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Inkabout L. Darby Gibbs

Science Fiction & Fantasy author

learning from the masters

Learning from the masters series: Ernest Hemingway carries theme

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Let’s face it, Ernest Hemingway does everything right, so I could focus on a variety of qualities in his writing and gain insight.  But for the purpose of this post, I am giving my attention to his use of theme, so I am turning to the high school standard read The Old Man and the Sea.

Loyalty, respect, not giving up, creating one’s own luck, appreciation for life: these are all themes that apply to this book. 

These themes appear in the relationship between the boy and old Santiago.  Their reliance on each other is exemplified in the way they play out the fiction of their hopes versus the conditions of their reality.

“What do you have to eat?” the boy asked.
“A pot of yellow rice with fish. Do you want some?”
“No.  I will eat at home.  Do you want me to make the fire?”
“No.  I will make it later on.  Or I may eat the rice cold.”
“May I take the cast net?”
“Of course.”
There was no cast net and the boy remembered when they had sold it. But they went through this fiction every day. There was no pot of yellow rice and fish and the boy knew this too.

There is loyalty and respect in this exchange, but it also is imbued with not giving up.  The boy does not see the man as not facing the truth.  He sees that the old man will not approach life with a view that there is only poverty to discuss.  He will act as if all is as it should be because it will soon be so even if it does not appear to be likely.

The boy brings the old man food and wakes him up to eat.  And the old man questions him about where the food comes from.  He then asks the boy if they should eat.

“I have been asking you to,” the boy told him gently.  “I have not wished to open the container until  you were ready.”
“I am ready now,” the old man said.  “I only needed time to wash.”
Where did you wash? the boy thought.  The village water supply was two streets down the road.  I must have water here for him, the boy thought, and soap and a good towel.  Why am I so thoughtless?  I must get him another shirt and a jacket for the winter and some sort of shoes and another blanket.

In these two examples, the love the boy has for the old man is clear, and the depth of his loyalty to him is shown in the boy’s effort to see that he eats and the remorse the boy feels for not providing better for him.  The fisherman was his teacher and mentor, and though now he cannot fish with him because the old man’s luck is not good, the boy has not let go of the respect he feels for him and the obligation that comes with having received training that will allow him to make his own luck in the harsh fishing life the two lead.

Hemingway followed a natural path of behavior for these two characters and by staying tight to the simplicity of their honest relationship, he cast hope in what was hopeless.  It had been 84 days since the old man had caught a fish.  Strength, the help of the boy, respect from many of the villagers and the chance of catching any fish were falling away.  There was no great hope that he would break his streak of bad luck, and over the run of the story that lack of chance follows the arc from bad to worse because in the moment of triumph there is also a longer run of defeat.  Yet by the end of the story, the reader is still left with the hope the old man and boy have sustained.

Santiago loses his great fish, but he never loses the boy, the boy’s respect nor his loyalty.  In the village, there is more respect for him though he returns with little to show for all his effort.  Hemingway built a deep, reliable underpinning through the relationship between the boy and the old man.  Through characterization he supported multiple themes and left the reader somber but hopeful in the way the old man was always hopeful because it may not appear that all will be well but it will soon be.  That is the only view the boy will allow: “You must get well fast for there is much that I can learn and you can teach me everything.“

#writing

Learning from the masters: Listen to the voices of Harper Lee’s Scout

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Time links past with present

Harper Lee had quite a task creating the narrative voice of  Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird.  Sure Scout was a six-year-old girl who ages about two years in the course of the book; what’s the challenge?  Seems easy enough — in that short span of years there is not much change.  But Scout is also the narrative voice of an adult, and how does one impart the perspective of a reflective southern woman?  How does it remain evident that young Scout and the reflective adult spring from the same root?

  The following week the knot-hole yielded a tarnished medal.  Jeb showed it to Atticus, who said it was a spelling medal, that before we were born the Maycomb County schools had spelling contests and awarded medals to the winners.  Atticus said someone must have lost it, and had we asked around?  Jem camel-kicked me when I tried to say where we had found it.  Jem asked Atticus if he remembered anybody who ever won one, and Atticus said no.
   Our biggest prize appeared four days later.  It was a pocket watch which wouldn’t run, on a chain with an aluminum knife.
   “You reckon it’s white gold, Jem?”

