True Confessions, pt 3

Me at Shakespeare's Birthplace

After the geek-out confession posted, I received a tweet from someone wanting to know why Shakespeare didn't make the list. Well... Shakespeare is his own post. That's fitting for the man who is the only author to have his very own classification number in the Dewey Decimal System. Shakespeare, and Shakespeare alone, is 822.33.

Here's a secret for my Austen friends: I started reading Shakespeare before I read Austen.

And a secret for my Shakespeare friends? I still haven't read nearly as much of his works as I feel I should have.

That's why I devised a plan shortly after my return from England last spring. I will read all of his plays in reverse alphabetical order. The one exception is that I'm planning to read all the histories in one go, chronologically. (I am willing to be talked out of that madness, if anyone would care to knock some sense into my head.)

More than any other author, Shakespeare formed the English language. I used to own a little book called Coined by Shakespeare, which detailed all the words and expressions he invented. Granted, he had the good fortune to live in a period when the language was still fairly elastic, but I think there's something to be said for that level of creativity and imagination, no matter what era he lived in. If the word he needed didn't exist, he simply created it.

I may not be able to invent words, but I hope I can be even half as imaginative as he was.

A certain sameness

Every city I visited in England is situated on a river, and I managed to walk beside all of them at least once. Of course, picturesque riverbanks just invited photographs, so I came away with quite a collection.

When I looked at my pictures after I got home, I noticed a certain similarity to them.

Winchester

Stratford-upon-Avon

 

Bath

Windsor-Eton

Do you see it? Every single picture features a willow tree. True, there were willow trees along all the rivers, but couldn't I choose something else to frame the photo?

I notice the same thing when I'm revising. During my last project, I actually wrote, "Find someplace other than the library!!!" across the top of a chapter in block letters, because every other important scene happened there.

In the Netherfield portion of HIS GOOD OPINION, my setting of choice was a garden walk. Any time Darcy needed to think--something he did far too much of--he took a walk through the gardens. By the time I reached the last scene, I knew as I wrote it that it would need to be moved. (Another garden scene?) shows up right in the MS.

Now, for all you members of Over-Thinkers Anonymous, this is not something to worry about during your rough draft. You notice that even though I caught it, I still went ahead and wrote the scene.

However, when you hit the revision stage, things probably need to be reworked. In my writing, if multiple scenes are set in the same place, it's often a clue that I've written the same scene more than once. That was the case with HIS GOOD OPINION. Like I said, there were way too many scenes where Darcy wandered off to think. Is he a thoughtful man? Yes. Does any man think that much about love and relationships? No. Therefore, I cut the love bit out of the first scene and then combined the second two into one.

The other possible reason is (sorry to say) laziness. This was my excuse in my earlier project. I didn't want to think about the setting any longer, so I didn't create other places in that world. I'm not one of these writers who can build whole cities out of nothing. My best work is with characters. Painting the backdrop for them to live on is tedious work to me, and sometimes that shows.

I'm working on both of these flaws. When I get to Pemberley, I will spend some time just thinking about the estate and the house itself. How many floors, how many rooms, what would the rooms be used for? If I have a clear idea going into that section, I'll have a much easier time moving things around and describing them.

What about you? Do you find yourselves leaning on a setting the way writers sometimes do a certain word or phrase?

How to Write Like Shakespeare

Saturday was Shakespeare's 447th birthday, and as part of the Happy Birthday Shakespeare project, I'd like to share some pictures and thoughts from my recent visit to Stratford-upon-Avon.

Shakespeare's Birthplace

 First, a confession: As much as I loved Chawton, Stratford-upon-Avon grabbed my heart and would not let go. I felt absolutely at home here, and I did not want to leave.

Shakespeare's Grave, Holy Trinity Church, Stratford-upon-Avon

Even in March, the city was full of tourists. (I ran into the same group of French students every place I went.) They all come to visit because they have been touched by the words of a man who died almost 400 years ago.

