My first textbook released yesterday

So far I haven’t written about the book I just spent a year completing.  But it was finally released yesterday, so maybe it’s time.

The book is called Echo: Main Issues 5, (an English textbook for high school students in Sweden) and has been beautifully produced by Natur och Kultur, who commissioned it from me last spring.  Writing a textbook was something new for me.  Even though I regularly write instructional texts for my students, I’ve never put this many thoughts into a single instructional text before.  In addition , it’s also full of genuine, tailor-made writing.  The way such textbooks usually work is that the main reading texts are culled from a wide variety of sources (which in my opinion as a teacher tends to be awkward and unwieldy to work with).  I decided to work in a holistic fashion, writing texts to unify purpose, situation, and learning goals.  It was an enormous amount of work, much of which would have been impossible without my editor.

I’m pleased with and proud of the results:

Flashback/Flash forward theory and mechanics

Narratives don’t have to be linear, but they are nearly always read in a linear fashion – one page after the other.  We determine when the reader gains access to the information – psychologial, logistical, scientific, etc.  But… how do we know when it’s time to shift the consciousness of the story/reader to another time or location (chronotope)?

And how, mechanically speaking, should we do it?  The answers are personal: what do we want to teach the reader, what kind of immersive experience do we want them to have?  Flashbacks and flash-forwards can be written smoothly, or they can intentionally jar the reader – it’s up to you.  Below are my current ideas on the subject.  What are yours?

1. What’s the difference between a memory and a flashback?  In a memory, the character is still anchored in the present, while flashbacks involve out-of-body experiences.  A memory involves having one foot in each time-consciousness, whereas a flashback (or forward) involves a total shift of consciousness, in which the body follows the thoughts.

2. Memories are often willed or intentional.  Flashbacks are usually unintentional.

3. How to choose between the two devices?  It’s the same as the choice between simile and metaphor – how much work do you want your reader to have to do, how strong of an experience do you want to put them through?

4. When is the right moment for a shift in consciousness?  Contrasts help readers maintain interest in the story.  Often slow sections of the narrative benefit from being spiced up with intense flashbacks, and the opposite is also true – action can be counterpointed by brief shifts of consciousness into calmer states, especially when they add psychological depth.

5. What is the purpose of shifting consciousness – psychological development, developing the mechanics of the plot intrigue, or informing the reader of the rules of the secondary world?

6. Flashback mechanics – shifts in consciousness can be signaled by typographic clues, the author-narrator telling the reader what is going on, the character involved telling the reader what is going on… they can be governed by sensory impulses, or they can occur randomly (psychosis).

–– Kevin Frato 2013

Circular Writing –– chasing our tails through manuscripts

(Second up in my series on the writing process, after Linear Writing)

And then there is circular writing, which is an unavoidable part of the editing process… and for many authors is also the way we draft our manuscripts.  Circular composition is linear writing curved back upon itself until the end meets the beginning and we start the creative process all over again, this time adding new layers to, or peeling off unwanted rinds from the circle of the rough draft:  circular writing sometimes expands our work by adding detail which makes the pattern more complex; other times it reduces it, by culling extraneous detail.  And I usually find myself doing both at the same time, so that the word count remains relatively stable.

Admittedly, circular writing can be self-destructive –– instead of layering the structure of the narrative in concentric circles, we whittle it down until there’s nothing left.  For instance in the 90s a lot of writers and artists I knew were working with Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones, which together with Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style appeared to be encouraging them to hack away like sculptors at their phrases until only the essence remained.  And there is something to be said for writing in a concise, direct fashion… but not everyone can be Hemingway.  Someone has to be Woolf, Melville, Whitman, Dickens Forster, and Shirley Jackson.  Back then I read (and still do read) far too much writing stripped of all the lovely redundancy that makes for poetic prose.

What is the clearest benefit of circular composition?  That we work with the entire narrative in one grand arch, writing in the same way as a reader who finishes the book and then turns back to the beginning and reads it all over again.  We understand what holds true and what doesn’t.

I believe the main drawback of circular writing is that it is cumbersome.  It requires an excellent memory to be able to hold so much text alive and malleable in the mind –– and this is a skill I myself was unable to master until my mid-30s.  I just couldn’t lift a 50,000-word manuscript without dropping it or being crushed under its weight.  And sometimes by the time I finished a manuscript, the end no long fit the beginning… so I went back and re-wrote the beginning and worked my way through to the end again… only to realize that now the end no longer fit the beginning.

