high art, they have a lot to teach short story writers about style and presentation.

Advice column letters are perfectly crafted for communication, clueing readers in on the emotional stakes of a situation with maximal efficiency. As such, they deploy unpretentious language and tight plotting to get readers invested in the most bizarre scenarios. Next time you write a story, try channeling their economy of expression for a narrative that packs a punch.

Lucia Tang is a writer for Reedsy, a marketplace that connects self-publishing authors with the book industry’s best editors, designers, and marketers. To work on the site’s free historical character name generators, she draws on her knowledge of Chinese, Latin, and Old Irish —  learned as a PhD candidate in history at UC Berkeley. You can read more of her work on the Reedsy Discovery blog, or follow her on Twitter at @lqtang.

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Courting the Muse

How Personality Quizzes Can Help You With Character Development

Have you ever taken the MBTI? Short for Myers Briggs Type Indicator, this classic personality test promises to divine your essential nature from a series of thought-provoking questions. A favorite of career counselors and online quiz junkies alike, it’s basically a Muggle’s multiple-choice Sorting Hat. But instead of Hogwarts’s four houses, the MBTI divides up all test-takers into sixteen personality types, from The Commander (assertive, far-sighted, prone to stubbornness) to The Artist (practical, detail-oriented, gun-shy in the face of conflict).

When I first took the MBTI over a decade ago, its chain of probing questions led me to an identification with The Thinker, a somewhat kooky theoretician prone to spells of self-doubt. I saw quite a bit of myself in the description of my type, from my dreaminess to my insecurity. And so my MBTI has hovered around the edges of my self-concept ever since.

A little while ago, I finished reading journalist and critic Merve Emre’s The Personality Brokers, which offers a deep dive into the twisty history of the indicator — turns out, its creators were adamant about not calling it a test, since there are no wrong answers. Merve’s research reveals a certain amount of fuzziness in MBTI’s inner workings: the scoring was constantly being tinkered with, and it was never proven to be scientifically valid at all.

At the same time, however, The Personality Brokers shines a light on MBTI’s usefulness as a storytelling tool. It may be far removed from the objective precision of a blood test. But when it comes to providing writing inspiration, no test — sorry, indicator — can do better.

The history of MBTI is also the story of two extraordinary women, Isabel Briggs Meyers and her mother Katharine Briggs, the “M” and the “B” of the initialism. Both of them, of course, were keen-eyed observers of personality. But perhaps more intriguingly, they were also writers.

Isabel even won a high-profile mystery writing contest with her debut novel, Murder Yet to Come. This thriller featured a team of idiosyncratic, finely drawn detectives whose “working relationships were always invigorated by their personality differences.” (Though the novel topped both the American and British bestseller lists, Isabel invested her earnings in the stock market and tragically lost everything in the 1929 crash.)

Katharine, meanwhile, bore a near-religious fascination with the work of pioneering psychologist Carl Jung. As she worked her way through his research as an autodidact, she processed what she learned by writing slow-moving, character-driven fiction about her idol. Though her Jung novel, The Man from Zurich, was never published, it bore witness to how closely psychology and storytelling were intertwined in her mind.

The MBTI might not have the scientific grounding to tell you who you are or what you should do with your life. But as Myers’s and Briggs’s own creative work suggests, it can certainly help you develop your characters. Read through a description of any MBTI type — say, Isabel’s own type, The Mediator — and you’ll find a comprehensive overview of how they relate to others, look at the world, and how they make decisions.

In other words, you’ll find the makings of a fantastically thorough character profile, detailing how a certain type of protagonist (or antagonist, or bit player) might react to anything your plot can throw at them.

If you ever find yourself stuck on a point of characterization, try using MBTI to write your way out. You can even take the test (or rather, indicator) “in character” and see if the result resonates with the fictional figure you had in mind. Who knows? You just might learn something new about one of your characters.

Lucia Tang is a writer for Reedsy, a marketplace that connects self-publishing authors with the book industry’s best editors, designers, and marketers. To work on the site’s free historical character name generators, she draws on her knowledge of Chinese, Latin, and Old Irish —  learned as a PhD candidate in history at UC Berkeley. You can read more of her work on the Reedsy Discovery blog, or follow her on Twitter at @lqtang.

