BY THE SAME AUTHOR
NOVELS
The Husband
The Magician
Living Room
The Childkeeper
Other People
The Resort
The Touch of
Treason
A Deniable Man
The Best Revenge
PLAYS
Napoleon (The
Illegitimist)
(New York and
California, 1953)
A Shadow of My
Enemy
(National Theater,
Washington D.C.
and Broadway, 1957)
NONFICTION
A Feast for Lawyers
STEIN
ON WRITING. Copyright © 1995 by Sol Stein, All rights reserved. Printed in the
United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any
manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief
quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address
St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
Production
Editor: David Stanford Burr
Design:
Pei Loi Koay
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Stein, Sol.
Stein on writing : a master
editor of some of the most successful
writers of our century shares
his craft techniques and strategies
by Sol Stein.
p. cm.
ISBN 0-312-13608-0
1. Authorship. I. Title.
PN151.S84 1995
808’.02—dc20
95-31793
CIP
First
Edition: December 1995
10 9
8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For Liz,
who knows better,
with love
I am grateful for the experienced
advice on this book, as on many of my other books, from Patricia Day and
Elizabeth Day Stein. My editors at St. Martin’s Press, Tom McCormack and Marian
Lizzi, provided me with both encouragement and thoughtful suggestions, as did
Loretta Hudson.
For their insights, I
am indebted beyond easy measure to the writers famous, infamous, and
not-yet-known, as well as the teachers, readers, and students with whom I
shared a life of editorial work and joy, and from whom I learned much of what
is between these covers.
Glossary of Terms Used by Writers and Editors
Some years ago I addressed the Southern California Chapter
of the National Writers Club on a day when a rowboat might have been more
appropriate than a car for getting to the meeting. The torrential rain seemed
determined to widen the Pacific Ocean at the expense of a state that was once
described to me as “mostly desert.” I managed the few hundred feet between the
parking lot and the hotel without drowning. Once inside, I expected to find the
meeting room deserted. Instead I happily discovered a full house, eighty-eight
professional nonfiction writers and journalists come to hear me talk about
fiction. I asked these weatherproof stalwarts, “How many of you want to write
the Great American Novel?” and eighty-eight hands shot up.
If
there are writers in America who do not have several hundred pages of a
would-be novel in a drawer or at least in mind, I have not met them.
Conversely, every novelist I’ve known has occasion to write nonfiction. For
those writers who, at least initially, want to read only about fiction or
nonfiction, I offer a road map to this book.
The
Contents page provides an overview of the main subjects covered. Part I, “The
Essentials,” is for all writers. Part II concerns the craft of fiction.
Eavesdropping by nonfiction writers is permitted. Part III deals with subjects
of interest to all writers. Part IV deals mainly with the application of
fictional techniques for the enhancement of nonfiction. Part V, “Literary
Values,” deals with upscale writing, both fiction and nonfiction. Part VI,
“Revision,” has separate chapters for fiction and nonfiction. Part VII contains
a chapter on where to get help, a final word, and a glossary of terms used by
writers and editors.
The
reader will find that I frequently use examples from writers I have known or
worked with because their material is familiar to me. From time to time I also
quote from my own work, allegedly for copyright reasons and convenience, but
perhaps also to underscore that I practice what I teach. If I quote often from
the New York Times, it is convenience as well as merit that guides me;
it is the newspaper I read every day. The Times has also been in the
vanguard of publications using the techniques of fiction to enhance journalism.
Women
usually outnumber men among my students, readers, and friends and I trust they
will forgive me for using a male pronoun to stand for both genders. Saying “he
or she” repeatedly is a distraction to both writer and reader.
I once
went to a convention in Seattle, and three people gave me gifts of an umbrella
for the trip. It didn’t rain. I hope this book has a few surprises for you.
Sol Stein
Scarborough,
New York May 1995
The Essentials
The Writer’s Job May Be Different Than You Think
This is not a book of theory. It is a book of usable
solutions—how to fix writing that is flawed, how to improve writing that is
good, how to create interesting writing in the first place.
For
thirty-six years I worked one-on-one with writers who had contract deadlines.
My primary interest was to provide them with the techniques for solving
editorial problems and improving their work in time to meet their deadlines. I
could not provide writers with new genes, an ear, or talent. What I passed on
was the craft other writers had developed to get their manuscripts in shape for
publication.
As an
editor and publisher, I frequently heard that an editor’s job was to help the
writer realize his intentions. That is true except for the fact that many
writers have inappropriate intentions. The four most common I’ve heard are “I
am expressing myself”; “I have something to say”; “I want to be loved by
readers”; and “I need money.” Those are all occasional outcomes of the correct
intention, which is to provide the reader with an experience that is superior
to the experiences the reader encounters in everyday life. If the reader is
also rewarded with insights, it is not always the result of the writer’s wisdom
but of the writer’s ability to create the conditions that enable pleasure to
edify.
The
writer comes to the editor bearing his talent, experience, and hope for his
manuscript. The editor provides distance, experience with other writers, and
the tools of craft that are efficient substitutes for trial and error. I have
had the good fortune to work with some of the most successful writers of our
time. They had much to teach me. What they taught and what they may have
learned is in this book.
As a
young writer brimming with hope and arrogance, I was subjected, luckily, to the
wisdom and tyranny of several extraordinary teachers of writing: Wilmer Stone, Theodore Goodman, Jacques Barzun,
Lionel Trilling, and Thornton Wilder. I would like to convey the most important
thing I learned from each.
