C.L. Gray said...
Perhaps a teaching on how to avoid "had" in events that happened two or three days in the past.


Okay, let me think about this.

First thing I'm going to say is... don't go back. That is, if you don't recount things that happened three days ago, you won't need "had". (Talk about evading the issue...:) That is, "had" as the past-perfect auxiliary verb

But really, I don't like flashbacks as I think they tend to detract from the verisimilitude of the scene. Here they are, having an argument, and she says the "D" word (divorce), and they're both shocked, and ... and then he thinks back to the last time they went to dinner three nights ago, "and she had ordered calimari though he hated even the sight of it, and....", and there goes the immediacy, there goes the sense of being in the moment, and there perhaps goes the characterization (does he just drift off in the middle of an argument? No wonder she's talking divorce!).

It reminds me of a Friends episode re-run I saw the other day, or rather one moment in it, where Joey (the actor) is telling how a mentor had taught him the trick of seeming to ruminate and remember as "smelling your farts." And then there's a flashback to Joey as a character, and he stops in the middle of the scene and tilts his head like he's smelling his fart.

The joke is that flashing back can be rather like, you know, smelling your farts-- it looks sort of significant, but it's not.

Okay, okay, I know I don't persuade anyone who loves flashbacks not to use them (though I defy you all to try that-- go ahead, write the flashback now without thinking, oh, no, I'm smelling my farts!).


So how about a flashback without that annoying "had" everywhere?

Well, I think we should distinguish between just a line or two about something in the past, and a real flashback.
If it's just a line or two-- She raised her hand to show off the time travel wristband she had been awarded at graduation-- then go ahead and use "had" and don't fret it. It's the most expeditious way to set the one event in the past of the story. (And of course, it's also correct, which matters to me. :)

But a flashback is a -scene-, not just a reference to a past event. A flashback takes the reader back to a time before the story present and presents this passage of time as if it's a scene, with setting, action, dialogue. (We should have a discussion of whether there should be introspection/POV in a flashback... also, is the flashback a character flashing back and remembering something, or an independent scene, or... see all these existential questions that arise when you mess with the time continuum???)

So with a real flashback, I'd suggest maybe starting with "had" to mark the descent into the past, but then once you get there, no more had (until maybe the very end of the flashback scene, when you're transitting back to the present of the story). So:

She had been so proud at that graduation. She had proudly worn her blue time-agent uniform, and her parents had beamed when they saw her. When the director called her name, she walked up the aisle to get her diploma, and she stood as still as she could as he strapped on the wristband...

That is, get us into the past scene with "had been", then once we're in the scene, just go with simple past to make it feel like a scene, to make us feel right there experiencing it.

How do you all handle this?

Alicia

More paragraphing thoughts-- Suz

Suz commented
What about when there is one beat of action, then the dialogue. Does the dialogue come on the same line, or is it a new paragraph?


Suz, I think-- what will the reader think? If the reader is going to think that the action and the speech are from different people because of the paragraph break, I think it's important then to put in a quote tag so the reader doesn't even have two seconds of wondering who the heck is saying this.

But personally, I would rewrite it so that someone else has the first line of dialogue at the end of the beat. Many reasons beyond just "so that you don't have Action by Bill and Speech by Bill in adjacent but separate paragraphs which Alicia doesn't like." :)

Another reason is replicating the rhythm of real conversation. If there's a lag, if there's a silence, usually the other person says something, even just "Uh..." to fill the space. Now maybe you're thinking, "But the action is taking just a split second," but it's a paragraph for the reader. It's not going to feel like a split second. So having the other character leap in with some kind of interruption will "feel" right.

And letting the other speak is a way to make this passage more interactive, more of a real conversation, not just "speaker and audience" but two characters interacting, each with his/her own agenda. What the other says, how he/she says it, will reveal something. If she's impatient, drawing his attention back to the subject-- "You were saying?"-- then we know that she wants to know more, that she might even think that he's avoiding the subject. If she says something helpful, like "I can understand how you feel," then we know more about their relationship.

