Writing – analysing a writer’s work-2

Many years ago, when I embarked on writing fiction, I studied a good number of novels in an attempt to see how they worked – paragraph structure, dialogue, scene changes, pace, characterisation, etc. It’s a useful exercise for beginners.

I’m going to post the occasional analysis in this blog, though it’s a little invidious, analysing a writer with only one sample of his (or her) work, but here goes.

The Writer: D.H. Lawrence
The Work: Love Among the Haystacks, 1930 (reviewed in my blog here)

If you’re intent on writing short stories, it makes sense to read short stories – preferably in the market you’re aiming at. Sadly, in the magazine world, there are no outlets these days for men’s adventure and action short stories; women’s magazines still proliferate, the most popular being Women’s Weekly and The People’s Friend in the UK. To counter-balance this state of affairs, there are a good number of online webzine outlets worth investigating.

Sometimes, it’s helpful to review short stories by accredited masters of the form. One of these is D.H. Lawrence, who wrote many, which can be read in collections such as The Prussian Officer, England, My England, The Woman Who Rode Away, The Princess and Other Stories, The Mortal Coil and Other Stories and Love Among the Haystacks.

The stories in this collection (Love Among the Haystacks) are a mixed bag and I feel they are not the best of his work. Of course his bucolic descriptions put the reader into the scene: ‘The two large fields lay on a hillside facing south. Being newly cleared of hay, they were golden green, and they shone almost blindingly in the sunlight…’ This is the beginning of the story. Modern critics and writers tend to avoid setting the scene like this at the start of a short story, and advocate diving straight in, perhaps with dialogue between the protagonists. The scene can be glimpsed through the eyes of one character, too, unlike here where it’s conveyed  with an omniscient point of view.

The omniscient POV is sometimes necessary for a short story, due to the limited length. Here, it’s ‘tell’ all the way, with little emotional involvement. ‘Geoffrey turned white to the lips, and remained standing, listening. He heard the fall. Then a flush of darkness came over him…’ (p14) He has just knocked his brother Maurice off the top of the haystack, but there’s no mention of gut-wrenching shock, the stopping of his heart, no physiological change in response to this potentially fatal action.

I was surprised to discover lazy writing, too.

‘Nay, lass,’ smiled Maurice.

‘Aye, in a bit,’ smiled Maurice.

‘There’s nowt ails me, father,’ he laughed. (pp18/19)

This kind of writing occurs frequently in popular fiction, but I’m surprised that it is present in literary fiction. As I’ve written in my book Write a Western in 30 Days: Ever tried smiling while speaking? There should be a full stop at the end of the speech and ‘He smiled’ capitalized. (p125)

You will have noticed his use of dialect, too. This can limit a readership and slow down the story. Is it correct, anyway? It’s so easy to get it wrong. There are little ways to suggest dialect without going overboard. A few recent TV productions have suffered due to a director’s insistence on realistic vernacular. Why do they do it? If we’re writing about French people, or Russians, we don’t write in their language, we use English – perhaps with the odd word or phrase (artificially thrown in). Avoid dialect!

Word repetition. All writers suffer from this ailment and only dedicated self-editing can remove the repetitions. Usually, they’re word-echoes, lingering in the head while putting down the first draft. There’s nothing wrong with using the same word more than once in the text, but preferably not on the same page or even in the same paragraph. On p65, we have ‘look of unspeakable irritability’ and five paragraphs lower, ‘crumpled mask of unspeakable irritability’ followed in the next paragraph with ‘almost gibbering irritability’. That’s enough to make most readers irritable. In four consecutive paragraphs there are four repetitions of ‘repulsion/repulsive’ on p119.

Yet his writing is famous for good reason. Digging deep into human psyche, perhaps: ‘She leaned down to him and gripped him tightly round the neck, pressing him to her bosom in a little frenzy of pain. Her bitter disillusionment with life, her unalleviated shame and degradation during the last four years, had driven her into loneliness, and hardened her till a large part of her nature was caked and sterile.’ (p40)  And from the other point of view, we have: ‘Geoffrey pressed her to his bosom: having her, he felt he could bruise the lips of the scornful, and pass on erect, unabateable. With her to complete him, to form the core of him, he was firm and whole. Needing her so much, he loved her fervently.’ (p41) Nothing graphic, but heartfelt, it seems.

No man is an island, yet each person has the potential to be isolated and alone even in a crowded room. In many of these stories, he tackles that aloneness, trying to come to terms with it.

From time to time writers need to read earlier writers’ work, to learn how they did it. And of course if you’re planning on writing a historical piece, then immerse yourself in the work of writers from that period, to gauge the style of dialogue and the vocabulary used.

My favourite D.H. Lawrence books are The Rainbow and Women in Love.

Book review - Love Among the Haystacks

David Herbert Lawrence was a prolific writer of short stories. This book collects six: ‘Love among the haystacks’ (1930), ‘The lovely lady’ (1933), ‘Rawdon’s Roof’ (1928), ‘The rocking-horse winner’ (1926), ‘The man who loved islands’ (1929) and ‘The man who died’ (1929). Lawrence died in 1930, aged 44.