Wilmer
Stone was faculty advisor to The Magpie, the literary magazine of DeWitt
Clinton High School in the Bronx, New York, then one of the best-known public
secondary schools in the United States. In those remarkable days, DeWitt
Clinton served not only its neighborhood but qualified students from anywhere
else in the vastness of New York City. One of them was James Baldwin, who, each
school day, took the long subway ride from Harlem in Manhattan to DeWitt
Clinton at the topmost part of the Bronx. Out of our adolescent camaraderie
came his most extraordinary book, Notes of a Native Son, which he much
later would claim I compelled him to publish.
Each
Friday afternoon at three, while other students decamped for their homes, the
lights were on in the Magpie tower high above the rectangle of the
school. There Wilmer Stone met with Richard Avedon, then a poet, who became one
of the most famous photographers in the world, the editor Emile Capouya, Jimmy
Baldwin, myself, and a few others whose names hide behind the scrim of time.
What went on in that tower was excruciatingly painful. Wilmer Stone read our
stories to us in a monotone as if he were reading from the pages of a phone
directory. What we learned with each stab of pain was that the words themselves
and not the inflections supplied by the reader had to carry the emotion of the
story.
Today I
still hear the metronome of Wilmer Stone’s voice, and counsel my students to
have their drafts read to them by the friend who has the least talent for
acting and is capable of reading words as if they had no meaning.
My
family was depression-poor, and the only college I could try for was one whose
expense would be as close to zero as possible. In those days the College of the
City of New York, better known as CCNY, took in the top fifteen percent of New
York City high school graduates, whose only expense would be secondhand books
and subway fare. There Theodore Goodman’s reputation was such that all who had
a craving to write gravitated toward his classes. To teach short story writing,
he had us read James Joyce’s “The Dead” over and over. It was from this
practice that I learned the value of dissecting a piece of writing repeatedly
until it surrendered its secrets.
The
most important thing I took away from Teddy Goodman came about at the beginning
of the one private conference each student was entitled to. I was by then a head taller than Goodman, but he was
Napoleon to us all. He glared at me and said, “Look how you’re dressed.”
I
looked down and could see only what I had seen in the mirror that morning, the
suit and shirt and tie that was customary for students at the time.
“Your
suit is blue,” he said. “Your shirt is blue, your tie is blue. That’s what’s
wrong with your writing.”
When my
ordeal was over I slunk away from Goodman’s cubicle to rethink the sameness of
my writing and to learn the value of variety. It took some time for me to learn
the other lesson, that a writer, shy or not, needs a tough skin, for no matter
how advanced one’s experience and career, expert criticism cuts to the quick,
and one learns to endure and to perfect, if for no other reason than to
challenge the pain-maker.
The
master’s seminar I attended at Columbia University was with William York
Tindall, who continued Goodman’s process of closely examining a single piece of
work to teach us how to read other works. That seminar created an appetite for
what was then quite possibly the best-known doctoral seminar in America, led in
discordant concert by two extraordinary men, Jacques Barzun and Lionel
Trilling, both of whom left their marks in writing as well as teaching.
The official
title of the seminar was “Backgrounds in Contemporary Thought and Culture.” Its
true subject was “So you think you know how to write? Let’s see.” It was a
tough course to get into. Thirty-five were selected, and only eight students
survived the academic year. Each week we had to read a designated book and
write a piece about it. The piece would come under as close a scrutiny as any
editor ever gave a work.
A cocky
Sol Stein thought he would trick his advisors and submitted a typed version of
an article of his that had already been published as the lead piece in an
academic journal. Barzun and Trilling skewered my prose with almost as much
comment in the margins as I had on the page. What had been acceptable to the
magazine was not acceptable to their higher standard. What I learned from my
destroyed work were the two simple objectives of all prose writing, to be clear
and to be precise. Precision and clarity became my watchwords, my guides to
self-correction, and my most prized editing tools, especially six or seven
years later when I was editing the work of both Barzun and Trilling for the Mid-Century
magazine.
I was a
playwright long before I became a novelist. In 1952, a year before I saw my
first play on stage, I was granted back-to-back play writing fellowships at Yaddo, the artists’ colony in
Saratoga Springs, New York, and the McDowell Colony in Peterborough, New
Hampshire. To my astonishment, my employer, the U.S. State Department, granted
me leave for both. At Yaddo, I occupied what was known as the Carson McCullers
cottage, though the vibrations came not from the spirit of Carson McCullers but
from two thousand bees whose colony was embedded in the hollow wall. On
arriving at McDowell, I was given an even greater surprise for a young playwright.
Though most of the people there were composers and painters, there was one
other playwright, Thornton Wilder. What a mind-walloping opportunity: one of
the most accomplished American playwrights of the century and a neophyte
working on his first play in the same environment!
Thornton
Wilder taught me two things. First, the necessity of sitting through bad plays,
to witness coughing and squirming in the audience, to have ears up like a
rabbit to catch what didn’t work, to observe how little tolerance an audience
has for a mishap, ten seconds of boredom breaking an hour-long spell. I was
soon to take advantage of the New Dramatists Committee, an organization that
enabled me to see free of charge some sixty plays in less than two years. I
learned more from the painfully bad than from the few remarkable plays that
kept me enthralled. Today, I urge my students once they have begun to master
craft, to read a few chapters of John Grisham’s The Firm, or some other
transient bestseller, to see what they can learn from the mistakes of writers
who don’t heed the precise meanings of the words they use. They also learn to
read the work of literary prize-winners to detect the rare uncaught error in
craft. What they are doing is perfecting their editorial eye and their self-editing
talent, learning to read as a writer.