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Courting the Muse

Why Stealing Characters from History Isn’t Just for Historical Fiction

As writers, we’re generally in the business of creating our own inspiration. When it does strike us unbidden, we know it’s a rare gift that can’t be squandered.

The problem is, even when our muses turn suddenly, spontaneously generous, they rarely shower us with all the inspiration we need to produce a complete work. Some fragment of a story might flare lightning across our minds — a striking premise or a single, unforgettable scene. But in that same Eureka moment, we don’t always get the setting, the conflict, or the characters we need to turn that inner prompt into a rich and powerful story.

If you’re in need of characters to anchor a compelling concept and give it a human touch, you can always opt for the stereotypical solution — writing what you know and transforming all your friends and loved ones into thinly veiled fiction. But if you want a wider, wilder range of characters to play with, why not turn to historical figures?

As a PhD student in history, I got into the discipline for the characters I encountered in textbooks. There was the mystic who wept her way through the Holy Land, disturbing her fellow pilgrims. The historian who chose castration over death, so he could finish the work his father started. The emperor who turned rulership into theater, demanding his subjects applaud him when he sang.

Any of these real-life figures would add depth and color to a novel or short story — whether or not it’s set in their native time and place. In my opinion, writers who don’t specialize in historical fiction can steal characters from history to tremendous effect. They’re not beholden to the strictures of fact, and they can even mix and match — welding, for instance, a famous painter’s precocious childhood to a rakish scientist’s turbulent marriage. Think of this as an act of narrative collage: piecing together, from a rich store of existing materials, the perfect character for your narrative needs.

Some of my favorite, non-historical novels have leaned on characters inspired by history — plucked from our past and transported to new worlds of the author’s creation. Ken Liu’s Nebula-nominated fantasy novel The Grace of Kings, for instance, rewrites material I studied extensively in grad school: an early Chinese historical account of the turbulent transition between the Qin and Han dynasties. (The author of the source text? The castrato-historian I mentioned earlier!)

In Liu’s vivid, imaginative retelling, Liu Bang — the brash and charismatic man who would become the first Han emperor — becomes Kuni Garu. He’s a hard-drinking, fast-talking charmer who shares the historical Liu’s contradictions: beneath each man’s loutish, workaday exterior lurks the potential for majesty.

As my example suggests, historically inspired character development works especially well for speculative fiction — we’ve seen plenty of sci-fi novels in recent years with settings modeled on, say, imperial Rome or the Byzantine Empire. Still, this technique should work just as well for other genres. Can you imagine a contemporary novel that transposes Virginia Woolf onto the world of digital media? Or a mystery series where the sleuth is based on Tanaquil LeClercq, the ballerina whose stage career was cut short by polio — and who reinvented herself as a dance teacher, demonstrating combinations with her arms and hands?

In the end, the figures you’ll encounter in history are more than lists of dates. They were human beings, with formative influences and inner conflicts, immortal longings and deferred dreams. Let them into the world of your story, and they just might surprise you with what they do.

Lucia Tang is a writer for Reedsy, a marketplace that connects self-publishing authors with the book industry’s best editors, designers, and marketers. To work on the site’s free historical character name generators, she draws on her knowledge of Chinese, Latin, and Old Irish —  learned as a PhD candidate in history at UC Berkeley. You can read more of her work on the Reedsy Discovery blog, or follow her on Twitter at @lqtang.

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Courting the Muse

How Reading Perfume Catalogs Can Help You Show, Not Tell

Emily Dickinson knew how to find inspiration without leaving the house. In her thirties, the reclusive poet withdrew into the quiet of her childhood home, holding conversations through her closed bedroom door. But she also carried out lively friendships through letter-writing, and even traveled — so to speak.

Dickinson, as much a landlubber as any, wrote movingly about the nautical sweep of reading, something we as writers know well:

There is no Frigate like a Book

To take us Lands away.

But there’s another vessel that can carry our imaginations to distant lands without moving our bodies at all: perfume.

Smell, as Helen Keller once observed, is “a potent wizard that transports us across thousands of miles” — often to places we’ve never been before. Perfumers use this teleportational magic to tell a story, bottling up exposition, climax, and denouement to bloom through the air as top notes, heart notes, and base notes.