Dialogue is a conversation, and I like it to look, feel, and sound like there are two people here, each with a reason to be conversing, maybe each with a goal, and certainly each with an attitude-- impatient, helpful, deceptive, something.

So if you want a character to insert some action, think about why. Action is a bit of a punctuator to speech. Why would he want to hesitate? What is he about to say or not say that makes him pause if only for an instant? And how is she going to interpret that?

I know some writers will say, "I just want to break up the dialogue with some action, or to anchor the scene in some setting detail." Well, sure, but that's not (if you do it well) what the reader gets. What the reader gets-- if you've made her believe in these characters-- is that the guy was conversing and stopped for a bit, and the reader is going to interpret this as having meaning in some way. Go with that. That's great. Let it happen. Make it happen. That doesn't mean you need a good reason for him to pause! But if you do it right, if you make the pause for action a part of the conversation, if you make the other character react, the reader will come up with a good reason. :) And that's what you want, the reader to get in there and care enough to speculate.

Alicia

Paragraphing as meaning

I'm still interested in paragraphing, and I'm wondering how you all decide what constitutes a paragraph in your stories. I know, I know, case-by-case. But some guidelines I'm working on:

1) Dialogue creates paragraphs-- start a new paragraph every time I switch speakers. Now a question is-- do you put the action and dialogue (same character) in the same paragraph? I almost always do:

"It was a terrible storm."
She applied a chain saw to the wind-felled tree.

If "she" said that, I say same paragraph. I think breaking the action from the dialogue will confuse the reader-- so who said that? In most cases, that is.

2) Paragraphs should be unified around something-- like this is all about his suspicions that the high school principal is an alien. If he contemplates the girl he's interested in and wonders what she thinks, usually I think that belongs in another paragraph.

3) A conclusion, a realization, a decision-- this might well deserve a new paragraph for emphasis. The line break and indentation tells the reader to pay attention.

4) Paragraphs are shorter now, but one-sentence paragraphs should be rare in fiction (except with dialogue). Too many one-sentence paragraphs make your prose sound juvenile, and doesn't allow for any development of an idea-- everything becomes a Twitter-style assertion-- no evidence, no analysis, no nuance.

5) I can use paragraphing to tell the reader what goes with what, what connects, what is important.

What else? Do you paragraph by instinct or by craft? How do you decide if a sentence or thought doesn't go in that paragraph?
Alicia

Cool line

I was in Ireland in 2007 when Bertie Ahern (the Taoiseach -- PM-- of Ireland) gave a speech to the UK Houses of Parliament, one of the most complex rhetorical situations ever, perhaps (800 years of oppression, continuing economic interdependence, revolution, hatred, all that).

Anyway, I was driving and listening to this speech, and I very clearly recall an absolutely terrific line, where Ahern was trying to honor Irish history but also move on into the future by acknowledging the two countries' commonality, and here's what I remember:
"And we must never forget the greatest forced marriage in history: between the English language and the Irish people."

(That is, English was forced upon the Irish, but they made it sing-- Wilde and Swift and Yeats and all those guys.)

Well, you know, I've quoted that line, and attributed it to old Bertie, and recently went looking for the exact quote and the date, and guess what? Here's what he actually said:
"One of the most creative moments in human history was the meeting between the English language and the Irish people."

Huh. Hey, what I remembered was a better line! It sounds like Wilde or Shaw. So, anyway, I'm going to claim it (unless anyone can find another source). :)

So here's what I say:
The greatest forced marriage in history was between the English language and the Irish people.

Ta-da!

Passive voice = Passive scene?

In the comments of the last post, someone suggested (or I interpreted :) that a lot of passive voice might mean that the scene is passive-- that you're not forcing your characters to be active and make choices and cause things to happen.

Think about that. Prose and action are intertwined-- that is, the action is told in prose, and so they can reflect each other. If there's a "passive" problem in my sentences, maybe the solution isn't fixing the sentences (or whining about how this is my voice and it's an assault on my human dignity to tell me to fix). Maybe I should be looking at the scene and specifically at what I'm requiring of my characters. If there's nothing happening in the scene that requires them to act, the POV character might just hang around and introspect and relate in retrospect what happened and ruminate about it. And the sentences will naturally reflect that lassitude and lack of urgency.

