This week I finished reading Point and Line to Plane by Wassily Kandinsky. Though it’s a confusing read at times, he has many interesting ideas about how the elements of abstract art interact with the world to express and create emotion.
Last week I gave his great example of the point as silence. Moving the point from its logical, practical position reveals its inner tensions:
Today I am going to the movies. Today I am going. To the movies Today I. Am going to the movies
This week, I’m looking at how the point is forced from its position to become a line.
The Heart of Me by Maria L. Berg 2023
The Point and the Line
Here is how Kandinsky defines the line:
The geometric line is an invisible thing. It is the track made by the moving point; that is, its product. It is created by movement—specifically through the destruction of the intense self-contained repose of the point. Here, the leap out of the static into the dynamic occurs. The line is, therefore, the greatest antithesis to the pictorial protoelement—the point. Viewed in the strictest sense, it can be designated as a secondary element.
I really love this—the line being antithetical to the point, but also created by the movement and destruction of the repose of the point. Such a dramatic and complicated relationship. Then Kandinsky brings in another topic I love, “forces”:
There exists still another force which develops not within the point, but outside of it. This force hurls itself upon the point which is digging its way into the surface, tears it out and pushes it about the surface in one direction or another. The concentric tension of the point is thereby immediately destroyed and, as a result, it perishes and a new being arises out of it which leads a new, independent life in accordance with its own laws. This is the Line.
The forces coming from without which transform the point into a line, can be very diverse. The variation in lines depends upon the number of these forces and upon their combinations. In the final analysis, all line forms can be reduced to two cases: 1. application of one force and 2. application of two forces: a) single or repeated, alternate action of both forces, b) simultaneous action of both forces.
So an outside force tears a point out of a surface and pushes it in a certain direction which defines what kind of line it is. It’s the action-drama of line’s origin story. The point and its offspring-turned-adversary living together in constant tension. I had no idea point and line had such a difficult home-life.
Point and Line to Plane also has a wonderful discussion of the temperatures and sounds of different lines, and diagrams of the forces that act on the line. I highly recommend spending some time enjoying Kandinsky’s unique view on the elements of art.
Wordplay by Maria L. Berg 2023
Point, Line, and Code
The Meeting the Bar prompt at dVerse Poets Pub last Thursday was to create a poem with different kinds of wordplay. Though I didn’t write a poem, I created some visual poetry. Thinking about imagery to go with “wordplay” using points and lines, I thought of Morse Code.
Samuel Morse was an American artist. He worked with physicist Joseph Henry and mechanical engineer Alfred Vail to develop an electrical telegraph system to transmit language using electrical pulses and the silence between them. It began as graphic indentations on paper strips, but the telegraph operators learned the sound of the clicking noise of the receiver making the paper tape unnecessary. When Morse Code was adapted for radio communication these clicks became tone pulses.
What’s really fun about this idea is it connects visual patterns to words and sounds. Connecting to Kandinsky’s synesthesia in my own way.
I started my Morse Code wordplay with the word “WORD.” Interestingly each letter in WORD has three symbols. I created a filter with the Morse Code for WORD and played with it in my mirrorworld.
Then I played with the word “PLAY”:
Playplay by Maria L. Berg 2023
The two images at the top of this post play with two different filters of my initials.
I’m not sure where I’ll take this idea, but it opens up a whole new area of visual poetry, visual communication, and is my first step toward exploring synesthesia in my images. I look forward to hearing what sonification programs do with these images.
This week I read Home by Toni Morrison. Home is a compact novel of only one hundred and forty six pages. It has a great opening hook of a man trying to escape from a hospital and letting the reader in on his plans of deception and escape. He doesn’t remember what he did to get arrested or taken to the hospital which starts the story off with a mystery. However, the novel continues to surprise by changing POV characters. The reader, keeps expecting the story to return to the first character Frank, a Korean War veteran with PTSD, but the novel keeps moving from character to character through the women in Frank’s life before coming back to him.