Wilder
taught me something else. He took me to watch a country square dance from an
unoccupied balcony in a recreation hall, and pointed out things that writers
are supposed to see. The New Hampshire folk came to dances in families—mothers,
fathers, and adolescent children. As we watched from the balcony, Wilder
pointed out the barely noticeable sexual interplay between fathers and
daughters and mothers and sons as they danced the evening away. In the fifties,
a dull age in which so much was forbidden, Wilder taught me that what a writer
deals with is the unspoken, what people see or sense in silence. It is our job,
in nonfiction as well as fiction, to juxtapose words that reveal what
previously may have been blinked, and provide insights obscured by convention
and shame.
* * *
The century I have inhabited has not seen the abandonment
of war and violence. It has not solved the problem of poverty, nor has it
improved human nature. However, we can credit the century with producing the
public realization that sex has to be good for both partners. That is also the
key to writing both fiction and nonfiction. It has to be a good experience for
both partners, the writer and the reader, and it is a source of distress to me
to observe how frequently writers ignore the pleasure of their partners.
The
pleasures of writer and reader are interwoven. The seasoned writer of both
nonfiction and fiction, confident in his craft, derives increasing pleasure
from his work. The reader in the hands of a writer who has mastered his craft
enjoys a richer experience.
When I
ask a group of professional writers to state the essential difference between
nonfiction and fiction, most are unable to do so. And when they try, an
audience of one hundred will provide answers so disparate as to seem to come
from a hundred different planets rather than common experience. Let us state
the difference in the simplest way.
Nonfiction
conveys information.
Fiction
evokes emotion.
Because
the intended results are so different, the mind-sets required for writing
fiction and nonfiction are different. In fiction, when information obtrudes the
experience of the story pauses. Raw information comes across as an
interruption, the author filling in. The fiction writer must avoid anything
that distracts from the experience even momentarily. A failure to understand
this difference between nonfiction and fiction is a major reason for the
rejection of novels.
Though
the ostensible purpose of nonfiction is the conveyance of information, if that
information is in a raw state, the writing seems pedestrian, black-and-white
facts in a colorful world. The reader, soon bored, yearns for the images,
anecdotes, characterization, and writerly precision that make informational
writing come alive on the page. That is where the techniques of fiction can be
so helpful to the nonfiction writer.
Over
many years I have observed that the failure of story writers is often
attributable to an incontrovertible fact. We are all writers from an early age.
Most of what we write is nonfiction—essays for school, letters to friends,
memoranda to colleagues—in which we are trying to pass on information. We are
raised with a traditional nonfiction mind-set. Even when we write love letters,
we are trying to communicate how we feel and not necessarily trying to evoke an
emotion in the recipient, though that might be better suited to our purpose.
In
previous centuries, when letter writing was more often than today a form of
personal art, letters had more of an emotional effect on readers, even those to
whom the writing was not addressed, as we know from reading some of the great
correspondence that has been collected in books.
The
lifelong habit of writing traditional nonfiction, passing on information, is curable
through attention to the fiction writer’s primary job, which is creating an
emotional experience for the reader. The novelist is like the conductor of
an orchestra, his back to the audience, his face invisible, summoning the
experience of music for the people he cannot see. The writer as conductor also
gets to compose the music and play all of the instruments, a task less
formidable than it seems. What it requires is the conscious practice of
providing an extraordinary experience for the reader, who should be oblivious
to the fact that he is seeing words on paper.
A
second matter insinuates itself between the writer and success. All of us, in
our daily speech to others, are not only trying to communicate information but
to get something off our minds and into the consciousness of the listeners.
When we write, we put down on paper what we think, know, or believe we know and
pay little attention to the effect on the reader. That is discourteous in life
and unsuccessful in writing.
We
practice our craft to service the reader, not our psyches. The material we deal
with may come from our observation and insight. As writers we don’t expel the
result as raw material, we transmute it to provide what the reader most wants,
an experience different from and richer than what he daily abides in life. As
E. L. Doctorow once put it, “Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the
reader, not the fact that it’s raining, but the feeling of being rained upon.”
The
good news is that the nonfiction mind-set has been changing. In recent years,
ambitious journalists and writers of nonfiction books have increasingly adopted
some of the techniques of fiction to enhance the readers’ experience of their
writing. In journalism, the change has been revolutionary. In the early part of
the twentieth century, journalists were taught to provide readers with the who,
what, when, where, and why of their stories in the first paragraph. The result
was the reader read the first paragraph and, sated, moved on to the first
paragraph of the next story. How frustrating it must have been for journalists
writing pieces of ten or fifteen or twenty paragraphs, finding readers skipping
away after the first. Today, the best of good journalists are arousing their
readers’ curiosity in the first
paragraph and seducing them into the rest of the story. A news story has become
a story that contains the news.
In
television, where new programs are frequent and often short-lived, one exemplar
of broadcast journalism that has lasted more than a quarter of a century is 60
Minutes, which weekly holds an audience of tens of millions. Its creator,
Don Hewitt, tells us, “TV is good not when you see it or hear it but when you
feel it.” Though it deals in fact, 60 Minutes, like fiction, is
concerned with evoking the emotions of its audience.
Don
Hewitt’s creation thrives on the revelation of character. Its interviewers peel
layers of camouflage to reveal matters that its subjects would rather conceal,
it uncovers cover-ups, it causes people to speak of things that are revelatory,
incriminating, or painful. The segments often bring out the dark side of human
nature, which at times excites its audience’s interest in the opposite, justice
and goodwill. It does, in other words, what creative writing aspires to.
It
should not be surprising that 60 Minutes has had imitators that do not
imitate well, programs of scandal and gossip laden with sentimentality and
cloaked in melodrama. An unfortunate amount of so-called transient fiction does
the same thing.