Perfumes are succinct, vivid, and memorable — all show and no tell. As storytellers, we can learn a lot from how they work. How to distill an experience into a few drops of salience. How to ensnare someone’s attention from the opening and keep hold of it as the story unfurls. How to evoke emotion directly, by playing to the senses instead of the mind. Still, there’s one problem when it comes to transmuting perfume into writing inspiration: scent is notoriously difficult to capture in words — at least if you take a direct approach.

What happens if you list out a perfume’s component scents? Violet, ylang-ylang, rice powder. The words are pretty enough, but they feel abstract, even sterile — no living fragrance clings to them. The ingredients might tell us what the perfume smells like, but they don’t show us how it feels to dash it along our wrists, to wait as the heat of our bodies makes it dance across our skin. When it comes to scent, words so often fall flat.

Luckily for us, copywriters in the fragrance industry have grappled with the inexpressibility of scent for years. As creative writers, we can learn a lot from the perfume catalogs they assemble, which translate stories told in scent into our chosen medium of language.

As an example, let’s look at a perfume built around the violet, ylang-ylang, and rice powder scents I brought up either. These notes take on a starring role in Blanc Violette, a powdery floral scent developed by the indie perfume house Histoires de Parfums.

Instead of simply listing out its olfactory components, the perfume’s catalog entry uses evocative language to capture a delicate and playful mood:

Amidst the subtle games of shadow and light playing out in the underbrush, heart-shaped flowers flourish, showing off their delicate lines on a lush blanket of chlorophyll and Violets.

An image of purity and innocence, White Violet enhances the skin with a delicate freshness, at once iridescent and scintillating, and powdery and creamy.

An evening perfume caught between shadow and light, and innocence and seduction: a sweet, powdery and witty fragrance.

Whether or not you know what violet smells like, this catalog entry develops striking but accessible imagery — the heart-shaped flowers, the play of light and shadow — to convey how wearing it feels. When we grapple with linguistically elusive concepts in our own writing, we can do the same: showing what we mean through powerful imagery instead of telling it in spare and lifeless words.

Failing that, we can always spritz on a bit of perfume to inspire us as we power our way through our drafts. Why not write in a cloud of Paper Passion, which captures the aspirational scent of new books?

Lucia Tang is a writer for Reedsy, a marketplace that connects self-publishing authors with the book industry’s best editors, designers, and marketers. To work on the site’s free historical character name generators, she draws on her knowledge of Chinese, Latin, and Old Irish —  learned as a PhD candidate in history at UC Berkeley. You can read more of her work on the Reedsy Discovery blog, or follow her on Twitter at @lqtang.

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Courting the Muse

Why Reading Bad Prose Can Make You a Better Writer

A quarantine isn’t a writing retreat. Sure, some of the greats managed to transmute epidemiological panic into excellent prose (and poetry). Shakespeare — as I’m sure we’ve all heard — may have taken advantage of the Globe Theater’s shuttering to pen King Lear as the plague ravaged London. Now, panic sweeps through our own communities while government orders shutter our doors. Should we channel the Bard and try to write our way out of alienation and anxiety?

For some, that’s easier said than done. Maybe you’re spending this time caring for loved ones, looking out for vulnerable neighbors, or even just learning how to navigate this new normal: urgent and necessary tasks that push your latest writing project to the wayside. That’s no reason for guilt. After all, you’re a human being before you’re a writer, and practicing compassion — for yourself and your community — will only make you a more sensitive storyteller in the long run.

That said, if you do have the bandwidth to craft a paragraph or fashion a plot, creating through the uncertainty can help you feel less adrift. It’ll stimulate your mind with something other than the news and give you a reason to reach out to like-minded writers — crucial at a time when we could all stand to feel less alone.

Just don’t put undue pressure on yourself by trying to write the next King Lear. Instead of force-fitting yourself into a Shakespearean mold, try looking to a counterintuitive source for authorial inspiration: bad writing. Not only will it give you a much-needed laugh, but studying shoddy prose will actually help you sharpen your craft. Here are three reasons why.

1. Learning how not to write can be easier than learning how to write

Think back to your standardized test-taking days. Remember using the process of elimination to puzzle out a question that might have otherwise stumped you?

Studying bad writing — a plodding novel, a disjointed short story, even a muddled and misshapen sentence — can improve your craft in the same way. Read enough problematic prose, and you’ll quickly build up a checklist of things to look for as you revise. Speaking of which….