But if instead of making this scene take place in the POV character's head, I make it take place in the campaign headquarters or in the abandoned house or the kitchen. And I can make the character do something. And I bet the sentences will get more active, just because they have more to do when the character has more to do.

After all, Churchill felt the urgency of the situation, the need of the populace for motivation and reassurance, the potential for change. And that feeling empowered his sentences. Maybe for us, the trick is to create a situation that requires power, then feel that in the scene, and transmit it into the sentences. Then maybe we won't have to worry about passive sentences, because we're not being passive, and neither are our characters.

So often prose problems are symptoms of scene problems. :)

Alicia

Passive voice-- just some thoughts

I just had a couple thoughts about passive construction. First, I see it often when students are trying to avoid using "I": Wild food is cooked at the annual Wild Food Picnic." But why not go ahead and say, "We cook wild food at the annual Wild Food Picnic." Passive is NOT better than using "I" or "we," as the subject should usually be the one that commits the action, and "we" did the cooking, so "we" should take credit for it. :)

Sometimes, writers assume "is and was" are markers of passive voice. But "is and was" have other roles, most of which have nothing to do with passive voice. For example:

I was once a champion tennis player.

That's a "predicate nominative," where the "was" just links the two nouns (I and tennis player) almost like an equal sign. There is no action (just "being"), so the sentence can't be active or passive.

The dress was red once. Now it is sort of pink.

That's a similar construction, just with an adjective (red) after the verb. That's a "predicate adjective" sentence.

Both of these use is/was to illustrate some aspect of the subject (I, the dress). Again, there's no action, so it can't be passive. It just "is".

"Is and was" can also turn a verb into a progressive verb --I am going (present progressive) rather than I go (present tense); I was going (past progressive) rather than I went (past tense). That's not passive voice, just another way the linking verb can be used (or, to be active! ... another way we can use the linking verb... see how "we" get in there!).

Those aren't passive construction. What is? It's when the ACTOR (the committer of the action) isn't in the subject position but the object position (where the object of the action should be). Or rather, the object (target of action) is in the subject position.

Example:

Passive voice is where the object is in the subject position:

Subject is usually what commits the action (the "agent" of the action)

Verb is usually the action

Object is usually what the action is committed on (the "patient or recipient" of the action).

So an active order is:

Paul (subject/agent) hit (verb) the ball (object/patient).

Passive order is:

The ball (object) was hit (verb) by Paul (subject).

The longer the sentence, I find, the more likely we trend into passive. Academic writing also often invites us to get all passive:

PASSIVE — In order to locate this paragraph, the cross reference feature was used.

ACTIVE — In order to locate this paragraph, the researchers used the cross reference feature.

What's wrong with passive construction? Well, for one reason, it allows us to avoid responsibility. "That $10 bill was stolen from your dresser" is sort of idle and guiltless. "I stole that $10 bill from your dresser" accepts responsibility (and even asserts pride, maybe).

Passive voice also leaches vividness and drama out of your sentences, because the subtext is that things just sort of happen. There's no real volition or intention in a passive construction.

"And then the car was just sort of dented."

"And I don't know how it happened, but the milk was spilled all over the floor."

And the famous Richard Nixon "admission of guilt:" "Mistakes were made."

Drama, power, conflict: Those are all in the active voice, and so you should default to active construction for livelier prose. Think about Churchill, trying to rally his country to resist occupation. He didn't use passive construction ("The battle shall be fought on the beaches") when he wanted to empower the British. Notice when he uses active and when he uses passive. (This is masterful manipulation of active/passive, by the way!). The highlighted parts are passive, and see how they are "the others in the past" (the other blue-highlighted line shows an unimaginable future for Britain, also passive), and notice how he will NOT give the Nazis the power (they are relegated to the object position, even though they are the ones subjugating!):

Even though large tracts of Europe and many old and famous States have fallen or may fall into the grip of the Gestapo and all the odious apparatus of Nazi rule, we shall not flag or fail.