Though
the new nonfiction uses some of the techniques of fiction, important
differences exist. Nonfiction stems from fact, and all attempts to evoke
emotion in its readership cannot—or at least should not—take leave from its
roots. It can make us feel what happened, but dares not invent what happened.
Nonfiction can describe effectively what people do and thereby move us, but it
cannot invent those actions. Nonfiction can report what people say, but it
cannot guess what they were thinking. To help us understand the essential difference
between nonfiction and fiction, let’s look at an example:
TRADITIONAL
NONFICTION: New York City has more than 1,400 homeless people.
BETTER
NONFICTION: The man who has laid claim to the bench on the corner of
88th Street and Park Avenue is one of New York City’s 1,400 homeless people.
FICTION:
His skin the color of rust, the man sits on his park bench next to his bag of
belongings, staring at the brightly lit windows in the apartments across the
street, at the strange race of people who still have hope.
In the transition from plain fact to fiction, we lose
statistics and focus on the individual character. The writer, having invented
the character, can convey what the character thinks.
To orient us, consider for a moment the relationship
between the writer, the book, and the reader. The writer, of course, writes the
book. The book then acts on the reader’s mind and emotions, unseen by the
writer. In fact when the writer finishes his work, he can vanish from the earth
and his book will continue to affect the reader’s mind and emotions. The writer
becomes dispensable. The work must do the job.
Can a
novelist or story writer work on the reader’s emotions consciously while
writing a first draft? Not easily, except through long practice and prowess.
But the less experienced writer can plan the reader’s adventure before
he writes each scene, and in revising that scene after a respite away from it,
with the steel gaze of an editor he can see how the reader’s experience might
be improved.
What of
the nonfiction writer who sees himself solely as the communicator of fact, who
is offended by the idea of working on the emotions of his audience? We
sometimes speak of academic writing, of courtroom transcripts, of material that
does not compel our attention or elicit a strong desire to continue reading, as
dry. What we mean by “dry” is that it does not enable us to see as we
read, it does not move us, and, most important, it does not stimulate our
intellect with insight, its ostensible purpose. The writers of thousands of
academic articles and books each year, of hundreds of thousands of legal papers
and millions of business memoranda, are discourteous to their readers and fail
in their purpose. They do not understand the power of language or the
techniques for its use.
Isn’t
there something distasteful in evoking the emotions of an audience? Some of the
great villains of our age have been spellbinders, working the public’s
emotions. In old newsreels we see Hitler in the Nuremberg stadium or Mussolini
on his balcony building frenzy in an audience that has abdicated sense for
sensation. But we are moved by heroes as well, often as a result of war:
Lincoln, Churchill, Roosevelt. Their effect lies in the language they are
cloaked in. Let us consider for a moment the most admired of the three. The
historian Shelby Foote reminds us, “Lincoln was highly intelligent. Almost
everything he did was calculated for effect.” That statement is one no writer
should ever forget. “Almost everything he did was calculated for effect.”
We like
to think of ourselves as moved to action by facts and reason, yet we shrink
from politicians who may have got their facts right but who bore us with language that is flat,
cliché-ridden, robbed of effectiveness by their unimaginative prose. They want us
to agree; what we feel is utter boredom. Researchers, scientists, academicians
marshal their facts to a higher standard, but with their neglect of the emotive
power of language they often speak only to each other, their parochial words
dropping like sand on a private desert.
Despite
our alleged reverence for fact, the truth is that our adrenaline rises most in
response to effective expression. When a writer or speaker understands the
electricity of fresh simile and metaphor, his choice of words empowers our
feelings, his language compels our attention, acceptance, and action. When
Shakespeare speaks, when Lincoln orates, we are moved not by information but by
the excellence of their diction. Alone in a living room, our book lit by a
chair-side lamp, we are enraptured by what is said because of the author’s
choice of words and their order on the page. The best of good writing will
entice us into subjects and knowledge we would have declared were of no
interest to us until we were seduced by the language they were dressed in.
This
book encompasses both modes of writing, fiction and nonfiction. The
practitioners of each have differing attitudes. In my experience, most
novelists and short story writers are eager to improve their craft, even after
they have been published many times. Nonfiction writers who do not have to
create living characters are sometimes complacent about a craft in which
publication comes easier and is paid for with greater regularity. This book may
inspire some nonfiction writers to reach for treasure on a higher shelf.
Fiction
and nonfiction both can benefit from the writer’s imagination as well as his
memory. For the story writer, witnessing—or remembering—incidents in life must
be more than an act of reporting. It is the taking-off point not of what
happened, but of what might have happened. That is what enables some fiction to
provide us with an experience that we characterize as extraordinary.
Reporting
in nonfiction can be accurate, like a photograph taken merely to record. The
best of nonfiction, however, sets what it sees in a framework, what has
happened elsewhere or in the past. As the recorded events march before us, a
scrim lifts to convey another dimension, the highlighting focuses our
attention, sight becomes insight, reporting becomes art. The evidence is in
this book.
For the writer who intends to master his craft, I have a
small-craft warning.
Imagine
yourself as a youngster standing beside a bicycle for the first time. You
watched someone riding this two-wheeled vehicle in a straight line. You may
have wondered how the rider kept his balance, why the bicycle didn’t tip over.
At your side is an experienced bicyclist who tells you how it’s done. You learn
that by holding the handlebars steady and pedaling fast the bicycle moves forward
without tipping. You are told that by steering gently with the handlebars,
turning the front wheel in the direction you want to go, you can manipulate the
vehicle elegantly, avoiding pedestrians and other obstacles, as long as you
keep pedaling. If you stop pedaling or even slow too much, the bicycle will
become unstable, wobbly, and your control of it will loosen until the bicycle
will sway to one side and start to fall. You learn that to halt you have to
press the hand brakes just so and be prepared to lower a leg for stability as
you come to a stop.