When we’re stuck chasing our tails in circles around manuscripts, that’s when it’s time to put it on the shelf for a while.  Let it rest before coming back to it with fresh eyes and renewed energy.

 

 

The Right Road to Avalon

On February 7th, 2013 at IEGS in Stockholm, a group of upper-secondary students presented a one-act play called ”The Right Road to Avalon” by Melissa Obrou, who also wrote and co-directed the play (together with Michelle Haglund). The project was fully student-led and initiated, and accomplished without the help of the teaching staff, who in fact only understood what it was all about the week before it went on stage.  The cast included Alexander Fenikowski, Henrik Lindeblad, Ellinor Magnusson, Annie Holtz, Jacob Svensson, Michelle Haglund, Maya Hjelm, Isabell Hammarlund, Tove Hörberg Danzer, Natalie Strömdahl, Therese Imme and Astrid Lindgren.

The play billed itself as being based on the legend of King Arthur, and indeed appeared to borrowed names and themes from the Walter Scott poem.  Yet the action was removed from the time of England’s early history to a modern boarding school replete with swim-team, social networking, computer hacking, and complex interpersonal dramas both amongst the students and between students and staff/parents.  A triangular romance moved the first half of the play forward, while parent-child relationships took the forefront in the second half.  The sudden death of a student marked a turning point in the tone of the play, and it became far more serious and focused during the second half.

The play borrowed dialogue and plot conventions from the theatrical tradition as well as from the world of sit-coms, and did a fairly convincing job of blending the two.  The political background of The Cause of the Lake, a semi-underground movement which appeared to involve students fighting for the right to go off-campus during the academic year, was harder for me to follow than the interpersonal relationships.  The script could have used a proofreader… but overall, this was a highly ambitious project which I enjoyed watching.  I hope to see more plays from Ms. Obrou in the future.

Reading by example

I attended university in Ohio during the battle between phonics vs. sight-recognition: what is the best method to teach reading, sounding out phonemes or recognizing word-shapes?  The two sides tended to toss insults at each other from podiums and scholarly journals, but what they tended to forget was the most essential part of teach kids to read: leading –– or reading –– by example.  Kids who regularly see adults read more often read as adults.

Well, my little brothers didn’t get the bedtime stories from my parents the same way as my older brother and my sister and I, which perhaps explains why, when they were old enough to read, they weren’t as interested in books.  Nonetheless I took it upon myself to try get them interested in books and reading.  I was pretty annoying, you know, buying books they didn’t want, nagging them to read, that type of thing.  At the time I suspected I was doing more harm than good… but happily, nowadays they both read books.

Now one of my younger  brothers Pat Frato (whose e-book Facundo I’ve written about on this blog) is heading up a school reading program in Massilon, Ohio.  It’s a difficult job –– in my opinion many local districts have traditionally emphasized sports, especially American football, over academics  –– but it’s heartening to know that with rigorous intervention programs, kids can learn to grow through reading.  Because not everyone has an annoying older brother to lead –– or read –– by example.

Linear writing –– should we work straight through manuscripts?

Lately I’ve been talking to other writers and authors about how the structure of the compositional process itself rubs off on the narrative structure.  I’d like to discuss the issue here, starting with linear composition and hopefully moving on to fragmented, circular and episodic writing.

Edgar Allen Poe, in his 1848 essay ”The Philosophy of Composition”, claims the reader benefits when a piece can be read during a single sitting:

”The initial consideration (is) that of extent. If any literary work is too long to be read at one sitting, we must be content to dispense with the immensely important effect derivable from unity of impression –– for, if two sittings be required, the affairs of the world interfere, and everything like totality is at once destroyed.”  The famous interruption of Coleridge during his composition of ”Kubla Khan” –– the affairs of the world intervening through a knock at the door and forever truncating his thought process –– illustrates Poe’s point.

Well, Poe gives a lot of practical advice, and is adamant about how long a finished poem ought to be.  But what about fiction?

