Craft: Crowding and Leaping; Focus and Trajectory

I recently obtained a copy of Ursula K. Le Guin's Steering the Craft, and, being perverse, went straight to the final chapter. The concepts therein piqued my interest, and I decided they would make a good subject for a blogpost. This is another post that might-maybe-possibly become a series.

Crowding and Leaping

Crowding is, yes, the act crowding a piece of writing with meaning. Increasing the density of your prose , avoiding fluff and flab, replacing abstract gestures with definite actions and description, that sort of thing. Le Guin's adjectives that sum up this process are: Vivid, exact, concrete, accurate, dense, rich. I think these make a pretty decent checklist to keep in mind both as you write and as you revise.

Leaping is, yes, leaping over descriptions and actions. What you leap over, what you leave out, is the whitespace that turns strings of letters into words and (hopeflly) sentences, is the absence of stone that makes a sculpture more than a chunk of rock, is all those other artsy-fartsy negative space metaphors. Leaping is more than just replacing "Twilight Sparkle did some stuff for a while" with "Twilight Sparkle ate hay and tidied the library"; it's realising that statement, though lovely and vivid and concrete, isn't all that relevant and lancing it so the reader can get to the sentence "Chest heaving and blood running down her nose, Twilight slammed her hoof into Cthulhu's face" more quickly. Without leaping, the text becomes a glut of monotone concrete details. Failure to leap is EQD's Show example is such a counter-productive, dreary puddle of arse water.

Le Guin recommends you crowd as much as you like in the first draft and then decide what to leap over in subsequent revisions. I think this would work for most amateur writers, whose problem is that they write way too much. I'm that rare beast, a writer who is a little too sparse on the first pass and needs, if anything, to put some more meat on the text's spindly bones.

There are a couple of caveats here. (These are mine. Le Guin doesn't mention them.) The first is that lush prose is no worse that sparse prose. Lushness is just another tool, and in skilled hands it can be used to great effect. None of the above contradicts that. The problem comes when you end up describing a desk in great detail for the sake of describing a desk in great detail. The second is that Crowding/Leaping is better approximated by a scale rather than a binary distinction. You can give an extremely rich description, and you leave it out entirely, but you can also mention offhand, give a quick (but still precise!) description, you can imply some details with others, and so forth. It's like calligraphy with a brush; between taking the brush off the page and applying pressure to give a nice fat curve there are gradations of line thickness.

Focus and Trajectory

Conflict? Forget about it. Here, according to Le Guin, are the two essential story elements, the two necessary conditions for a text to be a story and not just some events that happen.

A story needs to be about something. It needs to have a focus, a conceptual point about which everything in the orbits. This can be a theme, but it doesn't have to be. It doesn't have to be the sort of thing that you can easily describe in words other than the story itself, but it has to be there. This sounds fluffy, but I think it's fairly evident that there's a big distinction between a bunch of disparate happenings and a series related events that are related even if that relation can't be easily expressed.

A story must also have a trajectory. It can't be blunder about aimlessly and it can't be a still life. It needs a movement to follow, a movement which every passage is a part of. It must flow from beginning to end; the beginning promises the end, and the end flows inexorably from the beginning. The movement itself can be all sorts of things. It can scamper, canter, bounce, waltz, drift -- so long as there's a trajectory. (Brandon Sanderson has a similar insight into the power of trajectory here. Props to Bradel; without him I wouldn't even know Sanderson existed.)

Smushing it together into a lovely crowdy-leapy-focussy-trajectory cake-thing

Focus and trajectory illuminate crowding and leaping. Elements that are in focus and contribute to the trajectory should be crowded in. Elements that are out of focus and diverge from the trajectory should be leapt over. This is a simple but subtle and powerful insight. It's far better than twee, pernicious injunctions like show-don't-tell. It's a guide about when to show and when to tell, and to what degree. (Showing, of course, is a sort of crowding, and telling is towards the leaping end of the spectrum). It's also a good guide to when to to have scene breaks. It's nowere near as easy and show-don't-tell, and it requires a fair bit of brute intuition to see focus and trajectory. I think that's worth it, though, for being able to transcend facile writing rules.

Activity time!

Le Guin suggests taking a piece of writing you've done and lancing half of the text. This'll force you to make the really difficult choices, decide which words absolutely have to survive the cull. It won't necessarily make the text better, but it will help illuminate the trajectory and focus udnerneath. I'm going to make a more radical proposal.

Take a piece of text and shave off half of it as suggested by Le Guin. Then shave off half off that. Keep on going. Iterate until the text becomes meaningless, trying to keep as much of the original meaning as the can. Cutting closer and closer to the bone should really show you the underlying structure of a text.

Comments

[Vidatu]

Your method at the end there (write a lot and then repeatedly shave off chunks) served me very well when I was writing reports back in school (I know fiction is different, but the principle is the same). I basically threw in everything I could think of, and then winnowed it down to something like 20% of that - it took a lot more work than just trying to be to the point in the first place, but gave much better results (my only published paper started at about 400 pages, and boiled down to 70 in the end).

Advice like this should be understood, however, to not be meant as a blanket criticism of verbosity. It comes back to those ideas of focus and trajectory; I've read books where a good two thirds of the content wasn't related to the plot or characters, or where every sentence was so stuffed with purple that it could choke a king, but where these traits were used to support or expose the novel's themes, messages, or politics.

I'm glad to see someone else here reads Le Guin. She's influential and incredibly talented, but a little obscure these days (so many folks only ever seem to read stuff written in the last decade or so). I'm glad I decided to follow you (and, if I remember right, Bradel directed me your way. Guy's on a roll).

[Scramblers and Shadows]

1281214

Cheers. It's good to know that I can provide some useful content.

I'm thinking I should at least try and write by bulk'n'cutting the text.

Advice like this should be understood, however, to not be meant as a blanket criticism of verbosity. It comes back to those ideas of focus and trajectory; I've read books where a good two thirds of the content wasn't related to the plot or characters, or where every sentence was so stuffed with purple that it could choke a king, but where these traits were used to support or expose the novel's themes, messages, or politics. [/quote

This. So very definitely. Ornate prose may not be for everyone, but to dismiss it as poor writing is to dismiss a great many very good books. And is rather silly, too.