Necessity of Nipping.

This photo is on a tin sheet nailed to our bathroom door!

I have my beginning, and I have a fair idea of my ending so, what's my problem? It's always the MIDDLE.

We always strive for enough great lines to capture our readers in the beginning. And without a doubt the final pages need to have a very satisfactory ending. But that vexatious middle always gives me a headache.

I suppose it's because I want to reach my predicted
word count that instead of a nice, neat nipped in middle, it gains far too much weight.

Incidentally, in the Victorian Era, the ridiculous ideal for a woman's figure caused many deluded darlings to go under the surgeon's knife to remove two of their lower ribs. Then again who's to say we are any wiser in the twenty-first century with many a young woman happy to go for cosmetic surgery for the addition of silicone pads to enlarge their perceived small breasts?

Back to my writing. Nip and tuck it is.

• Must have nice description but only where needed. All right cut down here  and slash away there. Does it still read with sense? Yes. Then why did I have it in the first place? 
•  Must get to the point in the dialogue. Our characters should always sound better than our actual speech. And we get to have them say what we wished we could have said in certain situations. I guess we've all experienced what we should have said at one time or another.
• Too much convoluted thinking here. Leave it out. Mustn't confuse readers.
• Beware of too many characters, or those with similar names.

Hey, I think I've got it, by George I've got it! My novel now has a nice slim middle.

Any other writers out there struggling with overweight middles? (In their novels.)

Indie Publisher, Rita Galieh, has written a trilogy of historical novels & also contributed to several US anthologies. She is now completing a third historical romance series. Besides her weekly blog, she can be found on Facebook and www.ritastellapress.com  

Rita studied art at the National Art School then joined the family ceramics studio. After their marriage, she and her husband attended Emmaus Bible College, and currently co-presents Vantage Point, an Australia-wide Christian FM radio program. She enjoys giving her fun-filled presentations of ‘Etiquette of the Victorian Era’ in costume.

Creative Nonfiction Part 2 - Nola Passmore

It's Okay to Make a Scene

Novels and movies are typically made up of scenes: little stories or vignettes that progress the plot in some way.  Perhaps it’s a glimpse into the protagonist’s character, the foreshadowing of a tricky situation, a skinny latté between friends or a phone call that sets off a rippling chain of events.  The point is that something happens.  However, scenes are more than the playthings of fiction writers; they’re “the building blocks of creative nonfiction” (Gutkind, 2012, p. 107). 

Anna Elkins’ award-winning essay about her travels in Israel includes visits to thermal pools, a kibbutz and Roman ruins, but never reads like a travelogue.  There’s peril, interpersonal encounters and deeper questions of life and meaning.  She writes beautifully (e.g. “two contrails met in a calligraphy of white”), but another reason the story is so engaging is that it’s told almost entirely in scenes.  If you have ten minutes to spare, it’s well worth reading Of Danger and Beauty.  I count five major scenes.  The first takes place in Tel Aviv where a missile is intercepted.  The second involves Anna and her friend Tsach having a dip in the Dead Sea.  Can you identify the other three?

Elkins also makes good use of dialogue to enliven her scenes.  Cate Macabe provides a great list of tips for crafting realistic dialogue (e.g. handling dialect and avoiding information dumps).  Also see my post on speech tags.  However, using dialogue in nonfiction poses special problems.  What do you do if you’re writing about a past event for which there is no audio or video recording?  Won’t that involve making up some of the lines?  If so, doesn’t that mean it’s no longer accurate?

According to Gutkind, it’s important to be “true to your story, true to your characters, true to yourself” (p. 30).  Readers understand that you didn’t tape record that life-changing conversation with your mother twenty years ago.  However, reconstructed dialogue should be authentic in its depiction of memories, the available facts and the manner of speech used by the people involved.  In some cases you may be able to interview others to check their recollections, though people can remember the same events differently.  Melanie Faith provides a great rule of thumb for recreated dialogue: “some compression or restructuring is fine as long as the general gist contains literal and/or emotional truth, but outright making up or deceiving to flatter the self is never okay and takes an essay from the realm of nonfiction to fiction”.

Even when you do have a recording of a conversation, you can’t just plonk the transcript on paper and expect it to grab your readers.  Macabe notes that you still have to summarise, add dialogue tags or actions, cut filler words such as "um” and “ah”, and break it up with other relevant information.  Remember it’s all about story.  Just because it’s true doesn’t mean it has to be boring.

Can you recommend any nonfiction articles or books that make good use of scenes and/or dialogue?  Do you have a perspective on ethical issues in reconstructing events and conversations?  I’d be interested in your comments.

Sources:

Elkins, A.  Of Danger and Beauty.  Retrieved from http://travelerstales.com/carpet/002852.shtml

Faith, M.  Three Literary Tools for Crafting Creative Nonfiction.  Retrieved from http://myemail.constantcontact.com/Three-Literary-Tools-for-Crafting-Creative-Nonfiction.html?soid=1101417136261&aid=iJaD41EFhcg#LETTER.BLOCK7

Gutkind, L.  (2012).  You can’t make this stuff up: The complete guide to writing creative nonfiction from memoir to literary journalism and everything in between.  Boston, MA: Da Capo Press.

Macabe, C.  Writing a Memoir Like a Novel: Dialogue.  Retrieved from http://thisnewmountain.com/2013/04/12/writing-a-memoir-like-a-novel-dialogue/

Nola Passmore is a freelance writer who has had more than 140 short pieces published, including devotionals, true stories, magazine articles, academic papers, poetry and short fiction.  She loves sharing what God has done in her life and encouraging others to do the same.  She and her husband Tim have their own freelance writing and editing business called The Write Flourish.  You can find her weekly writing tips blog at their website: http://www.thewriteflourish.com.au