We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France,
we shall fight on the seas and oceans,
we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be,
we shall fight on the beaches,
we shall fight on the landing grounds,
we shall fight in the fields and in the streets,
we shall fight in the hills;
we shall never surrender , and even if, which I do not for a moment believe, this Island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, would carry on the struggle, until, in God's good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old.

Now Churchill was almost supernatural in his rhetorical command (notice that almost every word there is Anglo-Saxon or old English... very few "Norman" -- Romance language-- word). But when we decide to speak forcefully, we instinctively go into active mode and use strong, basic verbs and clear construction, don't we? Keep that in mind as you write!

However... passive voice is preferable in a few circumstances:

When the "actor" isn't known, or isn't relevant:

1) The general's house was broken into last night. (We don't know who "committed the action.")

2) Her grandfather's ashes were interred last weekend. (We don't care who actually dug the hole and put the box of ashes in there.)

That's pretty limited!

Passive voice is also used (ahem, that's passive-- who is using? The writer!) when the writer doesn't WANT to assign responsibility. (How would you revise that to make it active!!!?) Have you ever gotten a past-due notice from a utility company? The FIRST notice is usually quite polite and passive: "This bill has not been paid." Why? Because they don't want to be rude and alienate you as a customer by accusing you of being a deadbeat! But the THIRD notice isn't so passive: "You have neglected to pay this bill for 90 days!"

I don't think writers should give up any writing tool, and passive voice would never have developed if there wasn't some use for it. Here's a fascinating rhetorical theory: Politeness theory. It posits that the more dangerous the potential consequence of speech, the more careful, lengthy, and passive our speech becomes. During the Spanish Inquisition, or when we get stopped by the highway patrol, we want to make sure that we don't give offense or accept responsibility if the consequence of "speaking freely" means we will get punished. (Watch the wedding scene in The Godfather and see how polite and passive everyone is towards the Don.) Passive voice is a useful tool when you have to be polite!

However, we shouldn't be passive unless we have a good reason to be passive! This is especially important in the narrative of fiction. Don't evade responsibility or let your characters get away with it, and don't dodge away from action (unless, of course, you have a good reason, like to show how passive a character is).

UNC Online Writing Center: Passive Voice

http://www.unc.edu/depts/wcweb/handouts/passivevoice.html

Alicia

Sneak Peek

Here's a low-res preview of what our eventual logo will look like. Isn't it lovely? I'm so glad that Alicia and I both liked the same design. It was funny how the elements came together. I suggested STAR as an acronym of our initials. Alicia came up with the idea of a shooting star and quite rightly wanted a feeling of motion in the image. We both love purple so that choice was easy. And our wickedly talented graphic designer found a font that's both publish-y and contemporary. I love it when bits and pieces merge into a greater whole.

I thought I would talk a little about branding today and the graphic branding process because this is something that affects authors, too. If you're building a website or blog, you'll be confronted by decisions that are similar to the ones we've addressed in the last two weeks. In fact, only this week a friend with an established web presence emailed me a mockup of her new business cards with a request for feedback. Even with the foundation established, even with a beautiful website already in place, she still had to think about how her business cards tie into her brand and which graphics and details to include.

So, here is what we were thinking when we came up with our ideas, and here are some ways that ymmv.


The Name

Sample conversation that occurred over and over for months:

A: What should we call it?
T: Uhh...
(crickets)
T: What should we call it?
A: Hmm...
(crickets)

Occasionally, one of us would email a list of keywords or ideas to the other. And that would lead to a lot more Uhhing and Hmming and an occasional check to see if we could get a domain name for any of the options under consideration. It was very frustrating at the time because it felt as though the perfect name was just beyond our grasp. We had a relatively easy time coming up with a number of other central concepts like the eventual format for the books themselves. (Oddly enough, that format ties in very neatly to the name and logo, but that's a story for another day.)

At one point, we sat at my dining room table with dueling computers -- my laptop set up to mine a thesaurus and rhyming dictionary and other word tools, and hers to search the availability of domain names. I tried living with a couple of our ideas for a few days at a stretch to see if they would grow on me. They never did, so it's probably lucky that we couldn't get the domains.