We have a narrator, the adult Scout (Jean Louise) and the character who supplied remembered dialogue, young Scout.  The two voices are distinctly different ,yet they maintain a connection with the story.  The narrator introduces the event just to where we can imagine the moment, and the young Scout takes over, supplying the in-the-moment reactions and character interactions.

It looks easy when you expose the strings underneath, but it is not easy.

Six-year-old Scout had a pretty good vocabulary, but she also uses country dialect “reckon” and frequently her sentences will be missing the subject and have an abruptness to them as though she is in a hurry to express herself before Jem can shut her down or steal her thunder.  “You reckon it’s white gold, Jem?”  The older narrator Jean Louise takes her time, drawing out the moment.  “The following week the knot-hole yielded a tarnished medal.”  There is an easy, relaxed feel to her sentences, an ownership and a patience the younger Scout had not mastered, but near the end of the book, the reader can see she is beginning to learn that such patience exists and has value and place.

The flow between the two is seamless because the adult narrator’s viewpoint drops off when Scout speaks and picks up after, as though they were twins finishing each one’s sentences, although those sentences are separated by a distance of thirty years or more. 

That is one of the beauties of reading To Kill a Mockingbird:  enjoying the flow and the grace of the connection between the two Scouts.  We see the meaning behind events when Jean Louise speaks and the confusion, fear, surprise and revelation those same events bring out in Scout.  There is no ledge, no separation felt, yet the reader steps back and forth between them.

#narrative voice
#writing

Learning from the masters series: Steinbeck’s common man

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John Steinbeck wrote for and about the guy next door, the man that works to pay the bills at the end of the month, for the poor cuss who hopes and hopes even when hope is lost, and loses and loses,  even when he wins.

Tortilla Flat
   He moved slowly and cautiously.  Now and then the chicken tried to double back, but always there was Pilon in the place it chose to go.  At last it disappeared into the pine forest, and Pilon sauntered after it.
   To the glory of his soul be it said that no cry of pain came from that thicket.  That chicken, which Pilon has prophesied might live painfully, died peacefully, or at least quietly.

Okay, so that was not Pilon’s chicken and when he exited that thicket, he had already drawn and quartered that rooster, pocketed the parts and left all evidence of its identification behind.  He had a good day, a good meal and a good rule: chickens just wandering about homeless are best eaten fresh.

The Pearl
   His people had once been great makers of songs so that everything they saw or thought or did or heard became a song.  That was very long ago. The songs remained; Kino knew them, but no new songs were added.  That does not mean that there were no personal songs.  In Kino’s head, there was a song now, clear and soft, and if he had been able to speak of it, he would have called it the song of the family.

Kino was in tune with the flow of his community, the sea nearby and the sleepy contentment of his family in the breaking morning.  And song was his element and his barometer.

Of Mice and Men
   “No. . . you tell it.  It ain’t the same if I tell it. Go on . . . George.  How I get to tend the rabbits.”
   “Well,” said George, “we’ll have a big vegetable patch and a rabbit hutch and chickens.  And when it rains in the winter, we’ll just say hell with goin’ to work, and we’ll build up a fire in the stove and set around it an’ listen to the rain comin’ down on the roof–Nuts!”  He took out his pocket knife.  “I ain’t got time for no more.”  He drove his knife through the top of one of the bean cans, sawed out the top and passed the can to Lennie.

These two migrant workers were keeping the dream of a farm in the future, their own place where they could decide to work or not, stuffed deep in their empty pockets next to dead mice and nicked pocket knives.

And that was Steinbeck, the writer that lived first in the life then wrote the life of those who lived it.  His characters are drawn from people who live in and through hardship, but not the hardship that visits, leaves and sometime later after happy times have worn out their welcome is replaced with another difficult situation to manage through.  His characters are imbued in hardship; that is what life is.  It giveth and it taketh away, and mostly it taketh.