What I Learned
Structure: For a short novel, it has a surprise multi-POV structure with chapters in italics talking to the author, or someone who might tell the MC’s story in the future.
The title does a lot of work for the novel. It presents the theme and dramatic question and argument. What is home? Is it a place, a feeling, a person? Is it true that you can’t ever go home again? Or is home the place you settle, find comfort, or just give up looking for anything better?
Opening hook: The novel starts with one of the italicized sections describing a childhood memory that is a mystery about witnessing a dead body being buried in a field and ends addressing “you” as the person “set on telling my story.”
The first opening scene. The opening sentence is one word: Breathing. The next sentence is, “How to do it so no one would know he was awake.” What an intriguing opening. The character is contemplating using the most basic controllable action necessary for life to create a deceit. Instantly the reader has a ton of questions. Who is he trying to deceive? Why? Whether our MC is a good guy or a bad guy, he is manipulative and deceitful at the most basic level. And yet the reader wants answers to why and thus there’s already an investment in the character at least until they find out why he’s in that situation.
Evoking emotion: The emotion this novel evoked for me was disgust. To do this, Morrison broached taboo topics like Eugenics, forced sterilization, the horrors of war, PTSD, and child prostitution. I talked about writing about taboos in my RNLN post about A Widow For One Year by John Irving. She used many different techniques to finally get the reader feel disgust.
1. An unreliable main character. The main character is a Korean War veteran with Post Traumatic stress. He signed up with two of his childhood best friends and watched them both die horrible deaths. Morrison’s descriptions of how he experiences PTSD make his actions and feelings both real and relatable.
2. Making the main character honorable, or giving him heroic attributes: the only thing he has is the medal he earned for valor, and the reason he escapes and heads to Georgia is to save his sister. Everything he does is because he received a letter that says his sister’s life is in danger.
3. Making the main character vulnerable and giving him faults: The main character keeps getting mugged and losing all his money. He has to rely on the kindness of strangers. He has to trust others when he can’t even trust himself.
4. Betrayal: Though Morrison has set up the MC as a person who can’t be trusted, through making him relatable, honorable, and vulnerable she tricks the reader into believing him, only to be betrayed by the horror of the truth of his actions during the war when he finally faces and shares his truth.
Ending: The ending circles back to the opening scene, finding closure for the children in that opening memory.
Character and Character arc:
By using multiple POVs, Morrison makes it possible to see the MC through the eyes of the women in his life. One of the chapters is through the eyes of the “evil step-grandmother” who his family lived with before he left for the war. From her point of view, she had just gotten what she wanted in life before her new husband’s destitute family showed up and took it all away. They not only took her space, they expected her to be responsible for their children who became the only ones for her to take her frustrations out on.
Near the end, Frank sums up his sister Cee’s character arc for the reader:
“This Cee was not the girl who trembled at the slightest touch of the real and vicious world. Nor was she the not-even-fifteen-year-ole who would run off with the first boy who asked her. And she was not the household help who believed whatever happened to her whole drugged was a good idea, good because a white coat said so. Frank didn’t know what took place during those weeks at Miss Ethel;s house surrounded by those women with seen-it-all eyes. Their low expectation of the world was always on display. Their devotion to Jesus and one another centered them and placed them high above their lot in life. They delivered unto him a Cee who would never again need his hand over her eyes or his arms to stop her murmuring bones. “
I think one of the things I’m learning through reading novels as a novelist is telling the reader what you want them to take away from the novel is something the great novelists do. What makes it different than just exposition or telling is that the statements are interesting and thought provoking. The rule “show don’t tell” appears to be a rule meant to be broken.
Description and time: When the main character, Frank (Smart) Money does finally go home to his parents’ house, “that had been empty since his father died,” he re-rents it for a few months and finds some treasures in a hole next to the stove. “Cee’s two baby teeth were so small next to his winning marbles: a bright blue one, an ebony one, and his favorite, a rainbow mix. The Bulova watch was still there. No stem, no hands—the way time functioned in Lotus, pure and subject to anybody’s interpretation.”
