Tag Archives: creative-writing

Using punctuation to lock readers into your protagonist’s POV

Life update! While I’m still pursuing writing, right now I’m detouring to focus specifically on developing my editing skills. Along with reading for Strange Horizons and Flash Fiction Online, I’ve taken on more freelance editing and story coaching jobs this year, and I’m working towards a copyediting certificate from UC San Diego. I thought some of the assignments I turned in for the first course in the UCSD program, a grammar intensive, might make for fun blog posts, so here’s one about using the semicolon (and other punctuation) to guide the reader through description of setting in a story, locking them into your protagonist or narrator’s POV.

Using punctuation to lock readers into your protagonist’s POV

According to The McGraw-Hill Education Handbook of English Grammar and Usage, semicolons should be reserved for instances “when the two parts of a compound sentence—the two independent clauses—are very closely related” (260). But, assuming fluid prose and sound rhetoric, all consecutive sentences from any given text may be expected to bear a degree of “close” relationship to each other. Although one can imagine two sentences side by side which bear absolutely no relation—for example, “I find it difficult to understand contemporary punctuation usage through studying examples from Moby Dick. My cat just vomited on my toe”—in practice, most writing will not contain sentences this jarringly disconnected. So how does one determine if two independent clauses are closely related enough to warrant a semicolon?

I’d like to explore this question in the context of writing fiction, particularly in describing setting. In a passage of setting description, generally the sentences are all “closely related”—they all describe the setting, lighting up aspects of place formerly obscured, like a flashlight beam in a night hiker’s hand. So when and why might a semicolon be used?

When describing setting in fiction, I try to think about where, based on the details I select, I am turning the reader’s attention, and how the reader is spatially experiencing the world of the book. If the protagonist enters a garden, I could describe the grackles in the pecan trees, the stink of stagnant pond water, or the irises wilting in the afternoon sun—details which ground the reader in a real sense of place, while also doing something to characterize the protagonist/narrator, whom the reader will infer (consciously or subconsciously) is the one noticing and pointing these things out to them. Just look at how setting informs character through the narrator in Ella Fitzgerald’s song, “Tenderly,” who describes how “the evening breeze / caressed the trees / tenderly,” compared to the narrator in T. S. Eliot’s poem, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” who describes “the evening spread out against the sky / like a patient etherized upon a table”!

Recognizing that description of setting is really simulation of character gaze or movement through space, an author may use punctuation to moderate that gaze or movement—and the reader’s “movement” alongside them. Punctuation may serve not simply as grammar notation or reproduction of spoken language’s rhythm, but as a lever or regulating valve for the reader’s flow through the physical world described in the text.
Then, while all the sentences in a passage of description may technically be “closely related,” different punctuation choices can influence how closely a reader feels physically proximal to what is described, depending on the effect you want to produce.

Consider this passage of setting description from Satin Island by Tom McCarthy:

There was a small window. A few feet from this there was a drape that hung along the wall: this big wrinkled curtain. I don’t know why it was there—maybe for warmth; behind it there was just a wall as far as I could tell.


Each of these sentences could be said to be equally related, because they are all describing something about the same room. But McCarthy doesn’t join them all with semicolons. He saves it for a specific impact at the end, while slowly escalating towards it through other punctuation, tightly controlling how the reader moves through and experiences the space:

First, the initial period forces the reader to come up short at the window, simulating the way one is naturally drawn to and transfixed by a source of light upon entering an otherwise dark room. Next, the colon similarly emphasizes the prominence of another detail: a peculiar curtain, which might have blended into the shadows if only a comma had preceded it. While the window is “small,” the curtain is “big,” and McCarthy’s next punctuation choices serve to magnify the oppressive curtain even further: an em-dash links question and answer bubbling in the protagonist’s mind in response to the curtain. Finally, McCarthy drops a semicolon to provoke the reader, after a tense pause, to dare to draw back the curtain.

If McCarthy had used a period here instead, the reader would not experience the sense of a continuously deeper slide into the room, as if sucked into a whirlpool. The punctuation parallelism would have made the curtain and wall seem to sit statically next to each other, two-dimensional instead of three-dimensional. The reader would know there was a wall behind the curtain—but she would not have pulled back the curtain herself to discover it.