Unfortunately he makes no claim as to the optimal length of fiction, nor does he says a word about how the length of the compositional process itself affects a work.  In my experience, a linear compositional technique –– writing the story from beginning to end in the same order it will be read (even if the story itself isn’t linear) allows us to mirror, or at least attempt to simulate, the reader’s experience.  Of course we usually write more slowly than readers read, and we can easily get bogged down in the language and details.  But the main psychological experience, the mental theater production that fiction is, is hopefully vaguely similar to the reader’s.

So psychological authenticity is the benefit of composing in a linear fashion: we run a dress rehearsal as we write.  However if psychology is the benefit, it must also be the drawback.  The risk we run must be that the feeling of going along for the same ride as the reader gets in the way of our logical planning.  We risk getting emotionally carried away and losing the thread of the narrative, or the opposite, getting left in the dust as the emotional content runs off ahead of us.  It is also a bridling of the muse, forcing it to follow our design instead of vice versa.  For instance in his essay, Poe claims he wrote the final stanza of ”The Raven” first, in order to establish the far boundaries of the piece.  He even claims that, had he then written stronger stanzas leading up to it, he would have ”purposely enfeebled them so as not to interfere with the climactic effect.”

Sounds like coitus interruptus if you ask me.

These days I tend to prefer trying to compose in a fully linear fashion, with unbroken concentration, in the same order as a work will be read.  Of course this hardly ever happens, especially not when writing anything longer than a few pages.  I’m simply writing too many manuscripts at once, some on commission (fiction and non-fiction for textbooks) and others on speculation (novels), to be able to concentrate on any one of them for more than a few weeks at a time.  But language itself is ideas lined up and communicated one after the other, so I suspect linear composition is the most natural way of sitting down and putting stories on paper.

Teacher teacher burning bright

What a difference an ocean can make.

A teacher at my old high school in North Canton, Ohio, USA has been making the news lately.  I never met her –– I graduated in 1990 –– but I recognize the small-town attitude surrounding the controversy.  What happened?  According to the Canton Repository she apparently wrote and self-published a novel under a pseudonymn… and word somehow got out that it was her, and she was suspended from her job for three weeks.

So what’s the problem?  I imagine four issues are at work here:

1. We’re talking North Canton, where football and religion are the two main activities.  Did I write football and religion?  Oops, football is the main religion in North Canton.  Guys in shoulder pads hitting other guys that happen to touch them, and beer-bellied coaches patting their asses afterwards… it’s all very in-denial homoerotic.  I played in the marching band for four years and saw it all.

2. The author is an English teacher.  (So am I, but I never got in trouble for writing a book.)

3. The book is apparently  erotic.  (Some of my work also includes sex but nobody seems to care.  Look, I live in Sweden.)

4. The book was self-published.  Frankly, I bet if author Carol Ann Eastman (pen-named Deena Bright) had been published by Random House and she’d been interviewed by Oprah, she would have been a celebrity back home which would have meant the good people of North Canton would have ignored her.  Maybe her students would have toilet-papered her trees one night after a football game, but really, nobody would have cared.  Listen, that guy Marilyn Manson was attending Glenoak High, a couple minutes down the road, about the same time as I was in North Canton Hoover High, but nobody cared.  Why?  Probably because he became famous and got a record contract.

So maybe the mistake was self-publishing.  Or maybe the mistake was writing under a pen-name.  Possibly if the author had stood up straight and boldly asserted her rights as an author, her own union would have supported her (it appears the opposite happened).  It still would have been uncomfortable for everyone, yes, because the body is considered to be a very dirty thing indeed in North Canton (not even infants are allowed to splash around in blow-up pools in yards because of supposedly-marauding pedophiles).  But the last time I checked, yes, writing erotic fiction was indeed protected by the First Amendment.

I was in North Canton last summer.  Apart from Walt Whitman and certain hot sonnets, I don’t tend to read erotica.  But next time I’m back home, I’ll be sure to read more.  It sounds like Carol Ann Eastman got her students reading, which is a victory in itself.

PS: A couple of fond memories from North Canton Hoover High:

One afternoon in English class, the then-head of the English Department, a gentleman with the initials W.W. (not Walt Whitman but not far off either) interrupted his lecture.  He paused and gazed at a cheerleader in full (skimpy) uniform with legs crossed in the front row, and said, ”Pardon me, I just have to tell you that you have fabulous legs!”  She smiled politely and replied, ”Thank you.”