In that short description, she says so much. The most important things to the MCs young self were his sister’s baby teeth, his winning marbles and a broken watch. But she’s also described life in the town he grew up in, and time itself. Time is “pure” when it can’t be tracked or known.
Another way she uses description and time is right after Frank brings his sister Cee to a safe place. Her life is in danger. The reader doesn’t know if she will live and so the reader is hooked. Frank has done what he can do and now his sister’s well-being is out of his hands. So what does Toni Morrison do next? She writes two pages of description about the sun and heat. Current writing instruction would would most likely tell me that readers won’t put up with that much description anymore. They will get bored or scan over it, and yet, in this novel it works. She’s putting the reader in Frank’s shoes. He’s feeling the sun and the heat acutely as he walks to line up for work in the cotton field while no longer having anything he can do to help his sister but wait and stay away.
Thought provoking equivalencies: The thing that really makes this novel stand above to me are the statements about abstractions:
content=hopeless “My family was content or maybe just hopeless living that way. I understand. Having been run out of one town, any other that offered safety and the peace of sleeping through the night and not waking up with a rifle in your face was more than enough. But it was much less than enough for me. “
desire=disgust “Thinking back on it now, I think the guard felt more than disgust. I think he felt tempted and that is what he had to kill.”
violence=good “Once seated, Frank wondered at the excitement, the wild joy the fight had given him. It was unlike the rage that had accompanied killing in Korea. Those sprees were fierce but mindless, anonymous. This violence was personal in its delight. Good, he thought. He might need that thrill to claim his sister.”
I’ve reached an interesting and complicated point in my study. I want to create images that express contradictory abstract nouns and evoke emotion. But how will I photograph those images if everyone has different definitions for abstract nouns and everyone perceives images differently? How do points, lines, and colors on a two-dimensional surface evoke emotion at all?
This exploration will be ongoing, probably for a long time. I’ve been reading widely and while re-reading Abstract Art by Anna Moszynska noticed a reference to a text called Point and Line to Plane written by Wassily Kandinsky. I had recently looked at a picture book called The Noisy Paint Box by Barb Rosenstock which talks about Kandinsky having synesthesia. I’m glad I read that before Point and Line to Plane because it helps make sense of how Kandinsky talks about visual elements making sounds.
The Science of Art
In Point and Line to Plane which was first published in German in 1926, Kandinsky is attempting to create and explain a science of art. He sees every experience as a duality of external and internal.
Every phenomenon can be experienced in two ways. These two ways are not arbitrary, but are bound up with the phenomenon—developing out of its nature and characteristics: Externally—or—inwardly. . . . Aside from its scientific value, which depends upon an exact examination of the individual art elements, the analysis of the art elements forms a bridge to the inner pulsation of a work of art.
Wassily Kandinsky
When explaining his idea of an outer experience he titles the section “Shock.”
Sometimes an unusual shock is able to jolt us out of such a lifeless state into vigorous feeling. Frequently, however, the most thorough shaking fails to revitalize the deadly condition. The shocks which come from without (sickness, accident, sorrow, war, revolution) wrench us violently out of the circle of our customary habits for a shorter or a longer time, but such shocks are, as a rule, looked upon as a more or less violent “injustice.” Therefore, the desire to re-establish as soon as possible the traditional habits, temporarily abandoned, outweighs all other feelings.
And here’s his explanation of Inner experience:
Disturbances originating from within are of a different character; they are brought about by the human being himself and, therefore, find in him their appropriate foundation. . . . There, the receptive eye and the receptive ear transform the slightest vibrations into impressive experiences. Voices arise from all sides, and the world rings.
Kandinsky’s ideas of inner and outer experiences make me think of the emotions of the artist while making art and the emotions of the observer when experiencing the art. No matter how precisely an artist has used different elements in an attempt to evoke a specific emotion, or experience, the viewer may see something completely different.