2. Honing your editorial judgment is easier when you’re reading someone else’s prose

As writers, we can be blind to our own stylistic quirks, letting our gaze slide over major bobbles because we got inured to seeing them. On the other hand, we might be oversensitive to our faults. Without a firm sense of our own writerly strengths, we end up second-guessing everything and finding fault with perfectly sound passages.

When you read bad prose produced by another writer, these emotional hang ups aren’t in play: you can read the passage for what it is and critique it with a cool head. Over time, you’ll develop sound editorial instincts — and be able to draw on them when you return to your own writing.

3. Seeing the greats falter is a great reminder of your own potential

Maybe you’re worried that this particular form of writing inspiration leads to a mean-spirited exercise in punching down. After all, does anyone turn out terrible prose except for newbie writers — the very people we should be showering with support and encouragement?

Luckily, that’s not quite true — you can find plenty of models for how not to write among the oeuvres of literary giants. Just look at the hordes of Booker Prize winners who have earned nods from the infamous Bad Sex in Fiction Award and the fearless book reviewers who savage the bibliosphere’s stars. Even Shakespeare himself doesn’t always hit a home run: Titus Andronicus has garnered its share of thumbs downs over the years.

You should absolutely read celebrated writers at their best. But don’t be afraid to read them at their worst as well. It’s a much-needed reminder that every literary luminary was once like you — a writer intent on improving their craft.

Lucia Tang is a writer for Reedsy, a marketplace that connects self-publishing authors with the book industry’s best editors, designers, and marketers. To work on the site’s free historical character name generators, she draws on her knowledge of Chinese, Latin, and Old Irish —  learned as a PhD candidate in history at UC Berkeley. You can read more of her work on the Reedsy Discovery blog, or follow her on Twitter at @lqtang.

Categories
Courting the Muse

When Watching TV Doesn’t Mean Procrastinating on Your Manuscript

During my last semester of undergrad, I spent a lot of time watching 30 Rock.

Like many graduating seniors, I suffered from a mild-to-moderate case of senioritis: a heaviness that periodically gripped my limbs at the very thought of academic work. But the time I spent riveted on Tina Fey and Alec Baldwin as they traded repartees? That didn’t count as a symptom. My steady diet of sitcom wit wasn’t procrastination — it was research.

That was the semester I signed up for a workshop on literary translation, taught by a celebrated translator of Hebrew and Arabic. Over the course of fifteen weeks, the class chipped away at individual projects, wrestling with texts in languages that — for the most part — neither our classmates nor our professor could understand. Then we’d read each other’s work as a group. As the term wore on, we sampled a dizzying array of translations: Russian realism, Greek philosophy and, in my case, classical Chinese domestic farce.

Of course, we couldn’t offer notes on how accurately each translator treated the languages we didn’t know how to read. What we could critique was the quality of the English that came out the other side: the flow of the sentences, the music of the syllables, the feelings that arose as we read each line. That was when I realized literary translation was as much about writing as it was about understanding a text: it was creative, as well as critical, work.

Now, what exactly did translating classical Chinese have to do with 30 Rock? Not a lot at first, as you’d probably assumed. But that changed as the semester progressed and my project started to develop in a new direction. 

The piece I’d chosen to translate was earthy, irreverent, and dialogue-rich: lively with farcical liaisons, domestic squabbles, and pretentious characters who’d misquote the classics to justify their jealousy and lust. It was also literally full of holes — and not the plot variety. Part of a cache of excavated texts from the Western Han, the rhapsody dated back to the second century BC, and the bamboo it was inked on had been badly damaged, gnawed away by time. In the transcription I worked from, typed out by a Peking University professor, brackets and ellipses stood in where the original characters could no longer be read.

My first pass through this fragmentary text left me with a tortuous translation, pocked by footnotes and straining toward literalism. The other workshop participants gamely picked their way through the frustrated tangle of my English, asking insightful questions. But I could tell from their reactions: all I’d manage to get across was the text’s brokenness and difficulty, not the wit and soul that drew me to it in the first place.

So for my second draft, I decided to cut loose a little. Instead of bowing under the tyranny of the corrupt original, I’d turn this fragmentary story into a play, letting the sharp humor of the dialogue speak for itself. I wanted to spotlight what was still there, not the parts that were lost forever. 

When I told the workshop about this new approach, I couldn’t resist ending with a joke: “I’m thinking about watching a lot of sitcoms to make sure the dialogue sounds right.” But my classmates — and our professor — took me seriously, encouraging me to study TV writing as I learned to craft dialogue. So Liz Lemon and I started spending quite a bit of time together.