I was driving over a bridge in Bend, Oregon, and a man, layered in several shirts and jackets stepped blithely along the concrete margin that left a tight walkway along the fencing of the bridge.  I looked back (I wasn’t the driver) and watched him until we were out of sight.  He wore a grin on his face, was obviously singing loud and joyfully and looked to have taken his last bath some weeks earlier.  He’s a Steinbeck man, I remember thinking.  You know them when you see them.  It is hard not to be drawn in by their look of hope, their obvious plight, the sorrow you see coming which they don’t seem to.  Steinbeck made me sensitive to them, made me hope and work not to be one, and surprised me when after researching my family tree, I found I was but one generation from them and at times only a paycheck or two ahead of them.

If you want to write about the common man in his glory, in his misery, read Steinbeck first.  Research your family tree.  Look around.  Then sit down and write about the fears that wake you up at night, only let them loose and see what damp place they will land it, dry up, flit about and land in the wet again.

#Steinbeck
#learningfromthemasters
#writing

Learning from the masters series: John Gardner & the world of monster

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Door to the inside of a monster

John Gardner’s Grendel is a work of delight and derangement cluttered in one diabolical monster’s mind.  It is poetry garbed in prose, sophistry hiding behind a misunderstood, disadvantaged descendent of Cain.  Gardner slips his monster into the reader, building sympathy and support as the beast twists its words around unreliable reasoning that makes the reader want to believe Grendel’s version and feel sorry for him.  Gardner does all this through the voice of the monster as the creature seems to share all his personal feelings, fears and frustrations.  He’s honest, sort of.

” ‘Ah, sad one, poor old freak!’  I cry, and hug myself, and laugh, letting out salt tears, he he! till I fall down gasping and sobbing.  (It’s mostly fake.)”

This short quote is just a few pages into the book.  It contains, “cry,” “laugh,” “gasping,” “sobbing” and the words in parentheses “It’s mostly fake.” This sharing of Grendel’s view of his behavior draws the reader in, grinning (though of course, Grendel would be grinning too, but it is the reader that thinks this is great fun.  And before readers know it, they are so entertained that they fall for him, crazy rapscallion that he is.)

His honesty is refreshing, diverting, entrancing and completely manipulative.  And the reader knows that, too, but that is not enough to keep him or her secure from falling for the monster, and that is John Gardner’s gift.

” ‘Dark chasms!’ I scream from the cliff-edge, ‘seize me!  Seize me to your foul black bowels and crush my bones!’  I am terrified at the sound of my own huge voice in the darkness.  I stand there shaking from head to foot, moved to the deep-sea depths of my being, like a creature thrown into audience with thunder.”

Pulled in, right to the brink of believing him and then he says:

“At the same time, I am secretly unfooled. The uproar is only my own shriek, and the chasms are, like all things vast, inanimate.  They will not snatch me in a thousand years, unless, in a lunatic fit of religion, I jump.”

And thus Gardner twists us about.  First one way and then another, until we don’t know if we trust this Grendel or not, but for some crazy reason, we like him and want to continue to spend time with him.  We ignore his eating of people, his sarcasm, his beastliness.   He’s just too interesting, too contradicting.

That is the secret, or at least one of the important ones of this work of creating a monster that more than a mother can love.  Grendel is a contradiction.  He wants to be welcomed into the forgiveness of religion, but overlooks the dead man he has clutched under his arm.  He peers into holes in the mead hall wall to watch the Danes live their small lives, like a lonely voyeur, and eats their cattle, old women and wayward children.

We shake our heads at him, and then devour more words, more rabid philosophy.

I haven’t written about any monsters yet, but I am going to keep this technique in mind:  the twist of honesty, sympathy and personal fear around destruction, hate and madness.  A monster one can love and hate to hate, though the reader knows, knows with a certainty, here lies a crazy bastard of a monster; don’t turn your back and watch his hands closely, and his claws closer.
#writing
#monsterbuilding

Learning from the masters series: Seamus Heaney crafts imagery

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Amber: imbedding strong images

You know those images that stick with you long after the work has been shelved or sunk beneath a mountain of new impressions? The ones you can read over and over and feel the gritty texture, smell the burning tang, see the vivid stain…that quality of capturing a moment precisely, the vision exacting?

I have read “Graubelle Man” numerous times.  I have heard Seamus Heaney perform his work, though I cannot say if I have listened to him recite this one.  But each time I read this poem, a voice accompanies it.  It is a resonant utterance, that shapes each word in melodic presses of the tongue against teeth, palate, and lips.  The man described is evoked into dimensions that show him half imbedded in soggy peat, various degrees of dark pigmentation on his rippled, sunken skin crumpled against the bone. The reader knows he would feel stiff and cold if touched.