I shall mention in passing that the theory of empathy has afflicted generations of aestheticians with a host of pseudoproblems. One asked : Are the feelings expressed in sights and sounds those of the artist who created them or those of the recipient? Does one have to be in a melancholy mood in order to produce, perform, or apprehend a melancholy composition? Can “emotions” be expressed in a Bach fugue or a painting by Mondrian? These and other similar questions become incomprehensible once one has understood that expression resides in perceptual qualities of the stimulus pattern.
He alone can appreciate the art, who could comprehend the conversation of the painter, and share in his emotion, in moments of his most fiery passion and most original thought. And whereas the true meaning and end of his art must thus be sealed to thousands, or misunderstood by them; so also, as he is sometimes obliged, in working out his own peculiar end, to set at defiance those constant laws which have arisen out of our lower and changeless desires, that whose purpose is unseen, is frequently in its means and parts displeasing.
So what is the relationship between the emotions of the artist and the emotions of the observer?
“Riegl emphasized an obvious but previously ignored psychological aspect of art: that art is incomplete without the perceptual and emotional involvement of the viewer. Not only do we collaborate with the artist in transforming a two-dimensional figurative image on a canvas into a three-dimensional depiction of the visual world, we interpret what we see on the canvas in personal terms, thereby adding meaning to the picture. Riegl called this phenomenon the “beholder’s involvement.” Based on ideas derived from Rigl’s work and on insights that began to emerge from cognitive psychology, the biology of visual perception, and psychoanalysis, Kris and Gombrich went on to develop a new view of this concept, which Gombrich referred to as the beholder’s share.
Kris, who later became a psychoanalyst, started things off by studying ambiguity in visual perception. He argued that every powerful image is inherently ambiguous because it arises from experiences and conflicts in the artist’s life. The viewer responds to this ambiguity in terms of his or her own experiences and conflicts, recapitulating in a modest way the experience of the artist in creating the image. For the artist, the creative process is also interpretative, and for the beholder the interpretative process is also creative. Because the extent of the viewer’s contribution depends on the degree of ambiguity in the image, a work of abstract art, with its lack off reference to identifiable forms, arguably puts greater demands on the beholder’s imagination than a figurative work does. Perhaps it is these demands that make abstract works seem difficult to some viewers, yet rewarding to those who find in them an expansive, transcendent experience.”
Outside the Box by Maria L. Berg 2023
The How-tos of Evoking Emotion
Searching for the actual how-to of evoking emotion with art, I found a couple of paragraphs in The Art of Photography by Bruce Barnbaum:
Let’s pause for a moment to consider the ramifications of lines, forms, and contrasts on the emotional content of an image. This is of the utmost importance because even the most technically perfect print is meaningless without emotion.
. . . jagged lines are far more active than curved lines, which themselves are more relaxed. High contrast is far more active than low contrast. Middle gray tonalities impart the quietest, most relaxed mood of all. So jagged, sharp lines or even tightly curving, twisted lines combined with high contrast will be intensely active and highly charged. Gently curved lines along with softly modulating tonalities will impart a quiet, relaxed mood.
Any thinking photographer will use this universal language to his or her advantage. If you want a quiet, reverential mood, you’ll do well to work with curved lines, rounded forms, and subdued contrast. Soft light, gray tones, and pastel colors on rounded hills impart the feeling of a gentle, pleasant, livable landscape, whereas strong sidelight on sharp, craggy rock spires imparts excitement and adventure, perhaps even a feeling of foreboding.
So certain lines and colors, tones of color and lighting can evoke calm or excitement. That’s a start.
Kandinsky begins his scientific study with the geometric point. But he quickly moves from the idea of a mark of a pen or a brush to a surface to the written word. He says the geometric point is “the ultimate and most singular union of silence and speech.”
The geometric point has, therefore, been given its material form, in the first instance, in writing. It belongs to language and signifies silence.