Some of you might remember a few weeks (months?) ago, there was a brief gigglefest in the comments here about our initials being T&A. That got me thinking. Yes, blame yourselves, Team Comments, for the name STAR Guides. You made me think about our initials.

And as soon as I thought of it, I got a little sizzle inside. You know that feeling when your instinct knows it's right? But I sat on the idea for a couple of days before I sent it to Alicia. I wanted to be sure the sizzle wouldn't fade, and luckily, she liked the idea, too.

With the name STAR, several other things snapped into focus. We knew we would have a star graphic on our logo, a no-brainer, and we easily drifted to the name STAR Guides. Each book in the initial series will focus on a fiction topic, and will be named accordingly: The STAR Guide to Narrative Elements, The STAR Guide to Slush Survival, The STAR Guide to Openings, and so on.

Your pen name might function much the same way. It's your name brand. It should serve as a strong starting point for your other branding efforts -- your website, your blog, your facebook page, and so on. One key difference, of course, is that human names don't usually come with built-in thematic branding potential. Unless you choose a name that's also an English word with strong connotations (Rule, Dare, Tower, Moor, Quick, etc.), you're probably dealing more with mood and tone than with actual meanings. (Crusie, for example, is a name that just sounds like fun.) Or you're in a position where you have to build associations between your name and your brand. (Rockefeller, for example, didn't start off with the connotation of wealth, but built it over time and through circumstances.)


Color

Alicia and I both favor purple, so it was really easy to choose that as our base color. But more than that, it works. Purple is the color of creativity, or so my feng shui expert told me. It's bold enough to stand out on the spines of books on crowded shelves, but not so bold as to be overwhelming. I also think it has a playful edge, but it's playful without being juvenile. I think that's good and suits our purposes. Adults should be able to have fun with their writing yet still remain adults.

We thought at first about doing purple with white, which would clean but not high-contrast. And then we started thinking about cream or a soft yellow, which would still be soft but would give more contrast than plain white. And then our designer came up with the golden highlights, and it was all over. It's bolder than what we originally planned to do, but that design absolutely leaped off the mock sheet. I fell in love at first sight (again with that sizzle, the same feeling I get when reading something really special in the slush pile), and Alicia preferred it, too.

I guess the lesson in this is to choose a color that speaks to you and to your purpose in more than one way, but be open to ways to vary it. If we had stuck to our original intent of doing something soft and clean and lower contrast, we never would have seen this gorgeous star. Big shout out to our designer for coming up with that.


The Designer

I want to take a minute to talk about why we chose this particular designer to do our logo. I know lots of people who can do graphic design, and so does Alicia. But our designer is the creative director for an ad agency, with loads of experience with branding through images. She's incredibly sensitive to color and layout, and I've never yet seen a design from her for anything that read cluttered or busy, even when there was some detail in the design.

We wanted a design that was clean and strong -- something that would read at a glance even when reduced to the size of a spine logo. Not only did our designer "get" what we were looking for, she came up with dozens of ideas to make our original concepts even better. She thought of things we never would have thought of on our own. She made us look at black and white mockups, something which puzzled me initially but made incredible sense as the process unfolded. All in all, her work ethic and results proved repeatedly that she's the right one for the job. I genuinely believe we got a better logo in the end because we worked with this particular designer.

When you're choosing a graphic designer, look at lots of samples of their work first. Is this someone with a strong design sensibility, common traits that come up over and over again in the work? Do all the designs read feminine or masculine, or do they all use dark colors, or are there other similarities? If so, that might be what you get. All the various cover artists I've worked with over the years have definite design sensibilities -- some are whizzes with fonts, some are adept at complex layouts, some do cool things with shading and fades to control the movement of the viewer's eyes across the images. Learn to see these things, and decide which elements work best for you before you hire your designer.