‘Love among the haystacks’ is a well-observed bucolic episode in the lives of two brothers, Maurice, the youngest, and Geoffrey. It suffers from the use of dialect, which slows the pace and hinders the reader’s comprehension. The brothers are working in the fields, stacking hay. The local vicar joins them briefly accompanied by his children’s governess, a Pole, Paula, who is about the same age as the brothers. Accidentally on purpose, Geoffrey topples Maurice from the haystack; fortunately, he survives the fall and is presently administered to by Paula: ‘Maurice lay pale and smiling in her lap, whilst she cleaved to him like a mate. One felt instinctively that they were mated.’ (p18)

Geoffrey befriends Lydia, the wife of a tramp who sponges off the field labourers. Lydia’s story is a tragic one, told in the barn while the pair shelter from rain. The boys get their girls.

‘The Lovely Lady’ concerns the unpleasant Pauline Attenborough, 72, her niece Cecilia and her son Robert. Strange, that of all the names to choose, Lawrence opts for Paula in the above story and Pauline in this one. Pauline was ‘lovely’ in the sense that she appeared to most people to be only half her age in looks. Robert’s elder brother died in odd circumstances. Cecilia is attracted to Robert, but his domineering mother is in the way. The only person Pauline ever loved was herself. A story about power and lost love.

‘Rawdon’s Roof’ is a rather slight tale. Rawdon insisted that no woman would ever sleep again under his roof. Laced with wry humour: ‘One looked at the roof, and wondered what it had done amiss.’ The reason for Rawdon’s ire is a failed love affair, of no great consequence.  A little irony and an amusing confusion of names are not enough to quicken interest.

‘The Rocking-Horse Winner’ is known as a ghost story, which is a shame, as that fact detracts from some of the surprise. It was published in The Ghost Book edited by Cynthia Asquith.  A beautiful mother found she could not love her children – a boy and two girls. There was never enough money for them to maintain their social standing in the town. ‘The house came to be haunted by the unspoken phrase: There must be more money!’ (p82) The family seemed to have no luck in the money stakes. Uncle Oscar visits regularly and catches young Paul on his rocking-horse, riding a ‘winner’ in his imagination. Then he announces the name of the winning horse – Sansovino at Ascot, which won last week! Paul has a strong affinity with the butler, Bassett, who likes a flutter on the horses. Before long, Paul’s racing on the rocking-horse suggests winners of races yet to be run, and both Bassett and Paul and eventually Uncle Oscar dabble successfully. Paul is striving to grasp the luck that his parents lack, so they can be happy. It ends tragically.

‘The Man Who Loved Islands’ is about Mr Cathcart, who bought an island and was master of all he surveyed. There also dwell in a few cottages an old married couple, a widower and his son and two daughters. So he wasn’t quite alone. Financial circumstances prompted the islander to move to a smaller island, where he took the widower and his daughter to work for him. On this second island ‘there were no human ghosts, no ghosts of any ancient race. The sea, and the spume and the weather had washed them all out, washed them out so there was only the sound of the sea itself, its own ghost, myriad-voiced, communing and plotting and shouting all winter long.’ (p110) He has sex with the daughter, Flora, and she becomes pregnant. He flees to a third island, wanting to be stripped of humanity, wanting nothing to do with his fellow men and women. He seeks emptiness. A wasted life.

‘The Man Who Died’ was originally titled ‘The Escaped Cock’. There are echoes from the previous story: ‘In his own world he was alone, utterly alone. These things around him were in a world that had never died. But he himself had died, or had been killed from out of it, and all that remained now was the great void nausea of utter disillusion.’ (p130) The dead man walking is a resurrected Christ who falls in love with a priestess of Isis. It ends with the phrase ‘Tomorrow is another day.’ – the same ending found in Gone With the Wind!

I’ve read a number of D.H. Lawrence’s books and found this one a disappointment. He distances himself from the characters, and tells the stories rather than shows us through emotions. Yet his observation of nature is excellent, so much so that you can almost smell the flowers, feel the stubble of the cut wheat and the damp presence of rain and sea surf. 

The cover of this copy (1981) was one of a series by Yvonne Gilbert.

Dear Editor - rejection

All writers have to get used to rejection. It's a rare writer who has never been rejected. You need to don a thick skin in the morning, especially before the mail arrives (snail or e).

You won't be surprised to learn that many subsequently famous authors received their fair share of 'thanks, but no thanks' notes. Here are a few:

Crash (1973 by J.G. Ballard - 'The author of this book is beyond psychiatric help.'

A Study in Scarlet (1887) by Arthur Conan Doyle, introducing Sherlock Holmes to the world - 'Neither long enough for a serial nor short enough for a single story.'

The Last of the Plainsmen (1908) by Zane Grey - 'I do not see anything in this to convince me you can write either narrative or fiction.'

The Blessing Way (1970) by Tony Hillerman - 'If you insist on rewriting this, get rid of all that Indian stuff.'

The Rainbow (1915) by D.H. Lawrence - 'It is unpublishable as it stands because of its flagrant love passages.'

Peyton Place (1955) by Grace Metalious - 'Definitely too racy for us.'

Animal Farm (1945) by George Orwell - 'It is impossible to sell animal stories in the U.S.A.'

Leaves of Grass (1855) by Walt Whitman - 'We deem it injudicious to commit ourselves.'

and two of my favourites:

The Time Machine (1895) by H.G. Wells - 'It is not interesting enough for the general reader and not thorough enough for the scientific reader.'

The War of the Worlds (1898) by H.G. Wells - 'An endless nightmare. I do not believe it would take... I think the verdict would be "Oh don't read this horrid book".'

However, if you do get rejected, I do recommend you don't respond with any invective or abuse, such as our alien wannabe scribe: