Thoughts on Rhetoric

In the study of writing, the term 'rhetoric' is guaranteed to show up eventually. Rhetoric is a term that is difficult to define because everybody has their own definitions for it. I define rhetoric as the quality of communication. It's a simple definition, but that's the only way to cover everything that rhetoric covers.

Writing at its core is communication. You have thoughts, pictures, emotions, all in your head, and you want to put them in other people's heads. It's like a radio signal. The source sends it out and the receiver picks it up. Like a radio signal, though, there is going to be a degradation in the quality of the transmission. There is no real helping it; it simply happens as the signal travels from the source to the receiver. The weaker the signal, the less like the original it sounds to the receiver.

When you write, you are the source and your writing is the signal. Your goal is to have your writing be so strong a signal that your audience gets in their heads exactly what is in your head. And again, the rhetoric is the quality of your communication (or the strength of your signal).

The more your audience gets, the stronger and more effective your rhetoric is. At the basic level, you want your audience to understand what you are trying to say. If you are telling a story of a funny conversation you had, your audience should never get confused as to who was saying which line and what exactly they were talking about. On the next level, there should be an atmosphere about it. Effective rhetoric makes you feel like you are part of the story. The audience feels like they were there, watching it happen themselves. On the final level, there is the emotional state. This is what we usually think of when we talk about rhetoric: making other people feel the same way that you feel. The most effective rhetoric make s people laugh at a funny story and cry at a tragic one. Ineffective rhetoric will make a potentially funny story merely be a recollection of events that happened. And the worst rhetoric will be a confusing jumble of nonsense.

Of course, the means of achieving strong rhetoric are a whole other matter. That requires a great deal of study and practice. But it's not the kind of thing that requires a college degree in rhetoric. It's the kind of thing that requires practicing writing. If you are an effective writer, you have effective rhetoric. If you know how to make people interested in what you have to say, then you know your way around rhetoric, even if you don't know all the academic terms for it. And in the end, the skills in rhetoric are more useful than the knowledge of rhetoric. (I will grant, though, that it would be ironic if one was good at rhetoric, but lousy at explaining it.)

All Writing Counts As Writing

How much writing do you do in a day? When people ask me this question, they don't like my answers. Right now, at the bare minimum, I write one blog post, respond to emails, have at least a few conversations on IM, and post on a few message boards. According to most people, none of that is writing. Why?

All of this is colloquial writing; it's informal. We aren't writing about writerly things. Unless we are writing a story of some kind, we aren't really writing. I call bullshit.

All writing counts as writing. Writing is telling a story. Your story may be a fictional work about characters you create, or it can be about your own life (like in the creative nonfiction genre). Suppose you had a crazy experience when you went out to go bowling with your friends over the weekend. If you wrote those experiences down as a short story, then you would be writing. If you wrote those experiences down in an instant message or an email, how is there any difference? At best, the difference would be that nobody is requiring you to use standard written English. And if you believe that's the only difference between writing and nonwriting, I don't want to be your friend.

Even still, suppose that standard written English was required for writing to be considered valid. There is no reason to not use it. In fact, when I write my emails, IMs, and blogs, I am pretty much always using perfect English. I may lapse in capitalization with instant messages, but that's about the worst of it. That means that I am still writing when I do these inferior forms of writing.

At its core, writing is storytelling. An effective writer will tell a story that people will understand and will tell that story in such an entertaining way that the audience will want to listen to the whole thing. Even if you are talking about the most mundane things like the weather outside or your drive to work, you can be entertaining, interesting; you can be a writer.

Treat all forms of writing as legitimate writing and use them to practice your writing skills. The lessons you learn for formal writing are always useful for any kind of writing. Don't repeat words. Use varying sentence length. Use strong words to make your point. Avoid weak words and unnecessary phrases. If you have trouble with the rules of spelling and grammar, then practice using them with all the text messages, instant messages, emails, and everything else you regularly write in. You'll be amazed how much you can grow if you practice being a good writer every time you write something.