As it turns out, a tightly scripted sitcom really is a masterclass in writing conversations. Break it down, and you’ll learn more than the art of a snappy one-liner: you’ll get a sense of how to write dialogue that sounds natural without being pulled from real life, with all its pauses, mumbles, and wasted air. 

The next time you’re stuck on a bit of dialogue, try taking inspiration from your favorite Netflix show. Whether you’re writing a novel or turning a 2,000-year-old text into a play, the characters you’re trying to coax into conversation will thank you. Best of all, you’ll get to watch TV — guilt-free.

Lucia Tang is a writer for Reedsy, a marketplace that connects self-publishing authors with the book industry’s best editors, designers, and marketers. To work on the site’s free historical character name generators, she draws on her knowledge of Chinese, Latin, and Old Irish —  learned as a PhD candidate in history at UC Berkeley. You can read more of her work on the Reedsy Discovery blog, or follow her on Twitter at @lqtang.

Categories
Courting the Muse

Why Your Contemporary Fiction Needs Worldbuilding Too

If you’re like most writers, worldbuilding feels like the province of sci-fi and fantasy authors alone. Sure, it’s crucial if you’re populating a distant planet with intelligent life, or piecing together the history of a kingdom ruled by fire mages. But it’s less useful if you’re writing about a town full of ordinary people. Right?

Actually, crafting contemporary fiction with a worldbuilder’s mindset can take your storytelling to the next level, no matter how seemingly ordinary your setting. At the end of the day, every book is a world unto itself, set apart from real life by boundary lines drawn by the author’s imagination.

When you write your book, you’re creating a space for your readers to linger. If you want them to relish spending time in the world of your story, try taking inspiration from sci-fi and fantasy writers. Here are three reasons to follow their lead.

1. It forces you not to take everything for granted

When we write contemporary fiction, it’s hard not to fall back on conceptual shorthands to draw the reader into your story. Think about a signifier like “high school” and all the images it brings to mind, from lunchtime cliques to the disorientation of standing on the cusp of adulthood.

If your story takes place at a high school, it’s fine to tap into these ready-made associations. But rely on them too much, and you risk ending up with a story that feels mass-produced.

If you find yourself leaning into conventions, take a look at how settings work in strong, original sci-fi and fantasy. The best of them remix genre mainstays — say, the telepathic alien species or the faux-medieval kingdom — with original details you won’t find anywhere else.

That’s a worldbuilding trick you can use contemporary fiction to create memorable, immersive settings. Just think: how is your high school different from other fictional high schools? Which details make your story recognizable as a high school story, and which ones make it unique?

2. It helps you flesh out your characters

If a work of speculative fiction takes place in a setting that’s markedly not our world, its characterization should reflect that. Everyone, from the hero to the villain’s stepmom, will share a baseline set of assumptions. And these might look very different from what we’re familiar with.

For instance, picture a fantasy world where meddling gods regularly show their faces. Atheism might be common in our world, but it makes no sense for someone in that world to be atheist — how can they be, when they saw the water god the last time they went fishing?

If you’re writing contemporary fiction, you should still consider the influence of setting on characterization. Think through that, and it’ll help you make sure there’s nothing about your characters that strains plausibility.

For example, say your story takes place in a densely populated city: high-rises stacked together, and no green space in sight. Would it make sense to give your protagonist hobbies like horseback riding and apple-picking? Probably not, unless you have a good explanation in-story — say, summers spent at grandparent’s house in the country.

3. It will make sure your writing isn’t all over the map

I started this post by alluding to the maps you so often see at the beginning of fantasy books. But in speculative fiction, worldbuilding isn’t just about deciding on the location of a fictional continent’s highest mountain or biggest seaport. It’s also about defining a sensibility, an emotional texture for the story.

That’s why the Harry Potter series, full of wonder and whimsy, gives us a magic system filled with punny spells. The highly cynical Song of Ice and Fire books, meanwhile, offer a darker take on the enchantment, where the dead stand up to fight and mystical swords are forged with blood. The tenor of the setting fits the tone of the story — you won’t find bumbling House-elves or goofy Boggarts in the chill of Westeros.