A word about web design and graphic design: They're not the same thing. Don't assume that someone with mad web skillz can deliver suitable graphics. Maybe they can, and maybe they can't. We're talking about very different skill sets, although there is some overlap in areas like layout and color work. But before you assume you can hire a web designer and get a good graphic designer in the bargain, ask a lot of questions about where the graphics came from. You might be surprised to learn that some professional web designers sub out their important graphics work. They are willing to do basic stuff themselves, but the important things (like logo builds), they leave to the experts.


My mind is much occupied these days with these sorts of business issues, but I think it's worth blogging about them even if they're not as much fun as character and pov and plot.

Theresa

Setting as tone reinforcement

I'm reading an older thriller, Heartsick by Chelsea Cain, and came across this example of how you can use a precisely chosen setting detail to reinforce or punctuate or underline the action of the scene or the emotion-- and yet subtly (not the thunder crashing just when she hears bad news, though with the storms we've been having daily in the Midwest, that's actually perfectly plausible).

Susan is a reporter who thinks she's been handed the assignment of a lifetime, to "shadow" a homicide detective as he investigates a serial murder. But he has a dark past-- he himself was the victim of a serial murderer, who took him captive, kept him alive, and tortured him for days. Susan makes the mistake of asking why Gretchen (the murderer) had shown him "mercy":

"If Gretchen had been feeling charitable, she would have let me die," he said matter-of-factly. "I wanted to die, I was ready to die. If she had put a scalpel in my hand, I would have stabbed myself in the neck and happily bled to death right there in her basement. She didn't do me any favors by not killing me. Gretchen enjoys people's pain. And she just found a way to prolong my pain and her pleasure. Believe me, it was the cruellest thing she could have done to me. If she could have thought of something crueler, she would have done it. Gretchen doesn't show people mercy."

The heat kicked in. There was a rumble, then the slow blow of hot air from a vent that Susan couldn't see. Her mouth felt dry. The kid upstairs was still running. If Susan had lived there, she would have killed that kid by now.


Notice how the setting, which had been presented as boring earlier (nondescript apartment in the city, March in the Northwest, so cool and rainy), is made a little threatening here by the juxtaposition with his "matter-of-fact" assessment of what happened to him, and by the violent connotations of the words describing the action of the furnace -- "kicked in," "rumble," "slow blow." There's also the reporter's sensory reaction-- she can't see the vent (unseen threat) and her mouth goes dry, plausible because of the "heat" but also because of what he has said. And then the kicker, that his talking about this unrepentant sadist makes her thoughts become violent too, that (though she doesn't mean it) she would "kill" this running child in the apartment above. That is, the setting detail isn't just applied onto the emotion/action of the passage, but becomes part of it, manifesting within her a change because of what she's experiencing.

Too often I read passages where the setting is just shoved in there. I get the sense that the writer has ticked off something on a checklist: "Mention the setting. Check." And the result is a kind of interruption of the narrative, really just a moment of exposition, instead of being part of the narrative. And it feels like that. Check. Setting applied.

But if you think of the scene as a unit of conflict and action and emotion, then everything in the scene should be integrated to create at every moment precisely the right experience for the reader. And that's not going to happen with a pro forma "setting application" every few paragraphs. And it's not going to happen with a slapdash and generic description, a "he ran his hand through his hair" sort of cliche. The POV is all-important. What is happening in the scene is affecting how the POV character feels, and that affects what the character perceives and --this is key-- how she presents and describes what she perceives. So Susan above feels the terror and horror of realizing what he went through, and she thinks of the ordinary (the furnace coming on) as startling and threatening, and she uses "punchy" words to describe that threatening feeling.

But most important, the confluence of the action of the scene and the setting leads to a moment of reaction, of change, where she herself is influenced by the violence she's been hearing about, and her thoughts become grim and vengeful, and this is even more striking, because she isn't thinking, "I'd like to kill that evil Gretchen," but rather, "I'd like to kill that innocent child whose crime is running around."

That's good writing, and good scene design. Just another example of how we should always challenge ourselves to go beyond the generic, to get inside the scene and do our best to give the reader the authentic experience of being part of it.