In the flow of speech, the point symbolizes interruption, non-existence (negative element), and at the same time it forms a bridge from one existence to another (positive element). In writing, this constitutes its inner significance.
Externally, it is merely a sign serving a useful end and carries with it the element of the “practical-useful,” with which we have been acquainted since childhood. The external sign becomes a thing of habit and veils the inner sound of the symbol.
The inner becomes walled-up through the outer.
Kandinsky
As you can see, even a point, the smallest visual (and written language and speech) element is itself a contradiction with both negative and positive elements of both inner and outer significance.
He says that by moving the point from where one would expect to see it, once can reveal its “inner tensions.” I absolutely love his examples and think it may be something to think about in the coming month of poetry:
Let the point be moved out of its practical-useful situation into an impractical, that is, an illogical, position.
Today I am going to the movies. Today I am going. To the movies Today I. Am going to the movies
It is apparent that it is possible to view the transposition of the point in the second sentence still as a useful one—emphasis upon the destination, stress upon the intention, loud fanfare. In the third sentence the illogical, in pure form, is at work. This may be explained as a typographical error—the inner value of the point flashes forth for a moment and is immediately extinguished.
Kandinsky
So how does this help me with my images? Kandinsky got me thinking about focusing on basic elements. I haven’t contemplated the point’s inner tensions before; its sounds and silences, its illogical positions.
This week is going to be a little different. Every time I look “Abstract Art” in my local library system’s catalogue, the novel Kaleidoscope by Brian Seznick comes up. The cover looks like an extreme close-up on a green eye with the white lettering across the pupil. I’ve been curious why that novel comes up with “abstract art” every time, so this week, I checked it out and read it.
Seznick explains the connection himself in an author’s note:
“During the first three months of the pandemic . . . I started making abstract art, perhaps because it felt like the world was shattering, so my art needed to do something similar. . . . I found myself ripping apart everything I’d already written. It was like the narrative was shattering along with everything else, and out of the shards a new book began to take shape. . . . That’s why I decided to call this new version of the book Kaleidoscope, because each of these elements, like bits of colored glass, turn and transform and rearrange themselves into something new.”
Brian Seznick
I also finished S. by Doug Dorst and J.J. Abrams. You may recall that I first encountered S., or The Ship of Theseus while looking at unusual formats during RNLN of The Woman in the Library. I was taking my time reading it, reading a couple of pages of the text, then reading all the marginalia. But then I saw that two people are waiting for it at the library, so it will be due soon, so I started reading the text about a half chapter at a time them going back to the marginalia and that worked a lot better for me to get me into the story, though I must admit, after initially loving the concept, I found the result rather dull.
Both of these novels were very unconventional and yet, to me, had a lot in common. They both found ways to manipulate time, to have the past, present, and future exist in the same space, and they both explored the concept of identity, of knowing one’s identity, of a person’s ever-changing identity. And they both explore the fluidity of relationship.
Time & Space, Identity, and Relationship
In the sixth story, “The Abandoned House,” Seznick addresses Kaleidoscope‘s approach to time and space directly when James says,
“Most people think time is a machine that needs to be oiled and wound with a key. They think it’s something you control and maintain. But maybe it’s more wild than that. Maybe it’s bigger and stranger. Maybe time is uncontrollable, and endless, and … dangerous. Like a forest eating a house.”
Brian Seznick
The order of the very short stories of the narrator and James moves like that: bigger and stranger and wild. In the first story James leaves and the narrator is accused of his murder, and in the second the narrator has become, or is a giant who can become invisible and James may be the name of a boy who gives him an apple. Later James is an imaginary friend, and in another story the narrator is a spirit.
Then how is this a novel?, you may ask. Or how are these the same characters?, you may wonder. Seznick does a great job of explaining this in “The Story of Mr. Gardner.” Mr. Gardner attempted to write the ultimate reference book. He started with defining an apple, and ended up with seventy-five thousand pieces of paper, still trying to finish his definition of an apple when he died.