Those
are the essentials of cycling, but it doesn’t mean you can ride a bicycle. What
you need is practice. You learn to coordinate your movements. You discover how
rapidly you have to rotate the pedals in order to keep the bicycle moving, and
how to redirect the handlebars gradually to turn a corner. Only with repetition
do you find out how to slow down and stop without tipping over. Once you master
riding, what you have learned will stay with you for the rest of your life. You
may abandon the bicycle for an automobile, then years later take it up for
exercise and find that in moments you are rolling ahead, fully coordinated,
your brain responding to what you learned in your practice sessions long ago.
It is
the same with writing.
Except
that writers provide themselves with a monumental obstacle to achieving skill.
Ballet dancers practice technique. Pianists wear down their black and white
keys with hours of daily practice. Actors rehearse, and rehearse again.
Painters perfect still-life objects at various angles, practice obtaining the
best perspectives, experiment with color and texture, do sketches in
preparation for oil. By practice one learns to use what one has understood.
Only writers, it seems, expect to achieve some level of mastery without
practice.
Do all
writers resist the techniques that will help them master their craft? No. Some,
eager to get published, seize on the advice of anybody with an authoritative
title or a persuasive personality. Others find excuses for not writing at the
same time every day, balk at re-revising incessantly, or excuse themselves
because their lives are beset by difficulties. I am deaf to that excuse because
I worked with the most disadvantaged writer in history, Christy Brown, who had
the use of his brain, the little
toe on his left foot, and little else. When he was a seemingly helpless baby
lying on the kitchen floor of a cottage in Ireland, his remarkable mother saw
him reach out with his left foot and with his one good toe manage to pick up a
crayon that one of his siblings had dropped. That was the beginning of a
writer. Eventually someone at IBM made a special typewriter for Christy that
enabled him to punch in a letter at a time with his one working toe. I published
five of Christy Brown’s books, one of which made the national bestseller lists.
I urge you to see the video of a remarkable film called My Left Foot. It
won an Oscar for Daniel Day-Lewis, who played Christy. The film may cure you of
fishing for an excuse for not writing.
Once in
California I had a letter from a nonfiction writer who wanted desperately to
write fiction but wondered if at sixty she was too old to begin. I told her
that Elia Kazan was fifty-seven when he started with fiction and that I had
published four active octogenarians in a single year, the lexicographer Eric
Partridge, J. B. Priestley, Hannah Tillich, and Bertram Wolfe. If you’re a
writer, you are never retired by someone else. You not only keep going, but the
very act of writing helps keep you alive.
More
than half a millennium ago, Chaucer, the great English writer of the Middle
Ages, had this to say about the writer’s work:
The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne,
Th’ assay so hard, so sharp the conquering.
Life is short, Chaucer is telling us, the craft takes long
to learn, the work is hard, but ah, when it is right, the writer’s triumph
soars. Few among contemporary writers have expressed that pleasure as well as
Kate Braverman did about finishing her remarkable short story “Tall Tales from
the Mekong Delta”:
Writing is like hunting. There are brutally cold
afternoons with nothing in sight, only the wind and your breaking heart. Then
the moment when you bag something big. The entire process is beyond
intoxicating. As soon as Lenny began speaking, I knew I had mainlined it. I
felt like I was strapped in the cockpit with the stars in my face and the
expanding universe on my back. In my opinion, that’s the only way a writer
should travel. When I finished “Tall Tales” I thought, this one is a keeper.
This is a trophy brought back from the further realm, the kingdom of perpetual
glistening night where we know ourselves absolutely. This one goes on the wall.
As you perfect your craft through practice, remember the
joy of finally getting on a bicycle and riding to your destination without
giving a second thought to the technique that now comes naturally. Experience
the pleasure of getting the right word, the right phrase, the right sentence,
the right paragraph, and finally the ecstasy of creating a keeper for your
wall.
Come Right In: First Sentences, First Paragraphs
FICTION
Elia Kazan, brilliant director of stage and screen as well as a
late-blooming novelist, told me that audiences give a film seven minutes. If
the viewer is not intrigued by character or incident within that time, the film
and its viewer are at odds. The viewer came for an experience. The film is
disappointing him.
Today’s
impatient readers give a novelist fewer than seven minutes. Some years ago I
was involved in an informal study of the behavior of lunch-hour browsers in
mid-Manhattan bookstores. In the fiction section, the most common pattern was
for the browser to read the front flap of the book’s jacket and then go to page
one. No browser went beyond page three before either taking the book to the
cashier or putting the book down and picking up another to sample.
Thereafter,
whenever an author told me that his novel really got going on page ten or
twenty or thirty, I had to pass on the news that his book in all likelihood was
doomed unless he could revise it so that the first three pages aroused the
reader’s interest enough to quarantine him from distraction for the several
hours the book demanded from him.
Readers
have not grown more patient since that bit of research was conducted. Today,
first sentences and first paragraphs of any writing are increasingly important
for arousing the restless reader.
Arousal
is nature’s stimulus for the propagation of the human race. The unaroused male
of the species is as useless for that purpose as a worm. Arousal can happen
sooner or later, but it must happen.