Another in our long-running series on: "Why Details Matter." :)

Alicia

Context and subtext

I spent this last week scoring AP exams (seniors in high school take these exams) in literature. I was scoring essays in the poetry analysis section, which meant I read 1300 essays all about the same poem, which was (scroll down to the bottom-- it's 2010) "The Century Quilt" by Marilyn Nelson Waniek. The poem is in the point of view of a woman who sees a quilt that seems to capture the beauty and complexity of her family heritage.

To me, the context was obvious-- this was an African-American family, and she was looking back at the 20th century. She referred to her grandmother (few of the students understood "Meema," but if you're from the South, you know it means Grandma), and "channeled" her memory of dancing with her "beautiful yellow sisters" and meeting and passing "her grandfather's white family."

I was amazed at how few students understood that this was an African-American family. There was a reference to Meema's "Indian blanket," and a lot of students went off in that direction (not realizing, probably, that many African-Americans in the southeast had a Native American ancestor). Since the Native American experience in the 20th century was vastly different, that didn't really fit the poem's development, but at least they got the connection of "multi-cultural" and "patchwork quilt" (that is, that the quilt is a metaphor for a multi-cultural family").

Anyway, I was noticing that almost no one got what to me was a clear context-- that of the exploitation of young Black women by older white men (sometimes "slaveowners"), and how that has made so many African-American families mixed race. And the quilt metaphor (patching together disparate pieces to make a piece of folk art-- the quilt is a wonderful metaphor-- forgive me, my beloved grandmother was a quilter, so I'm partial!) is a great symbol for the tendency of the African-American community to make history, heritage, and art from the troubled experience of Blacks in America.

So... almost none of the students got this. Some understood that the speaker was African-American, but often they kind of romanticized, that the Grandpa and Grandma were kind of Romeo and Juliet, ostracized because of their mixed-race love, while the actual experience was more akin to rape. Almost none got the term "yellow," which I know (because I grew up in the south, and have read lots of Toni Morrison and Faulkner and Maya Angelou, means a Black person with at least one white ancestor. Nowadays, of course, "brown" means Hispanic, and "yellow" is a epithet referring to Asians.

I was kind of glad that so few of the students (among them African-Americans) "got" the complicated background, because it is great to think of that awful era so far behind us that kids today don't even know about it. However, there's a beauty in it too, in the transformation of that brutal history into love and art. And that's lost when no one recognizes it anymore. There is, we know, great art in adversity, and when we lose the memory of the troubles, do we lose the art too?

And almost no one noticed the title (ALWAYS notice the title!), "The Century Quilt." Apparently few had quilting grandmothers (a "century quilt" has 100 squares), and of course they didn't live through much of the 20th Century (which ended, really, in 2008, not 2001), from Jim Crow and lynching to the election of the African-American president-- an amazing century.

Finally, this made me think about the importance of context. Without the context (specifically, understanding what "yellow" means in the poem), the students, most of them, couldn't connect this poem with the wonderful and terrible history of American Blacks. The subtext (that great passion and art come from adversity, that you can "patch together" meaning and art) was lost on most of the students.

However, they did make their own subtext. And I think that's something that characterizes art, that every generation makes new subtext, that the work allows for multiple interpretations and new interpretations.

But still I think of this so-modern dilemma, that something so meaningful in the past isn't even recognized now. The world changes so rapidly these days, and so many conflicts that might be awful to experience but create opportunity for good story, are almost immediately superseded by new events. How much have we lost by just not noticing? I can point to the paucity of novels about the Vietnam war compared to the number about World War II, though both were bristling with interesting story potential. Will there be even that many stories about Iraq? No-- I can just about guarantee that, because no one's paying much attention to the war now, while it's actually happening.

But... oh, well, it inspired me sort of at least! My poetry-reading group just did "ballads" and we decided we couldn't understand ballads without experiencing them from the poet's perspective, so we decided to write ballads (because they're easier, natch, than sonnets!). And so I wrote a ballad about a quilt-- "The Ballad of the Wedding Ring Quilt". It's sort of wonderful how easy it is to slip into the ballad rhythm (da Dum da Dum...) and use the tradition to build a story, even with complex emotions.

Alicia