“We had only a tiny fraction of everything he wrote in our possession, but the fragments included references to Greek myths, the origins of the universe, children’s fantasy novels, the quests of King Arthur’s knights, the creation of the periodic table, a man who found the entrance to a buried city behind a wall in his house, spaceships, ancient Egypt, mysterious castles, the invention of the kaleidoscope, and the knitted blankets of his childhood bed.
“It’s sad that Mr. Gardner died without finishing,” I said.
“I suppose,” said James. “But I think he may have discovered something interesting.”
I waited for James to continue. He gently placed his hand on top of the pile of papers, as if he was touching a living thing, and said, “The entire universe can be found inside an apple.”
Brian Seznick
The stories in this novel are like those fractions of everything that define the narrator and James.
In S. the physical space of the book, the text, the footnotes, the inserts, and different colors of ink show the past, present, and future, overlapping on the page. In the text of The Ship of Theseus which is the novel that S. revolves around, time behaves differently on the ship than it does on land. In the section of Ship of Theseus called “Interlude: Toccata and Fugue in Free Time,” the character S. moves between the ship and land many times, slipping between times and spaces.
“When S. is on the orlop, with the pen’s nib flying over paper, with ink spattering over skin, fabric, wood, what emerges on the paper are flashes of image, lightning-strikes of sense-memories, fragmented impressions of events. They refuse to be strung into coherent, linear narrative no matter how consciously he tries to arrange them so; in fact, the more he tries, the more the pieces resist his efforts. Many feel as if they belong to his past, but others almost certainly belong to the lives of others . . . he transcribes a captain’s log of voyages he has never taken on a ship he has never boarded; he chronicles (confesses?) his murderous skulkings on terra firma , although these accounts drift away from fact, toward distortion and grotesquerie as he—a dazed but rapt Hephaestus—sits and sweats in the greasy orange glow, watching his hands as if they were not his own.”
V. M. Straka
The marginalia references another of V. M. Straka’s fictional novels, but this can also be read as a description of S. as a whole.
At one point in The Ship of Theseus, the story addresses the philosophical question, or mental puzzle called “The Ship of Theseus.” S. finds a book that chronicles every change that has been made to the ship he is on, and poses the question to himself.
“On the first page is a charcoal drawing of his ship (no, he reminds himself, the ship on which I’ve been held)—or, rather, an earlier version of it, when it was a harmonious whole, a shipwright’s realization of a xebec that would fly across the main and leave sailors about other vessels dumbstruck with envy. With each page S. turns, he finds another drawing of the ship along with marginal notes cataloguing the changes it has undergone.
He flips forward, ten to twenty pages at a time. Again and again the ship sheds a feature and dons a new one, reinterpreted and remade. Some of these changes are noteworthy . . . each one seeming to widen the gap between what was intended and what turned out to be. . . .Are they the same ship? Intuition tells him they are, though perhaps he is being influenced by the fact that the pages are all held together within the same covers.”
V. M. Straka
This made me think of the short short stories that make up Kaleidoscope, and all the postcards, letters, and marginalia that make up S. Are they novels because they are held together and presented as such? I think it’s more than that. Each of the authors used moments within the novels to explain how to read and appreciate them as novels.
Attraction by Maria L. Berg 2023
Applying What I Learned
Though my novel is told chronologically, these novels got me thinking about all of the times in my MC’s life that affect what is happening in the present story and got me brainstorming.
Which times of Verity’s life play the largest roles in her present being?
Happy childhood, loving parents, happy home
Her dad gets shot in a random act of violence Meets Memphis because forced bussing Memphis uses Verity’s address so they can continue to go to same schools, Verity’s mom goes along with it when asked, but holds it over Memphis. Says if she ever gets called that Memphis is in trouble, she’ll tell them the truth. This starts Memphis’s resentment of Verity.
Middle School dramas / basketball / fascination with school shootings, random acts of violence High School dramas / basketball / fascination with school shootings, random acts of violence / parties / dances
College : left town for the first time / felt a little fame from basketball / aches, pains, injuries?