Following on that theme, I wrote an editorial in the school newspaper the Viking Views wondering why the cheerleaders wore uniforms to school… that were against the dress code.  Miniskirts and mustaches were disallowed, as well as alcohol ads and obscenities (though there was always some prankster wearing a ‘Hard Cock Cafe’ t-shirt and getting away with it, which made me wonder if the administration was fully literate).  Well, word leaked about what I’d written, and one of the cheerleader’s mothers called the principal who impounded the entire print run in the school office for a week until the dust settled.  Since then I’ve understood that high schools, even entire school districts, all too often function as banana republics.

Free workshops this Saturday at Skrivarakademin

Anyone wanting to try their hand at writing the preface to a detective or romance novel should stop by Skrivarakademin (Folkuniversitetet, Kungstensgatan 45) this Saturday.  We’ll be reading excerpts from some well-known novels, studying patterns, talking briefly about structure and linguistics, writing and sharing.  It’s free, as are a number of other writing workshops.

It’s all part of Skrivarakademin’s 20th anniversary.

My workshop will be at 2 pm.  Some of the other authors involved in the afternoon are Felicia Feldt, Jenny Jägerfeld, Camilla Wittmoss, Erik Grundström and Jenny Tunedal.

It should be a lot of sun!  Hope to see you there.

Ger ut ny novell på Myrios Novellförlag

I veckan kom min novell ”Eleven” på Myrios Novellförlag. Ni som prenumererar på Myrios får tillgång till texten, författarintervjun, studiefrågor samt den fina inspelningen med Gloria Tapia.

Novellen skrev jag under sommaren, tillsammans med två andra som förlaget fick välja mellan. Det blev ”Eleven” som jag till slut översatt och jobbade vidare med. Novellen handlar om… ja såhär skriver förlaget:

”Det är dagen innan examen. Skolans främsta elev och framtidslöfte har åkt fast för dataintrång. Rektorn och studierektorn är oense om hur frågan ska hanteras och eleven själv påfallande arrogant. Outtalade konflikter pyr under ytan, en plats på Harvard står på spel. ”Eleven” är ett koncentrerat kammarspel om makt och kontroll, beroende och uppror.”

Tack Myrios för ett proffsigt samarbete!

Rapport från Bokmässan

En försenad rapport från seminariet i Göteborg:
Anneli Jordahl, Jenny Jägerfeldt och jag pratade om Avståndet mellan i tjugo minuter inför en publik som bestod av kanske trettio personer. Vi hade kunnat prata dubbelt så länge. Samtalet flöt på, vi läste i några minuter var, vi diskuterade strukturella och lingvistiska frågor… och sen var det slut. Intressanta svar: Anneli sa att projektet lät så tokigt att hon bestämde sig på en gång att hon absolut ville vara med. Dessutom gillade hon idén om att jobba kollektivt (fast hon medgav att hon sen lustigt nog inte hade lust att ändra i sin egen text för att anpassa den till andras!).

Jenny berättade att projektet fick henne att skriva sin allra första novell som vuxen (hon hade alltså inte skrivit någon sen hon gick i skolan). Jag berättade att jag fick idén till projektet efter att ha läst Trude Marsteins Göra gott (jag tyckte att hennes egen berättarröst låg till grunden för alla jag-berättare i boken, och att för att göra ett sådant projekt ordentligt skulle det krävas ett gäng författare som jobbade ihop). Annelis och Jennys noveller fick nya dimensioner, tyckte jag, när de läste upp dem. Själv skyndade jag mig igenom mitt utdrag. Dels för att tiden höll på att ta slut, dels för att utdraget innehöll referenser till… ja, erotiska händelser. Och jag är helt ovan med att läsa sådant högt.

Efteråt blev det lite signering. Även medförfattarna Katarina Kuick och Mårten Sandén var med!

Annars var Bokmässan som den brukar. Myrios hade ett fint monter hos Natur och Kultur (min novell ”Eleven” kommer ut hos Myrios nästa vecka). Köpte Lennart Hagerfors Vägen till Khumba på Weylers monter. Skrev en massa på tåget på vägen dit och hem igen. Har inte lyckas lade ner bilderna från seminariet!