Take inspiration from JKR and GRRM: make sure the world of your story works with its sensibility, whether that’s somber or silly, hopeful or grim. After all the work you’ve put into your writing, the last thing you want is to make your readers laugh when they should be crying. Approach your storytelling with a worldbuilder’s sensitivity to setting, and you can rest assured they won’t.

Lucia Tang is a writer for Reedsy, a marketplace that connects self-publishing authors with the book industry’s best editors, designers, and marketers. To work on the site’s free historical character name generators, she draws on her knowledge of Chinese, Latin, and Old Irish —  learned as a PhD candidate in history at UC Berkeley. You can read more of her work on the Reedsy Discovery blog, or follow her on Twitter at @lqtang.

Categories
Courting the Muse Guest Posts

How Reading Poetry Collections Can Help You Plot Your Novel

Whether your novel closes on a cyclone-worthy twist, or a conclusion as warm and satisfying as homemade pie, you’ll need a solid plot to guide you as you write your way to that ending. Of course, coming up with one is easier said than done. 

You might have your major plot points all lined up, but maneuvering your cast from one scene to the next doesn’t always mean smooth sailing. You need the plot to advance, but there’s so much more to think about. Is your protagonist’s growth coming through? Are your themes subtle and multilayered, or just clear as mud? 

When you’re stuck on questions like these, it’s helpful to step beyond the world of your own manuscript and do a little outside reading for inspiration. Of course, you can look at how the greats in your genre have plotted their masterworks. But there’s another kind of book that just might give you the Eureka moment you’re seeking: poetry collections.

Poetry collections are plotless. But they’re also highly curated and intentionally ordered, without a verse out of place. Taking inspiration from their structure can help you plot a story that satisfies. Here are three crucial lessons to take away from them.

1. Think about the reader’s experience.

Poetry collections are often organized with the reader’s experience in mind, attending to their emotional and intellectual needs. That could entail interspersing two devastating pieces on grief with something more hopeful in tone. Or it might mean mixing in some lighter works with dense, allusive poems that require substantial thought to appreciate.

Let this reader-focused approach guide you as you assemble your chain of events. If you’ve placed a lot of tearjerker scenes early on, for instance, you’ll risk having your audience all cried out before the climax. Alternatively, you might be subjecting them to information overload —  forcing them to juggle too many names and too much backstory before the action kicks off. 

2. You might have to cut beautifully written scenes.

What makes a poetry collection difference from a bunch of poems bound together? Cohesion. A seasoned poet is wise enough to leave out any piece that doesn’t fit with the rest — even if it won them their latest Pushcart.

This sort of strictness will serve you well too. As writers, we’re often told to kill our darlings, setting sentiment aside and subjecting the lines we’re proudest of to revision’s red pen. That generally means excising an elegant but distracting metaphor. But it can also apply to entire scenes.

A scene might be gorgeously written, showcasing the most stylish prose in your entire book. But what if it feels out of place, or doesn’t serve a purpose beyond mere beauty? File it away and save it for a companion short story (or perhaps a sequel).

3. Give each chapter a shadow title.

Speaking of every section serving a purpose, here’s a poetry-inspired trick to make sure each chapter you write pulls its narrative weight. Each poem within a collection tends to have a title. That’s generally not the case for novel chapters (unless you’re writing for a middle-grade audience). But try to give each of your chapters a title anyway — for your eyes only.

Formulating these “shadow titles” help you distill each chapter down to its essentials: its key takeaway, its place in the overall structure of the book. It can also help you spot any outliers that should perhaps be reworked — or even removed. Say, for instance, you’ve come up with Friends-style titles for most of your chapters — “The One Where Iris Finds the Amulet”, “The One Where Jeff Dies”— but you have one that you can only call “The Sunset”. That might be a sign that it’s out of sync with the rest of the book.

By examining how every chapter works within the structure of your book, you’ll be able to deliver a satisfying story — and keep your readers hanging onto your every word. After all the work you’ve put into shaping your plot, that’s exactly what you deserve. 

Lucia Tang is a writer for Reedsy, a marketplace that connects self-publishing authors with the book industry’s best editors, designers, and marketers. To work on the site’s free historical character name generators, she draws on her knowledge of Chinese, Latin, and Old Irish —  learned as a PhD candidate in history at UC Berkeley. You can read more of her work on the Reedsy Discovery blog, or follow her on Twitter at @lqtang.