Similarly
arousal is an author’s stimulus for the reader. Without early arousal, the
reader does not yet trust that he will enjoy the experience that the writer has
prepared. The ideal goals of an opening paragraph are:
Long before I edited a couple of Budd Schulberg’s books,
he published his first novel, What Makes Sammy Run?, a book whose
opening I like to quote from. Sammy was a huge bestseller in 1941. This
is the way it starts:
The first time I saw him he couldn’t have been more than
sixteen years old, a little ferret of a kid, sharp and quick. Sammy Glick. Used
to run copy for me. Always ran. Always looked thirsty.
To prove that writers know what works even if they don’t
take advantage of their knowledge in their own writing, I ask my students to
pick out the most important word in Schulberg’s opening. See if you can’t find
it in the paragraph just quoted.
Most
writers quickly come up with the correct answer: “ferret.” It characterizes
sixteen-year-old Sammy in a flash.
Next I
ask for the second most important word in that paragraph. See if you can’t
detect it.
That
may take a bit more time, but after a moment’s thought a majority will zero in
on “thirsty,” an original way of saying Sammy was hungry, meaning ambitious.
The
words “always ran” convey quickly that Sammy is a hustler.
That
opening is an inspiring example of quick characterization and especially of a
way to arouse the reader’s interest because in a few words we sense a conflict
brewing. The narrator knows Sammy is overly ambitious. The kid wants what?
Everything!
Therein
lies a clue. As readers, we are immediately interested in a character who wants
something badly.
The
fact that the narrator is Sammy’s boss also piques the reader’s curiosity. Will
the narrator continue to put up with Sammy’s drive? Will Sammy get fired? Will
Sammy succeed, and if so at what and how will he do it? The story is off and
running in the first paragraph. We want to know what will happen.
At the
time that Schulberg wrote What Makes Sammy Run? he wasn’t an old master.
He was a young first novelist. If one understands the principles of intriguing
the reader, one doesn’t need decades of experience.
James
T. Farrell, a friend who achieved fame for his novel Studs Lonigan, once
gave me a copy of a collection of his short stories called French Girls Are
Vicious, in which the title story contains an interesting example for
writers. The narrator begins, “I don’t like French girls. Perhaps it’s because
of my Puritan upbringing ...”
We
assume the speaker is a man. At the beginning of the second paragraph a
surprise is waiting for us. The narrator is a woman! Our curiosity is aroused
when a surprise unsettles our expectation.
It is
astonishing how much the first words of a novel or story affect editors,
reviewers, and readers. They are the trigger of curiosity, what writers have
long called the “narrative hook.” In addition, the early words suggest the kind
of book one is reading.
Thornton
Wilder, my early mentor in playwriting, also wrote novels, the most famous of
which, The Bridge of San Luis Key, starts this way:
On Friday noon, July the twentieth, 1714, the finest
bridge in all Peru broke and precipitated five travelers into the gulf below.
It’s precise as to date and time and the number of people. But the key to arousing our interest is in the words “finest bridge.” Bridges deteriorate. Many are hazardous. But this bridge that suddenly hurtled five people to their death was “the finest.” We want to know what happened, and why.
Here’s
another:
Yank Lucas fell asleep late one night and left the gas
burning on the kitchen range.
We want to know more. That’s the opening of John O’Hara’s
1967 novel, The Instrument.
James
Baldwin began his short story “Going to Meet the Man” with this unembellished
way of interesting the reader:
“What’s the matter?” she asked.
Here’s a quieter—yet intriguing—opening sentence by one of
the century’s grand masters, Graham Greene, from an early (1935) novel, England
Made Me.
She might have been waiting for her lover.
Maxine Hong Kingston kindled the reader’s interest in The
Woman Warrior with the kind of hook that almost always works:
“You must not tell anyone,” my mother said, “what I am
about to tell you.”
See how much Irwin Shaw accomplished in the first sentence
of his story “The Eighty-Yard Run”:
The pass was high and wide and he jumped for it, feeling
it slap flatly against his hands, as he shook his hips to throw off the
halfback who was diving at him.
Anthony Burgess, in both his fiction and nonfiction,
enjoyed shocking the reader into attention. The following attention-getter is
the opening of his twenty-second novel, Earthly Powers:
It was the afternoon of my eighty-first birthday, and I
was in bed with my catamite when Ali announced the archbishop had come to see
me.
That first sentence tells us the narrator is old, that he
is in bed with someone of the same sex, that this is a regular event in his
life, and the event this day is being interrupted by a visit from an
archbishop! That certainly piques the reader’s curiosity about what kind of
confrontation is about to happen.
Another
example:
On the day he lost his right foot, Walter Van Brunt had
been haunted, however haphazardly, by ghosts of the past.
Losing a foot is not an everyday occurrence. From the
first sentence we know we are going to witness an important day in the life of
Walter Van Brunt. Moreover, Van Brunt is haunted by “ghosts of the past.” Who
or what are they? The interjection—“however haphazardly”—conveys a touch of
literary flavor. Would a commercial action-adventure author ever say “however
haphazardly”?
That’s
a lot to get from a first sentence. It’s from a 1987 novel, World’s End, by
T. Coraghessan Boyle, who has been called “one of the most gifted writers of
his generation.”
Saul
Bellow, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, most often uses
characterization to attract a reader’s attention. Here are the opening
sentences of four of his novels:
When it came to concealing his troubles, Tommy Wilhelm
was not less capable than the next fellow.
What made me take this trip to Africa?
If I am out of my mind, it’s all right with me, thought
Moses Herzog.
Shortly after dawn, or what would have been dawn in a
normal sky, Mr. Artur Sammler with his bushy eye took in the books and papers
of his West Side bedroom and suspected strongly that they were the wrong books,
the wrong papers.