Use All of Your Senses

There is no doubt that sight is the most powerful of our five senses. Hearing comes next, but it doesn't even come close to rivaling sight. However, we do have 5 five senses, which means we can describe things in five different ways.

When I read stories, they tend to play as movies in my head. My mind creates mental images of the scenes and the characters and they move around as my eyes move along the pages. When I write, I find the same thing happening; my mind is showing me the actions and I am recording what I see. This is all well and good, but it tends to focus on the visual too much.

Suppose the hero walks into a dungeon in the basement of an old castle. We can see cobwebs and stone walls and shackles, but what else is there? Can you smell the concoction of sweat, feces, blood, and iron that lingers in the air, reminding the hero of the atrocities that once occurred there? Can you hear the deathly silence (or perhaps the phantom screams of the prisoners once tortured there)? Can you feel the rust on the prison bars or the dust settled on an open logbook? Can you taste the stale water standing in a tin cup?

I will admit that taste is a particularly difficult sense to write for. Tasting things requires a great amount of trust that the object will not poison or otherwise harm us. However, taste is closely related to smell, so a smell that is particularly strong or thick can be tasted, despite not actually having the object touch the tongue.

When you use more senses in your writing, you add depth and realism to your story. We are doing more than seeing the action; we are experiencing it. Although the other four senses are not as powerful for knowing our surroundings, they make up for it by acting as powerful triggers. Smell is notoriously powerful. The right smell can trigger long lost memories from decades in the past. Certain tactile feelings are similarly unforgettable. Sounds, such as a familiar voice, can be thought to help bring people out of comas or regain memories after amnesia.

If you are going to incorporate other senses into your writing, remember to make them natural. They shouldn't be a gimmick, nor should they feel like they've been artificially inserted. Talk about what somebody smells when that character is taking a deep breath or when a particular scent is noteworthy. The point is to create an immersive world.

Death

Perhaps the most powerful thing in life is death. It is the most extreme thing that can happen to a person. It is irreversible. It truly is the end. As such, it makes sense that it is common fodder for writing.

Death is a universal experience in that everybody knows and understands it. Death is also a deeply personal experience; the power of an individual's death depends on the closeness one had to the deceased. This is what makes death a difficult subject. Death in general is merely a concept. Joseph Stalin is attributed with the saying, "A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic." The only way to make death powerful is to kill somebody that the audience is close to.

The other problem with death is that it is so extreme. Although there are storytelling techniques that can subvert the finality of death, they either involve ridiculously circuitous plots or a fantasy world where either science or magic can bring people back. In this extremeness, death becomes easy. To make a character die becomes a quick way of getting them out of the picture. On top of that, one of the top two worst ways to end a story is to have everybody die (the other one is to make it all a dream). Making death cheap makes it meaningless.

One of my writing teachers told my class to avoid having characters die or writing about death. The idea was that although death is the most extreme thing that can happen to us, it is much more moving to see a person live and struggle through that life.

I do agree with my teachers on that idea. I don't think that we should avoid writing about death like the plague, but we should think twice before heading in that direction. Why are we writing about it? Is it for ourselves or is it for other people? Is it because it's easy or because it's necessary? If you have a legitimate reason for writing about death, then do it. If not, then maybe what needs to die is your story.

Originality

Originality is a great concern for writers, especially beginning writers. Those who can break down individual stories into basic components realize that every story has already been written. Those who can't do that see that there are millions of stories already made, so it's impossible for their story to be original.

This is a paralyzing fear. When you think that none of your ideas are your own or worth sharing, you will not write any of them. And since fear is irrational, there is no reasoning that can have a meaningful impact. It is easy to say that simply writing your version of a classic story in your voice and style will give enough individuality to make it not a copy. It's a lot harder to get people to believe it.

There is no magic cure for fear. There are techniques to circumvent it, though. If somebody thinks their story is unoriginal, find out why, then simply do something different. If somebody thinks that there are tons of stories that are all original, show them that most stories are retellings of the same basic story and that it is possible to write a good story that has already been written before.