Whenever you write a passage describing setting, return during the editing phase to interrogate its punctuation. Think about how a comma might dip a reader’s finger into the pool, where a period pushes them all the way in. Could the enclosure of one detail in parentheses better effect the reader poking their head around a corner? Consider if a colon or an em-dash announces the presence of the gothic mansion at the end of the lane—and its door, creaking open, slowly, very slowly . . .

First Place for Flash Fiction – Roanoke Writers Conference

Quick update, this month I won first place at a flash fiction contest at the Roanoke Writers Conference!

The story I submitted, “She Stalks in Beauty, Like the Night,” is a slice of life high school sweetheart love story in a small town Texas. With lesbian vampires. I’m sending it out to magazines now to hopefully get it published somewhere.

It’s incredibly encouraging to conclude this first year of studying the craft of the short story by winning this award, and not simply because it feels like proof of my capability despite (oh, unceasing!) doubts. This story is a product of community, and to me the award symbolizes less my own skill and more the dear friends who have helped me in these early stages of my writing journey.

Context: I first drafted this story for the Clarion West flash fiction workshop I did over the summer, and drastically revised it based on critiques from friends I made there, to a level of quality I couldn’t have reached relying only on my own intuition and skills. Plus, I wouldn’t have heard about this conference and contest if it weren’t for a lovely friend I met through work, who herself heard about this through her library writing group. And the conference itself was a huge, collaborative effort of a community that truly believes in supporting each other and new writers.

On that note: check out the North Texas Writers Collective, sign up for their newsletter and go to next year’s Roanoke Writer Conference! They have so much to offer, particularly the community and mutual aid network behind it. The conference, organized thanks to DG Swain, Alicia Holston at the Roanoke Public Library, and many more, and packed with presentations and workshops by successful authors across genres and trad/indie publishing, was totally free. I actually personally left $50 richer than I arrived thanks to the flash fiction contest (which also completed my little goal to make $100 from speculative fiction this year!) but MORE IMPORTANTLY I left richer in information, networking, and friendship. At one point, I looked around the conference and just thought, “these are my people.” I felt like for the first time, I had found my local crew in terms of love for the craft of writing, and I’ve been continuing to meet up since then with friends I made there.

I can’t recommend this conference enough for writers in the Dallas/Fort Worth area and beyond, and I’m looking forward to what else the North Texas Writers Collective cooks up. What impressed me most was the genuine love I witnessed, writers who have “made it” turning around to uplift the next generations and share everything they can, and cultivate a collaborative and healthy community. I’ve unfortunately experienced my share of toxic communities, and a lot depends on the seeds you plant and the presence of experienced, wiser members bringing up newbies with good principles. So it was gratifying and even healing to find an intergenerational community planting good seeds.

For other new writers who are nervous about conferences and trying to figure out how to make connections and learn: just show up! I literally just showed up, not knowing anybody or what to expect, and just being present opened me to being approached by people who would share resources and encouragement and become new friends and mentors.

Reviews you can use: Borne, by Jeff VanderMeer


First blog post, welcome!

I’m going to start by blogging edited-down versions of the analyses I write after reading stories, paired with writing exercises based on the book I’m reviewing, I call it “reviews you can use”!

As part of my writing practice, after finishing a book I go back over it and take notes on its plot, characters, structure, techniques, etc. With shorter stories, I will often construct a complete “template” based on the story’s beats and unique quirks, then write a story using this template. These blog posts will pass on templates and exercises I’ve come up with, which I hope you’ll find fun and useful too.

They will contain spoilers and may not make as much sense if you haven’t read the book yourself, but I hope you will find the writing exercises fun and helpful either way (scroll to the end for these), and that sharing these examples of how I analyze a text may also be useful in your own approach to breaking down a story.

Analysis: Borne, by Jeff VanderMeer


Warning: Spoilers!

Summary

Rachel, a scavenger in the nightmarish apocalyptic “City,” where biotech creatures engineered by “the Company” have taken over, finds Borne, a mysterious creature. It begins to rapidly grow and change, and she becomes a kind of mother to him, with all the love and heartbreak that entails. The story engages themes of not just motherhood, but personhood, as well as love and trauma, nature and nurture, destruction and evolution.