In order, the openings are from Bellow’s first novel, Seize
the Day; Henderson the Rain King, his most celebrated novel; Herzog; and
Mr. Sammler’s Planet. Note that all of Bellow’s beginnings except
Henderson seize the attention of the reader by characterization, which we
get soon enough.
All
right, you say, these are well-known writers, prize-winning writers, what about
writers like me? Fair enough. Here are some first sentences from work by
students of mine who have yet to publish:
I wanted to strangle mother but I’d have to touch her to
do it.
That’s by Loretta Hudson. The narrator wants to perform an
act that is taboo and punishable, but what causes the reaction of the reader is
the countervailing force, the repugnance at having to touch the person you want
to strangle. I have heard audiences gasp when that opening sentence is read to
them.
The
same student started a story with an entirely different hook in the first
sentence:
It would have been nice if the stork had dropped me down
the right chimney.
That visual opening presents the narrator’s problem—the
wrong parents!—in an attention-grabbing way. How abstract the beginning would
have sounded had the author started, “I was born to the wrong parents.”
Here’s
one by another beginner:
A telephone ringing in the middle of the night is not a
welcome sound.
What should be clear by now is that writers with differing skills and experiences have all tried to engage the reader’s curiosity at the outset. There are questions you can ask yourself about your own first sentence:
Your entire story or novel may depend on that first
sentence arresting the reader’s attention. A terrific sentence on page two
won’t help if the reader never gets there.
Is it absolutely essential for the first sentence to hook
the reader? The first sentence of the next example is a simple statement of the
narrator’s name. The rest of the paragraph appears on the surface to be
conventional, but is it? It’s from the title story of John Cheever’s short
story collection The Housebreaker of Shady Hill[1]
My name is Johnny Hake. I’m thirty-six years old, stand
five feet eleven in my socks, weigh one hundred and forty-two pounds stripped,
and am, so to speak, naked at the moment and talking into the dark. I was
conceived in the Hotel St. Regis, born in the Presbyterian Hospital, raised on
Sutton Place, christened and confirmed in St. Bartholomew’s, and I drilled with
the Knickerbocker Greys, played football and baseball in Central Park, learned
to chin myself on the framework of East Side apartment-house canopies, and met
my wife (Christina Lewis) at one of those big cotillions at the Waldorf. I
served four years in the Navy, have four kids now, and live in a banlieue called Shady Hill. We have a
nice house with a garden and a place outside for cooking meat, and on summer
nights, sitting there with the kids and looking into the front of Christina’s
dress as she bends over to salt the steaks, or just gazing at the lights in
Heaven, I am thrilled by more hardy and dangerous pursuits, and I guess this is
what is meant by the pain and sweetness of life.
You can’t be more direct than that. There’s Johnny Hake
encapsulating his life for the reader. Cheever, however, is a sly craftsman. In
the first sentence his character lets drop that he is “naked at the moment and
talking into the dark.” Not the kind of thing you’d put into a résumé. A few
more sentences and he’s “looking into the front of Christina’s dress as she
bends over to salt the steaks.” That’s in the middle of a sentence, seemingly a
throwaway, but in fact a hook for the reader. A craftsman like Cheever will
season even the most conventional beginning with just enough that is
unconventional to rouse the reader’s curiosity.
John
Fowles is one of the more accomplished novelists of this century. His career
began in 1963 with the publication of a relatively simple novel called The
Collector. If you haven’t read it, I urge you to. Let’s look at how he
starts the book:
When she was home from her boarding school I used to see
her almost every day sometimes, because their house was right opposite the Town
Hall Annex. She and her younger sister used to go in and out a lot, often with
young men, which of course I didn’t like.
The end of the second sentence is the first omen of what
proves to be an exceptionally suspenseful book. Let’s see how the first
paragraph continues:
When I had a free moment from the files and ledgers I
stood by the window and used to look down over the road over the frosting and
sometimes I’d see her. In the evening I marked it in my observations diary, at
first with X, and then when I knew her name with M. I saw her several times
outside too. I stood right behind her once in a queue at the public library
down Crossfield Street. She didn’t look once at me, but I watched the back of
her head and her hair in a long pigtail. It was very pale, silky, like Burnet
cocoons. All in one pigtail coming down almost to her waist, sometimes in
front, sometimes at the back. Sometimes she wore it up. Only once, before she
came to be my guest here, did I have the privilege to see her with it loose and
it took my breath away it was so beautiful, like a mermaid.
That first long paragraph introduces the two main
characters, the narrator and his victim. Note the amount of concrete detail. I
will reproduce that paragraph, highlighting the ominous phrases.
When she was home from her boarding school I used to see
her almost every day sometimes, because their house was right opposite the Town
Hall Annex. She and her younger sister used to go in and out a lot, often with
young men, which of course I didn’t like. When I had a free moment from
the files and ledgers I stood by the window and used to look down over the road
over the frosting and sometimes I’d see her. In the evening I marked it in
my observations diary, at first with X, and then when I knew her name with M.
I saw her several times outside too. I stood right behind once in a queue at
the public library down Crossfield Street. She didn’t look once at me, but I watched
the back of her head and her hair in a long pigtail. It was very pale, silky,
like Burnet cocoons. All in one pigtail coming down almost to her waist,
sometimes in front, sometimes at the back. Sometimes she wore it up. Only once,
before she came to be my guest here, did I have the privilege to see her
with it loose and it took my breath away it was so beautiful, like a mermaid.
As readers, what do we take away from that first paragraph?
An even more sly craftsman is Vladimir Nabokov. Here’s the
beginning of his most famous novel:
Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my
soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the
palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.
The second paragraph continues:
She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet
ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was
Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.