Good relationships/ Bad relationships
Her mother getting sick Leaving college to go to school closer to home to take care of mother Taking the job as a cop Becoming a detective Solving her first big case Pauline getting murdered The restraining order / getting fired Her mom dying
All of these things and more happen before the novel begins.
In Kaleidoscope, the two main characters—the first person narrator, and James take on many different personae.
I, the first person narrator is a boy, a giant, a man James is an imaginary friend, a boy, the king of the moon
What are my MC’s different identities?
She is the store detective working a nine to five, going home, eating dinner, watching tv, going to bed, doing it again tomorrow Verity of the first paragraph of this novel. She is the Verity of the present who goes through the events of the novel She is jogger Verity She is Memphis’s friend Verity She is Verity who pretends to be like Memphis to get attention She is daughter Verity, grieving for her mother She is jobless Verity, grieving for her future She is obsessive connection-making thinker Verity She is detective Verity She is police officer Verity She is uncomfortable in her body tall Verity She is in command of her body basketball player Verity She is not Malibu Verity
By the end there, I was thinking about Barbie and all her different personae.
How do the events I listed that formed how Verity is in the present interact with her different identities? I think I’ll try writing some of the big events in Verity’s life from her point of view as they happened, then as a memory from the POV of a present identity. Once I’ve done that, I may want to re-evaluate my chronological telling. Is there a stronger way to use time, identity, and relationship in the way I tell my story?
This Week’s Surprise Connection
I checked out a book called The Writer’s Library by Nancy Pearl and Jeff Schwager, in which they talk to authors about the books that “made them think, brought them joy, and changed their lives.” I thought this might have some interesting insight for this study.
In the Foreword by Susan Orlean she says, “In Senegal, when someone dies, you say that his or her library has burned.” (Having lived in Senegal, I did not ever hear that, and have trouble imagining it, said, but some people in Senegal could say it.) But that’s not this week’s surprise connection. Later she says, “At last, I understood how much we all are our books. Their meaning to us doesn’t end when we close the last page. What we glean from them alters us permanently; it becomes part of who we are for as long as we live.”
After reading that, I started reading Kaleidoscope and in the third story “The Library,” I read
“I found one other thing from the wreck,” I told him. “A locked chest.”
The boy sat up. “Where is it now?”
I brought him the chest, and he opened it with the key he wore around his neck.
As he lifted the lid, we saw the trunk was full of seawater stained black with ink and glue. One by one the boy pulled out soaking, ruined books. They dissolved in his hands and he collapsed on the floor in tears.
“Tell me what they were,” I asked. “My father’s books,” he said. “He was teaching me from them. I loved reading these books and discussing them with him. Now he is gone, and so are all the things he knew. Everything is lost.”
It was as if the two texts were talking to each other.
This week I enjoyed a fun read: The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman. I brought this popular mystery home from the library and read the whole thing in one sitting, reading into the night. I laughed out loud and almost cried. So I thought this would be a good week to start re-reading The Emotional Craft of Fiction: How to Write the Story Beneath the Surface by Donald Maass, and learn how novels evoke emotion.
Maass says, ” . . . none of readers’ emotional experience of a story actually comes from the emotional lives of characters. It comes from readers themselves.” So how are we supposed to get a reader to feel from our writing?
He says, “There are three primary paths to producing an emotional response in readers. The first is to report what characters are feeling so effectively that readers feel something too. This is inner mode, . . .The second is to provoke in readers what characters may be feeling by implying their inner state through external action. This is outer mode, . . .The third method is to cause readers to feel something that a story’s characters do not themselves feel. This is other mode,”
Let’s start with what made me laugh:
1. The first example is when we first meet the four members of the Thursday Murder Club as a group for the first time.
A question has been nagging at Donna throughout lunch. “So, if you don’t mind me asking, I know you all live at Coopers Chase, but how did the four of you become friends?”