You can’t shake the feeling you’re reading Alice and Wonderland, but a version VanderMeer altered so much along the way that it’s a totally different story– only some vestigial Alice and Wonderland vibe continues to haunt your reading, like Rachel points out the reader yourself haunts her story. The Red Queen has been recast as the Magician, Wick whom Rachel pursues in their “warren” home is the White Rabbit, Mord is the Cheshire Cat, and most tellingly at the end of the story we learn that Rachel quite literally came here through a looking glass.

The narrator – the key to why this story works (for me)

The story’s world is so (darkly) whimsical and surreal, it almost turned me off, because absurdist stories are not so much to my taste. It takes a few chapters to get your bearings, you feel like Rachel when she looks at Borne’s shapeshifting colors and considers that her eyes didn’t evolve to be able to see anything like this.

But I was quickly anchored by the real-world-ness of the narrator Rachel, and kept grounded throughout as much by her presence as by her own grappling with the world. Through Rachel, I was able to appreciate the world as a metaphor for the psyche, and its chaos as a metaphor for trauma and growth, in a way I’m not able to appreciate Alice in Wonderland. Rachel is completely human and relatable, and she’s in charge of the story, so despite the madness going on around her, we’re able to stay sane through her and her ordering of the world for us via her narration and her actions in it. It also helps Rachel feel so real as a character because she makes us real to her– she serves to give a sense of meaning to many people’s lives in the story despite the chaos (both external and existential), including us readers.

I just started reading VanderMeer’s Annihilation since it was turned into one of my favorite movies, and it’s interesting in both books there’s a reason we’re receiving this story, here it’s Rachel achieving her dream of writing a book, there it’s the Biologist completing her requisite journal entries during their voyage into the mysterious Area X.

Dialogue

The dialogue is super fun and tightly woven into the activity of each scene. VanderMeer delightfully captures not only how kids talk, but how this particular type of kid would talk, who is not human and is growing up in 5 directions instead of 1. In the acknowledgments, VanderMeer thanks stepdaughter Erin Kennedy and grandson “Mr. R” Riley for help with this dialogue. That’s a good cue to seek advice and assistance in the writing process, and in particular go out and study and inquire from the type of voices you’re trying to emulate.

A flaw; there were a couple parts where Wick’s dialogue didn’t sound like him, but more like Borne. This was confusing because sometimes, Wick sounding like Borne was intentional foreshadowing that he WAS Borne pretending to be Wick. But there were one or two parts where he was definitely Wick but still sounded like Borne. Maybe this was to foreshadow that since Wick was also non-human, he occasionally had his idiosyncrasies. But it took me out of the story at these moments because it didn’t sound authentic to his character and felt like a fumble where VanderMeer got used to writing as Borne so the “Borne voice” leaked into Wick voice.

Storytelling theme and narrative devices

There’s a strong theme of storytelling within the story, and VanderMeer also employs various devices to spice up the one running narrative by Rachel, like injecting journal entries, uncovered secret files, flashbacks, and a letter. Rachel herself wanted to be a writer, and her relationship with Borne, especially in its first stage, really develops through her continuously telling stories to him, even before she realizes he can understand her. She also, obviously, tells us this story, fulfilling her dream of being a writer. Rachel’s partner, Wick, designs drugs which can erase your memories and/or insert new ones– he too is a kind of storyteller, or inverse storyteller, untelling people their life stories. Borne himself is like a walking library of stories, since he remembers the life of every creature he “knows” (eats, kind of). We don’t get to know all the stories he knows, but VanderMeer probably wrote them out as worldbuilding, because you get glimpses into their existence based on things Borne says and does.

Significant names

You can’t do this with every type of story, but I find it fun when names have literal or significant meanings, and Borne, in all its weirdness, gets to run with this. All the names in this story seem to have significance, although only some are explained.

Rachel is the only person with a normal name (which tracks with her being the Alice who’s not from this world), explained as a name she was given because it didn’t run on either side of her family, a compromise between her Romeo and Juliet-esque parents. In the Bible, the original Rachel is an important matriarch whose relationship to motherhood is also complex and traumatic, interwoven with infertility, betrayal, and surrogacy. One could draw many parallels between the biblical story of Rachel and the story here –they both raise someone else’s child who appears to be a kind of divine intervention, they are both “discovered” by their partners beside pools of water, etc.–, but I won’t belabor (no pun intended) the point.