Occasionally, originality is merely a generic crutch. Though they claim that their ideas aren't original, they still don't want to write when something completely new is in front of them. In that case, the fear is merely a matter of self-confidence. And although there is no cure for that, either, the treatment for it is easy: write something. The only way to believe that you can write is to actually write. If you don't spontaneously combust, then you're a writer. Then all you have to do is become a better writer, which everybody has to do. And that's way more important than an original story, anyway.

Imposing Boundaries

Sometimes I think that my writing professors were too lax. For many of my creative writing classes, it felt like my assignments amounted to "you can write about anything you want." Sometimes it was "I want you to write about X, but if you want to write about Y, feel free to do that instead." These two are a little different, but not much. They are also very difficult to handle.

Coming up with ideas can be he hardest part of writing for some people. It can certainly be the thing that stops people from even trying to write. When you tell somebody to write about anything, they are overloaded with possibilities. They need to narrow their scope and focus on only a few possible paths.

I understand why my teachers were lax, though. They didn't want to stifle creativity. If they assign us to write a story that takes place on a train and we want to write one that takes place on a bus, we should be allowed to change the assignment because we will be creatively writing and be interested in our work, which is one of the main points of the class. But the catch is that this creativity generally comes from limitations. The student may never come up with the story that takes place on a bus if they weren't assigned a story that takes place on a train. If the student was told that they could write a story that takes place on a train, or anything else if they wanted, then the student may not go through the same mental processes and wouldn't think of the story that takes place on a bus.

So, these boundaries are important in helping students focus and think, but they are not so important that they should never be broken. The question, then, is when to break these boundaries. Personally, I think that the answer is when the student is personally compelled to break them. If I was a teacher and found that my student wrote a story that took place on a bus, I would not deduct points. I would ask why the student made the change to understand the reasoning (because I would hope it was for a good reason, as opposed to misreading the assignment), but in a creative writing class, the main point is to develop good creative writing, so that is what matters most.

Some students are not bold enough to break rules without permission, though. In academia, where grades matter and can affect the rest of one's life, I don't blame students for being hesitant to go against teachers. However, if a student wants to break the boundaries so much that he or she is compelled to ask for permission, that is good enough for me to grant it.

The important thing to remember, though, is that not every student is that compelled or motivated. I think all of my classmates in the Professional Writing major at one point said that they had no idea what to write for an assignment. Those people needed boundaries. They needed an imposed structure to build from. Teachers who don't give that structure to their students are doing harm to those he need the most help.

Compelled writers will always find a way. They will either create within a structure, break the boundaries, or create without any help in the first place. Those who aren't as compelled or inspired to write are the ones who need these boundaries, which is why you should impose them and why you should make them look very firm.

Making Characters: By Actions

I've heard it said that actions speak louder than words. In theory, if you want to know who a person is, you would be best off observing their actions. I have mixed feelings about this in real life, but as a tool for creating characters, it can be useful.

This goes along with my idea of starting vague. Start with a blank slate character, make them do some actions, and build from there. Everything happens for a reason, so whatever actions a character takes have some rationale. If you give a character some seemingly random characteristics, you can then try to figure out what would make those characteristics occur.

Similarly, I have sometimes created characters by thinking of a habit and considering what causes it. For example, most people are afraid of the rain. When storm clouds are overhead, people wrap themselves up as tight as possible. When rain is falling, they either don't go outside or will literally run from one roof to another. Other people, though, love the rain. They embrace it and run outside during a storm to play outside and jump in puddles. Both of those people looks at the other like they are weirdos.

I wonder what causes each of these personalities. Why does a person, who is made up of at least 70% water, who takes showers in falling water, absolutely hate the water? The common response is that they hate being wet, but there has to be more than that. Why does a person, who spends the vast majority of life being dry on dry land, only getting wet to get clean (and immediately drying off) love the water so much?

People think and do very strange things at times. But these things are expressions of who we are, even when we don't mean them to be. People can be defined by their actions, so creating characters that way is a great technique.