Anne Hathaway's Cottage, childhood home of Shakespeare's wife

 The authorship of those words, however, has been a subject of contention for the last 150-200 years. When I was at Anne Hathaway's Cottage, I overheard the guide explaining the Shakespeare Authorship Controversy to another visitor.

There are several reasons some people doubt Shakespeare actually wrote Shakespeare. However, the most ludicrous to my mind is this: Shakespeare grew up in a small town in rural England and never traveled any farther than London. His life experiences wouldn't have given him the keen understanding of human nature we see in the works attributed to his name.

Let's put this argument in perspective. Many of Shakespeare's plays are histories. If we're to believe he couldn't have understood people well enough to write the complex relationships he did, then how would Francis Bacon, the Earls of Denby and Oxford, or Christopher Marlowe (all given as potential candidates) have been able to write about events in the past? They didn't experience them, so surely they couldn't have written about them.

King James Bible, first edition. Holy Trinity Church, Stratford-upon-Avon

Ridiculous, yes? Have these people never heard of books? Shakespeare lived in a time when books were becoming readily available to the masses. The obvious example in his lifetime was the publication of the King James Bible in 1611, but even before that the written word was a hot commodity among those who could read.

Guild Chapel, King Edward VI Grammar School, Stratford-upon-Avon

Some go so far as to argue that Shakespeare was illiterate, but that stretches credulity a bit far. As the son of a well-to-do man, he would almost certainly have been educated at the local grammar school. There he would have received instruction in Latin and Greek, a vital tool since most works were still written in either language.

Carnegie Library, Stratford-upon-Avon

Today, Stratford's public library is just two doors down from the Birthplace, as if it is impossible to separate a love and reverence for the Bard from a love of books. Shakespeare read classical myths and the plays and poems of his day, and in them he traveled to places he could only see in his mind. Today, people read his plays for the same reason. His words take us to Ancient Rome, to the battlefield of Agincourt, to fair Verona. With each reading, we learn more about people and history, about mythology and poetry.

This is why writers need to read. It is not so we understand how to use language, when to follow the rules and when to break them. Those are things we learn in the process of attaining a greater wisdom:
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy." (Hamlet, Act I, Scene v, 166-167)

If you want to write like Shakespeare, if you want to live in a world that is wider than you can imagine, then you must read.

Change your focus

On Monday, I shared a little of my approach to photography: take as many pictures as possible, and hope some turn out well. There is a dark side to this, however. I can be a little... obsessive. At times, I'll fixate on an image I must capture on film, and nothing can shake me from my purpose.

In England, I found myself drawn to the flowers. Even though our climates are very similar, somehow more things were in bloom there than at home. Stratford-upon-Avon was particularly beautiful. On my first afternoon, I walked out to Anne Hathaway's Cottage.

The walk itself is lovely. Magnolias were in bloom, as well as other trees I can't identify.

However, I became obsessed with this:

And when I say obsessed, I mean I have 16 other shots, all of about the same quality. For some reason, I could not get a clear shot of this little flower, no matter how hard I tried. It wasn't until I looked at them at home that I realized the problem. Take a look at this example:

Do you see what happened? I wanted a picture of the flower in the middle, but my camera wanted to shoot the one on the edge. The resulting image is blurry and unsatisfactory.

How often does that happen when we're writing? In the middle of revisions, it can feel like we've reworked a scene 14, 15, 16 times, all without affect. It's only when we take a step back and look at what we're trying to accomplish that we realize we've been focusing on the wrong things.

Perhaps the chapter needs to be rewritten from another character's perspective, or maybe the entire scene should take place later in the book. Whatever it is, once we adjust our lens, we're able to write the scene we didn't realize we needed to write.

PS: Please, for the sake of my sanity, don't tell me how I could have gotten a clear picture of that flower. I think I'd throw my camera at the wall if I found out now.