Rachel named “Borne” after a play on words her partner once made about being born/borne. Borne’s name gains added significance as a creature who is borne (carried, and carried to term) first by Mord, then by Rachel, and by whom others are borne, since his nature is to incorporate the material and information around him into his body.

VanderMeer’s own name indicates Dutch heritage, and in Dutch “moord” means “murder,” a fitting name for the embodiment of destruction that is Mord. (Also interesting, “VanderMeer” means “From the Lake” and many creatures in this story come from watery places).

“Wick” is more ambiguous, but my theory is that there’s an off-stage story behind this, that Wick was originally designed as a bioluminescent creature, and this is a candle metaphor –at certain points Rachel dramatically describes him as radiant with light, especially when his love for her is fully revealed in his acts towards the end of the story. The way she describes this can be read as metaphor, but looking back he may actually have a luminescent quality which Rachel was consciously or subconsciously picking up on.

An incomplete picture and keeping some mysteries

VanderMeer delivers on the big promises, but introduces plenty of mystery that doesn’t get answered, in a way that you won’t feel disappointed because you got the answers to the biggest questions, but which serve as further hooks to keep you engaged. Some examples:

  • What is Borne? We are given enough angles to form our own understanding of Borne, but a definitive answer is never given — we’re satisfied with this because we realize it’s asking the wrong question, or rather, this is the ultimate question of all creatures, and does not have a definitive answer– existentialism etc.
  • What’s up with the Company and the City? We get to know them fairly well, but at the end of the book there’s no definitive history given of where either came from and how they got to the state they’re in today, aside from the general understanding of human failings, capitalism, and climate crisis leading to apocalypse.
  • Who is Mord? — unlike Borne, we get a more definitive answer to “what” Mord is, but not who. We learn he was initially a human being who turned into a creature, but not who that human was. I was expecting to learn more about who was before, especially the way Wick talked about him sometimes I thought they might have been in a relationship. But I guess the interesting thing here is that, Mord is human who becomes a creature, who is he is what he is now, like everyone else.

Personhood

This is one of the two top themes of the book in my opinion, beside motherhood. “Am I a person?” “What does it mean to be a person” etc. are questions regularly asked directly by characters, or raised in the readers’ mind as the story unfolds.

The contrasts between characters and their relation to personhood allow for a holistic contemplation of personhood and humanity. We see each character as one thing and then learn they “are,” or were, something else entirely. For example, we see Wick as human for most of the story, but he doesn’t see himself that way. Later we learn that Wick is a creature we mistook for human. But he does become human, after self-sabotaging his own personhood for so long through self-loathing, love of Rachel, and hatred of Borne.

Within this theme arises the question of nature versus nurture, or the big impact both have. On the one hand, Mord is a human who is transformed into a creature through the Company’s evil surgery –nurture over nature. On the other hand, Borne is a creature who is transformed into a person through Rachel’s love, but also through an inner light or nature which understands himself in a subconscious way to be deserving of more love and personhood than even Rachel gives him –nurture, but wait! More deeply, nature.

Rachel is the only one who actually doesn’t change that much, now that I think about it, despite being the ostensible protagonist as the narrator (though Borne is really the protagonist imo). Or at least the change with Rachel is more subtle. At the beginning, the trauma was so great that she doesn’t know how she got here, she has a broken relationship with her beloved, and she’s also given up her dream of being a writer. At the end, she learns what happened to her parents, that their great act of love seeking a better life for her got them killed and brought her here, she has a complete and healed relationship with her beloved, and she has apparently written this story. She’s been able to heal and self-actualize even in what we initially considered apocalypse, she’s found new life at the end of the world.

