Category: Fiction and nonfiction writing

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Fiction and nonfiction writing Research tools Writing

Joys and Sorrows of Online Research

Frere Hall, in Karachi, Pakistan, which dates from the British Raj. Source: Wikipedia.

I was writing a story for myself, set in South Asia, and was using online searches to research some locales. It was fun: Finding pictures of remote valleys and small towns on maps, reading about them on Wikipedia and other sites I thought I could trust.

I don’t know if websites about Pakistan are more dangerous than other sites–it would be consistent with the increased dangers of other things, like travel. I was trying to find names for my characters and searched for lists of surnames and first names. Learned some things about Pakistani ethnicities, which are not as simple as I had assumed. Of course Pakistan has been a crossroads for millennia, why wouldn’t family names be complex? Understand that I am not bashing Pakistan. I concluded they are as diverse as we are.

Some of the websites were sketchy, wanted me to create an account, and those I got out of quickly.

Anyway, I eventually found the perfect setting in a “tribal area” of Pakistan, which I am not going to name. I was on Wikipedia and there was a short article with one picture. There were external links to two websites. I clicked on the first link and something came up which had nothing to do with the topic, and I got out of there quick. The second one led me to a site warning me that I had damaged their system by entering it and would have to pay them to fix their computer and thus be able to get my files back. In other words, I was a victim of ransomware.

This all happened really fast as I closed the browser almost instantaneously. But now my computer was frozen. I immediately unplugged the backup drive and tried “control-alt-delete” to close the browser. No response. I was able to get into Windows 10 settings and do a “reset.” It actually was the second reset in two days—the first time was related to a hardware malfunction. By now I’ve gotten pretty good at it.

Fortunately I have my computer backed up in two places, one in the cloud and also an external hard drive. Still, having to go through the reset and reinstall process took the whole day, once again, was tedious and a waste of time. The computer is now operating normally and I didn’t lose any files.

I did contact Wikipedia to report the problem. It was hard to figure out where to send the “malicious content report,” but it did eventually get forwarded to a volunteer editor. The link for reporting is info-en@wikimedia.org, in case anyone else should ever need it. A week later the volunteer sent me back a nice note and said he had removed the links.

My take-homes from this experience:

  • The virtual world has opened up to writers. The admonition to “write about what you know,” can be cautiously ignored, to some degree. What I still know about is people, and I was careful to write characters I could breathe substance into.
  • I do have a lot of generalized background knowledge about the story setting, have been to South Asian cities and villages, and was able to imagine myself there in ways that I think are convincing to the reader.
  • I was careful to only describe scenes I felt were convincing.
  • Be really careful about clicking web links! If I was doing this again, I would probably go to the library and use their computers. But that part of the story is finished. I’m now moving on to Chicago and LA, places I know more about.
Categories
Academic writing Fiction and nonfiction writing Opening statements Structure Term papers

Structure: Once upon a time….

The end of Jean Cocteau's introduction to his film version of Beauty and the Beast.
The end of Jean Cocteau’s introduction to his film version of Beauty and the Beast.

Writers of nonfiction, including the academic variety, can often learn useful lessons from the more “artful” storytelling world of novelists, playwrights and filmmakers. The phrase “Once upon a time…,” despite or perhaps because of age (it’s apparently been in use since 1380), still evokes a sense of wonder. It’s a sense that has been exploited in numerous ways over the years, including George Lucas’ “A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away….” in Star Wars to the title of Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West.

The introduction to the first Star Wars movie.
The introduction to the first Star Wars movie.

Sometimes opening words can take on a life all their own. Think of the first paragraph of Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way,” or “Rosebud,” the first word spoken in Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane. While Tolstoy’s sentence sets the tone for his novel, the dying word of Charles Foster Kane sets up a mystery (a question if you will) which the film’s story attempts to unravel.

Students are taught to write introductory paragraphs that clearly state what you are going to write about and how you are going to go about it. Unless you have been assigned to do one of those five-paragraph essays, your opening statement does not have to be your opening paragraph—it might even be several paragraphs long.

For instance, you could start off by telling an anecdote whose relevance to your topic is not initially evident. It could set up a mystery or question much like Welles did with “Rosebud.” One might also begin with an evocative quotation, such as “Once upon a time….” to start a book review of Bruno Bettelheim’s The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales, or Tolstoy’s “Happy families” to introduce your essay on the dynamics of families coping with schizophrenia.

While the use of anecdotes and/or quotations to start off your book or essay might seem a bit of a cliché, they can be useful literary devices to get you going. After all, it’s much more interesting than starting a term paper for your American Literature class with something as cut and dry as, “John Steinbeck was born on February 27, 1902, in Salinas, California.”

Categories
Ethnography Fiction and nonfiction writing Writing style

Style: Using Description in your Writing

Gary Cooper and Helen Hayes in the 1932 A Farewell to Arms movie.

Tips for creative and other descriptive writing. Whether you’re writing a novel or ethnography, description places the reader in the scene.

That night at the hotel, in our room with the long empty hall outside and our shoes outside the door, a thick carpet on the floor of the room, outside the windows the rain falling and in the room light and pleasant and cheerful, then the light out and it exciting with smooth sheets and the bed comfortable, feeling that we had come home, feeling no longer alone, waking in the night to find the other one there, and not gone away; all other things were unreal.

— Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms

  • Good writing is good writing, whether it’s literature or a scholarly journal article.
  • Provide enough evidence so that the reader agrees with you. In the quote above, everything that precedes the last line is evidence for the private world of Hemingway’s characters, Henry and Catherine. We accept Hemingway’s assertion because we have experienced it for ourselves.
  • If you’re doing an ethnography or other academic writing, there is a paradox. Part of providing evidence is acknowledging alternative views. You want the reader to understand why you came to the conclusion you did.
  • In fiction writing, alternative perspectives are less important, since you don’t have to justify the existence of the world you are creating.
  • The point of this excerpt is that Henry and Catherine were living in their private world. The last words, “all other things were unreal,” says this explicitly. Don’t be afraid to be explicit.
  • Try to use all 5 senses, although not all at once, which would be overkill. The new writer’s tendency is to say what things look like, but if you place yourself in any situation, there is a lot more going on. The Hemingway passage is very tactile, even though it appears at first read to be visual. Smooth sheets, thick carpet, comfortable bed. Long empty halls come with a feeling, and subconsciously evoke smells, and even sounds or absence of sounds.
  • Focus on describing rather than telling. In this passage, Hemingway does not tell us the main characters Henry and Catherine are blissfully happy with each other, he uses words so we feel it.
  • Describing is NOT emotionally neutral. Hemingway’s images are deliberately chosen to evoke feelings. Good writing, especially good academic writing, has a definite perspective. Make your point without apology.
  • Economy of words. Eliminate words which don’t create images relevant to your point. Hemingway is famous for being lean and economical with his words. However, you can see that the carefully chosen images in the quote provide a rich sensual experience for the reader.

Recommended reading: H.L. Goodall’s book, Writing the New Ethnography.

— Vickie Deneroff