Graubelle Man

As if he had been poured
in tar, he lies
on a pillow of turf
and seems to weep

the black river of himself.
The grain of his wrists
is like bog oak,
the ball of his heel

like a basalt egg.


He builds an image so deeply that it slides under the skin and settles in for a lifetime.  I cannot dig this image out of my horde of gathered bits of fine poesy.  There is much more to this poem, more images that bring the Gaubelle man described into the view of every reader that examines the piece. 
I cannot imagine that one could teach a person to write at this level.  I can only imagine that it must be sought out, read repeatedly, savored in the hope that in seeping in it will imbue one’s images with moments which may find a reader to settle into for a lifetime.  Read, seek these images out, glory in them as reader or writer, make space under your skin for them.

Learning from the masters series: Connie Willis drags you into the deep end

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Reading a Connie Willis novel is like drowning.  Her very first paragraph is a rip tide that lets you get a breath just often enough not to drown you.  You spend a lot of time treading water, but the liquid feels so lovely against your skin, a blood warm suspension, and you pray for breath and continued immersion in the same bubble rising to the surface.  No ground beneath your feet, but somewhere along the line you learn to stay above water, gain a sense of where land is and strike out in an Australian crawl that you didn’t know you could do.  At about the time the book ends, your toes feel the roughness of sand and sea shells and you wade to shore.  Welcome to Willis style writing.   What will you do, probably what I did.  Go dive into another Connie Willis book.

What in heck does she do?  The problem is you can’t just sit down and read one of her novels to learn something.  Two tiptoes in and you’re out of your depth in story.  So I am grabbing a bucketful from All Clear you can’t possibly fall into, but you can shove your head in and peer about.

Bucketful — take a deep breath and kick:  By noon Michael and Merope still hadn’t returned from Stepney, and Polly was beginning to get really worried.  Stepney was less than an hour away by train.  There was no way it could take Merope and Michael–correction, Eileen and Mike; she had to remember to call them by their cover names–no way it could take them six hours to go fetch Eileen’s belongings from Mrs. Willett’s and come back to Oxford Street. What if there’d been a raid and something had happened to them?  The East End was the most dangerous part of London.


There weren’t any daytime raids on the twenty-sixth, she thought.  But there weren’t supposed to have been five fatalities at Padgett’s either.  If Mike was right, and he had altered events by saving the soldier Hardy at Dunkirk, anything was possible.  The space-time continuum was a chaotic system, in which even a minuscule action could have an enormous effect.

Dry off your head.  Now think about what she did.  First she threw a bunch of names and places at you.  Then she set up a problem; where are Eileen and Mike who apparently go by other names, real names?  They have been gone too long.  Five people dead?  London and Dunkirk on the same page and practically the same breath.  Why is the East End the most dangerous part of London?  Raids?! Altering time?  Space-time continuum?  Well, if you like time travel that last bit wasn’t so hard to swallow.  But there is so  much to wonder about that you have to keep swimming just to find out what is going on.  And then it is too late to get out of the water.  You are in for the duration.

With all that tossing of names, places and events, you would think you’d feel over run with information to process. But that is not the case. There is the intimate connection you have formed with Polly who is worried about her friends and their safety in time which does not appear to be playing by the rules.  All that in two paragraphs.  Better read it again.  You only had a couple chances to get a gulp or two of air and probably missed something.

Ready again?  Six hours, they’ve been gone.  What has Polly been doing while they were gone?  Padgett’s? (Those with experience in London know, but the rest of us need more information.)  Hey, that’s only an hour away by train, wouldn’t she know by now if there had been a raid?  When is this anyway?  How did she know so precisely that there were no daytime raids on the twenty-sixth?  Clearly you must read for a while before you get the answers you need.  Better pack a life vest.

That’s Connie Willis.  She dives in and never lets the water grow smooth.  There will be a break or two, but the waves are still coming, though you can float on your back for a bit until things get rough again and they will. Gotta love a writer who knows how to throw the reader in and make them love the drenching.