Some other thoughts on personhood/character development

  • Borne’s dressing up as a wizard to disguise himself was the most adorable thing and made me just fall in love with him as a character. And as a shapeshifting creature that can look like anything and beyond, the choices he makes or feels he has to make about what he looks like serve as meditations on children trying to please parents, people trying to please societal norms, etc.
  • The horror of when Rachel, after obviously loving Borne as her child, completely neglects to check up on his wounds after asking him to defend her with his life, was one of the most shattering moments of the book for me. The mother using the child as a human shield and then just absentmindedly forgetting to even check up on the wounds he incurred in protecting her was brutal, it revealed in a way she doesn’t see him as a person like she sees her own kind (even ironically when the other human turns out to be not human at all). In this case, Borne is more human, or at least a better person, than Rachel. This was a key scene for interrogating who is really “human” or “person.”


Mixed feelings about the ending

The very last lines, in which we learn that Borne survived in a way, but that Rachel will kill him if he shows any sign of personhood, didn’t sit right with me. His survival felt a little deus ex machina, and Rachel’s reaction felt like VanderMeer delivering a moral to the story that I didn’t realize he was pushing, and which I highly disagreed with. For most of the read, I thought the book was gonna end with Borne devouring everything and this turning out to be a good thing because he’s a kind of preserving, healing, synthesizing force that becomes a new world in itself. So for Rachel to conclude it’s right to kill Borne felt all kinds of wrong.

But reflecting further, I can also see this as a masterful ending. Because remember, Rachel is telling us this story, not VanderMeer. Rachel’s conclusion is at the end of the day, Borne’s nature is a killing machine, so he needs to be killed before he can kill. But VanderMeer’s conclusion, is to have us interrogate this, Rachel’s conclusion, and apply the same logic to her: maybe humans are a killing machine that can be kept around in a future run by more evolved creatures only if we’re “nice” (one of the story’s motif words), but we may just to be eliminated if it seems we’re doomed by nature to be a killing machine.

This ending states that humans kind of suck and can’t think beyond certain limits, and Rachel will never be able to really outgrow her limited morality in this regard. But just like the book earlier wondered, “you wouldn’t hate a wolf for hunting, that’s its nature,” maybe in ending on this disappointing note with Rachel, it’s inviting us to consider that we shouldn’t hate humans for the apparent evils we’ve done either. It’s our nature, just like a wolf can’t choose to be vegetarian, we’re stuck thinking in terms of killing or being killed. Or maybe we’re like Borne, and may have [been] developed to be a killing machine, but can choose to be good, in the right conditions.

Either way, the ending seems to point to the City’s salvation via the creatures that succeed humans, who aren’t just better because they try to be better, as we try but fail to overcome our nature, but are better because they have better natures to begin with (a sort of Aristotelian ethics). Evidence for this interpretation comes in the angelic figure of the fox, who moves through the world (literally, through solid matter), accompanying its dying creatures in love, without yielding to them or harming them, on its way to building a world beyond them. I think this is an interesting form of climate optimism championed by VanderMeer, that humans may wreck and irrevocably alter the earth, and go extinct, but the earth will not end, and life will continue to evolve and improve.

Writing exercises based on Borne by Jeff VanderMeer

  1. Practice writing child dialogue. Take notes as you listen to kids you know, or lookup youtube videos of kids speaking, analyze its sense and syntax, get inspired by its quirks, and then try writing your own.
  2. Descriptive chapter headings. Outline or organize a story via descriptive chapter headings, like Borne is structured. For example, “What Wick had told me about the fish project and the company,” “What I found and how I found it,” etc. The novel Cracks uses this device as well, often in the form of questions, which the chapter answers: “Why did our parents send us to this school?”, “How we first heard about Fiamma.” Posing a question about the story as a chapter heading at then writing to answer the question can be a good way to brainstorm material as well as retain as a narrative device in the final draft.
  3. Collage. Embellish or shake up your story by telling part of it through a journal entry, letter between characters, or flashback. For practice, try delivering the same content through all three different vehicles.
  4. Who’s your narrator and why do they write? Write in the first person as if this is a real story you’re passing on, and consider in what manner it would have been written down and delivered, to whom, and why.
  5. Write from nature. VanderMeer’s books attest to his growing up in, studying, and loving complex ecosystems. Spend time studying, actually studying, the flora and fauna of the place where you live. You can use apps like iNaturalist or PlantNet that allow you to snap pictures and quickly learn about what you’re looking at. Use this knowledge to enrich your worldbuilding and/or write an apocalyptic story based in your backyard and how the creatures you find there might evolve.