How to Deliver Your Message: Part 1, Avoid The Big Moment

Most writers want to say something that's going to have a strong and lasting impact. To deliver a message to your readers, it’s tempting to go for The Big Moment. The Big Moment is a point when the author reveals The Truth. Suddenly the plot and characters and metaphors and images fall away, and the author bares the real meaning of the work, and maybe even what the writer feels is the real meaning of life.

Is this sort of direct message a good idea for a writer? What are the consequences of reaching for The Big Moment?

Here’s an example of a Big Moment. In Ayn Rand’s novel, The Fountainhead, the architect Howard Roark, loosely based on Frank Lloyd Wright, has to stand trial for dynamiting the façade of a building he himself designed. Roark destroys the front of his own building because his design was altered, and the new version violates both his vision and the agreement he had with the developer about artistic control.

When Roark goes on trial, he elects to defend himself, and speaks to the jury for eight solid pages. Yes, eight uninterrupted pages! At least it only takes 710 pages to get to his harangue. Here’s a sample of what he says:

“The man who attempts to live for others is a dependent. He is a parasite in motive and makes parasites of those he serves. The relationship produces nothing but mutual corruption.… This country was not based on selfless service, sacrifice, renunciation or any precept of altruism. It was based on a man’s right to the pursuit of happiness. His own happiness. Not anyone else’s. A private, personal, selfish motive.”

[Copyright © Ayn Rand, 1968]

In this endless lecture to the jury, Howard Roark is only a megaphone for Ayn Rand. He's not a character with a personality, only a vehicle for an idea, and not a very well-thought out or humane idea. It’s a Big Moment.

Poets are not immune from The Big Moment, either. The temptation to wave the moral like a huge flag is just too great at times. At the opposite end of the political spectrum from Ayn Rand is the French poet Louis Aragon, one of the founding members of the surrealist group and an avowed communist.

                          Louis Aragon, photographed by Man Ray

Aragon published the poem “The Red Front” in 1931 in Moscow, a poem that speaks of the time when the supporters of communism will triumph under the banner of the proletariat (referred to as "it" at this point in the poem):

It’s just waiting for the day the hour
the minute the second
when that lethal gunshot hits home
and the bullet’s aim is so true that all the social fascist doctors
leaning over the corpse of its victim
try in vain to run their eager fingers under that lace shirt
to listen with their stethoscopes to its heart already rotting
no they won’t find the usual cure
and they fall into the hands of rioters who line them up against the wall

(translation © 2013 by Zack Rogow)

“Social fascist” is a term that doctrinaire Marxists use to designate progressives and liberals. Not a lot of subtlety in that Big Moment! Aragon lays bare his political agenda for everyone to see. Communism galumphs to victory, capitalism and its apologists eat the dust. At least he extends the metaphor of the rotting corpse of capitalism! Though it’s quite a cliché.

I’ve picked extreme political philosophies to illustrate my point that The Big Moment rarely works. I could have picked statements I agree with, though. The Big Moment is usually a flawed artistic strategy no matter what the message. The reality is that few generalized moral judgments directed as a speech to the reader still surprise, provoke, or inspire us any more. They simply produce a yawn in the reader. Not only that, the reader is likely to recoil from the overbearing tone of a Big Moment. The Big Moment generally creates the exact opposite effect from what the author desired, which is to persuade the reader.

In my next blog, I’ll talk about why whether it’s still important, desirable, or possible to make a persuasive point or to deliver a message in a work of poetry, fiction, or nonfiction

How to Deliver Your Message: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4

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Zack’s new book of poetry, The Kama Sutra for Senior Citizens and Other Poems on Aging. Order in the USA    Order in the UK

Zack’s most recent translation: The Water Drinkers and Other Sketches of Paris in the Romantic Era by Henry Murger

Other posts of interest:

How to Get Published

Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop

How Not to Become a Literary Dropout

Putting Together a Book Manuscript

Working with a Writing Mentor

How to Deliver Your Message

Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?

Why Write Poetry?

Poetic Forms: Introduction, the Sonnet, the Sestina, the Ghazal, the Tanka, the Villanelle

Praise and Lament

How to Be an American Writer

Writers and Collaboration

Types of Closure in Poetry

How Not to Become a Literary Dropout, Part 1

 

The best way to avoid becoming a literary dropout is to keep writing. As all of us know, that’s easier said than done. There are many elements to keeping the writing flowing. I’ll try to cover several in this series of blogs.

To begin with, I’ll start with factors that relate just to the writing itself, and not to circumstances peripherally connected to, or outside of the writing.

The first suggestion I’d make is to choose projects that you can complete successfully. I had a terrific student several years ago, a guy who had a remarkable facility for spontaneous writing. Our class was studying the surrealist movement at the time. I asked the students to attempt automatic writing as a learning exercise. Automatic writing is a type of writing devised by the surrealist group in Paris in the early 1920s as a way of liberating the subconscious. In automatic writing you don’t edit or look back at what you’ve already written but compose spontaneously, as if dreaming onto the page. It’s a great exercise if you’re suffering from writer’s block or just want to warm up. The student I’m referring to was one of the few I’ve ever encountered who could create a finished piece of work using automatic writing. The whole class was amazed at what he created during that in-class exercise, without editing. If he had lived in Paris in the 1920s, he’d be a legend.

Surrealist group in Paris practices automatic writing

Now, you would think that a person who can compose literature so fluently would have absolutely no trouble finishing a longer work. Poof! You sit down, you write, it’s done. But that wasn’t the case. For his MFA thesis, he attempted to write a sort of modern-day Dante’s Inferno. A worthy project. The task was almost impossible, though, since the way he set it up, not one of the characters interacted with anyone but the narrator. Not only that, but we knew that each story ended with the death of the person recounting it, since all the characters besides the narrator were ghosts. And there was a talking-head aspect to the format that killed almost all of the drama.

You should be extremely ambitious in the projects you pick for yourself as a writer, but don’t choose a project that you can never finish, or that won’t interest many people even if you do finish it. Stretch yourself, be daring in your aesthetic choices, do things that no one has attempted before, but don’t try to climb Mount Denali on rollerskates.

Other recent posts about writing topics:

How Not to Become a Literary Dropout, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10

How to Get Published
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop
Putting Together a Book Manuscript
Working with a Writing Mentor
How to Deliver Your Message
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?
Why Write Poetry? 
Poetic Forms: Introduction; The Sonnet, The Sestina, The Ghazal, The Tanka

Praise and Lament
How to Be an American Writer