“Friends?” Elizabeth seems amused. “Oh, we’re not friends, dear.”
Ron is chuckling. “Christ, love, no, we’re not friends. Do you need a top-up, Liz?”
Elizabeth nods and Ron pours. They are on a second bottle. It is twelve fifteen.
Ibrahim agrees. “I don’t think friends is the word. We wouldn’t choose to socialize; we have very different interests. I like Ron, I suppose, but he can be very difficult.”
Ron nods. “I’m very difficult.”
“And Elizabeth’s manner is off-putting.”
Elizabeth nods as well. “There it is, I’m afraid. I’ve always been an acquired taste. Since school.”
*A note about Character Description: At the end of that first funny insult fest, Osman gives a little physical description: “Elizabeth is going glassy-eyed with red wine, Ron is scratching at a West Ham tattoo on his neck, and Ibrahim is polishing an already-polished cuff-link.” These little descriptions say so much.
2. “So we were all witnesses to a murder,” says Elizabeth. “Which, needless to say, is wonderful.”
3. Then, this contradiction not of behavior, but of the common understanding of the challenge of chess.
“Chess is easy,” says Bogdan, continuing the walk between the lines of graves and now flicking on a torch. “Just always make the best move.”
“Well, I suppose,” says Elizabeth. “I’ve never quite thought about it like that. But what if you don’t know what the best move is?”
“Then you lose.”
All three of these places where I laughed while reading, were mostly dialogue and had to do with contradictions. In the first example, the people talking all seem to get along and be fun and interesting pensioners in an old folks home. But they are quick to say they are not friends, and insult each other. What made me laugh was the insulted person agreeing with the insult. In the second example, was the unexpected reaction to the horror of murder, that it’s wonderful and somehow needless to say, as if murder is always wonderful. In the third example, it’s the idea that a difficult strategy game is easy, simplified to making the best move. Of course it’s that simple, if you don’t make the best moves you lose. Every game comes down to that, life comes down to that. But it’s not that simple, and that’s what makes it funny.
Which of the three primary paths made me laugh? I think it’s other mode, the third method is to cause readers to feel something that a story’s characters do not themselves feel. I think Osman set up an expectation of these pensioners being friends and hanging out because they like each other, but has them contradict expectations: saying they are not friends, not being upset when insulted, saying murder is obviously wonderful, and chess is easy. Each of these contradictions made me laugh.
Now let’s look at what made me weepy:
Joyce is reading the suicide note from the widower she was romantically interested in.
“And that was that, I suppose, so silly when you look at it, but I had no easy way of digging the tea caddy back up. So would continue to walk up the hill, and continue to talk to Asima when no one was listening, telling her my news, telling her how much I loved her, and telling her I was sorry. And honestly, Joyce, for your eyes only, I realize that I have run out of whatever it s that we need to carry on. So that’s me, I’m afraid.
Joyce finishes and stares down at the letter for another moment, running a finger across the ink. She looks up at her friends and attempts a smile, which turns in an instant to tears. The tears turn to shaking sobs and Ron leaves his chair, kneels in front of her, and takes her in his arms.”
Which of the three primary paths made me weepy? I think it’s outer mode, to provoke in readers what characters may be feeling by implying their inner state through external action. Maass says, “An important part of this method is the lengthy discourse . . . Why delve so deeply? One reason is to create a longer passage for the reader. That in turn creates a period of time, perhaps fifteen seconds, for the reader’s brain to process. That interval is necessary. It gives readers the opportunity to arrive at their own emotional response, a response that we cannot know.”
The section that made me weepy started long before this example section when I got weepy.
Applying What I Learned
How can I apply these techniques to my novel? Maybe my first step is to read through and find all of the places where I named an emotion. Then label which emotions I think the reader might feel. Then find which of the three primary paths will best evoke the story emotion.
This is a quick first step into the study of the reader’s emotional journey. I think this study will continue for many novels to come.
Experience Writing 