That’s ostensibly the first paragraph of Vladimir
Nabokov’s Lolita, which created a sensation when it was published in
1955. “Ostensibly” because we find there’s a Foreword in front of the novel
signed by one John Ray, Jr., Ph.D. Nabokov liked to have fun with his audience,
and so in front of the book proper, he planted a mock Foreword supposedly
written by a scholar. That Foreword is as intriguing as the beginning of the
actual book. It describes the book as a confession, tells us the book’s author
died in prison, uses concrete specifics—a diagnosis, a date, a lawyer’s
name—and lets drop that the writer of the foreword was himself awarded a prize
for a modest work in which “certain morbid states and perversions” were
discussed. We might say that Nabokov began Lolita twice, and both
beginnings, in different ways, were designed to excite the interest of the
reader.
The
opening paragraphs of Lolita proper—the announcing of the sounds of her
name and the revelation that the protagonist is having an affair with a
schoolgirl—pulls the reader in two ways: Scandalous subject matter and the
immediate sense that here is a writer who plays with language artfully.
I thought it might be useful to follow a writer’s thoughts as he developed a first paragraph. I am not psychic. The experience I tapped is my own. The lawyer George Thomassy appeared in my novels The Magician, The Childkeeper, and Other People. When it came time for him to appear again in The Touch of Treason, I wanted to start with Thomassy looking over a courtroom where he was to try a major case. My objectives for that beginning were the three that I suggested earlier:
In
the end you died. There could be a courtroom like this, Thomassy thought; all
the good wood bleached white, the judge deaf to objections because He owned the
place. The law was His, the advocacy system finished.
If that’s what it was going
to be like, George Thomassy wanted to live forever, because here on earth, God
willing or not, you could fight back.
The courtroom Thomassy is viewing is in his mind. He is
imagining the “courtroom” of judgment day. The reader knows the judge is He,
and He “owned the place. The law was His.” It is apparent that Thomassy resents
the authority of judges. Thomassy wants an arena where he can fight back. His
most characteristic trait is to try to win under every circumstance, yet to
continue to do so would be impossible; he would have to live forever.
That’s
a lot to cram into a few lines. I hoped the essence of my intent would come
across, and that the reader, at minimum, would be anticipating the courtroom
drama to come.
What
can a newcomer do in a first paragraph? A lot. The following is the first
paragraph of a novel by a student in my advanced fiction seminar who is writing
about a painter:
Shoshana stormed through the silent apartment. Mason, you
son of a bitch! Where are you? Instinct told her: Mason had fled. You gutless
coward, she raged. Returning to her studio, Shoshana stabbed the brush she
carried into ajar of turpentine. Just try to get in one hour’s ego-affirming
work of one’s own. No way!
The writer, Anne Mudgett, is using action to characterize.
She is also setting up conflict between the narrator and Mason, and involving
the reader in Shoshana’s emotional state.
We saw
how James T. Farrell used surprise. In the example that follows, surprise is
used by a student, Steve Talsky, whose work is yet to be published:
I am
the way, the answer and the light, through me all things are possible.
He had written this once as
a joke on the headboard of his bed.
The reader gets an
impression of a character who is unusual and about whom one wants to
know more. Not least, one has the sense that this author’s work has resonance.
The
value of a well-written opening is that it makes the reader ready to give
himself to the writer’s imagined people for the duration.
It
should be clear by now that the unusual is a factor in arousing the reader’s
interest. And so is action and conflict. So many writers fight an uphill battle
trying to interest their readers in matters that have no inherent conflict. The
worst possible way to start a story is with something like “They were a
wonderful couple. He loved her and she loved him. They never argued.”
The
result is instant boredom. Boredom is the greatest enemy of both reader and
writer. Do we gaze with wonder at the nice, average, normal-looking people we
pass in the street? Our attention is arrested by the seven-footer and the
midget, the oldster with the mechanical waddle, the child who bounces as she
walks. Recall how people react to the sound of metal crunching metal,
announcing an accident. They hasten to see what happened. Highways get choked
when drivers slow down to gawk at the remains of an collision. To the student
of literature it should come as no surprise that news programs concentrate on
bad news first, on events filled with conflict.
Beginning a book with an intriguing opening is the easy
way to capture the reader. There are, however, more leisurely ways to seduce
the reader, through omens.
You
have heard people say, “I’ve got a feeling something is going to happen.” How
is that done? In The Magician, the opening pages convey the town of
Ossining at the end of a month of intermittent snowfall. Boys in twos and
threes with shovels are clearing neighbors’ sidewalks. The third sentence has a
slight omen:
An occasional older man, impoverished or proud, could be
seen daring death with a shovel in hand, clearing steps so that one could get
in and out of the house, or using a small snowblower on a driveway in the hope
of getting his wife to the supermarket and back before the next snow fell.
“Daring death” is an omen. And the rhythm of the words at
the end of the sentence is designed to strengthen the ominous feeling in “the
next snow fell.”
The
second paragraph also ends with the thump-thump-thump of monosyllabic words:
It seemed impossible that spring might come, and that
these humped gray masses would eventually vanish as water into the heel-hard
ground.
I then lift the reader’s spirit with a sight of “huge
evergreens dusted with snow, and above them the bare webs of leafless silver
maples reflecting sunlight.” We see young children enjoying the snow. During a
brief tour, we find out we are in the richest county of the United States, but
the center of the village of Ossining has numerous empty storefronts. Nearby
homes have been fled from. And another omen central to the book looms:
The biggest drain on taxes was, of course, the schools,
in which violence was not unknown.
And soon another:
It was not an unusual town in a country on the decline
after only two centuries.
In the next paragraph—still on page two—we find out that
the most famous site in that village is Sing Sing prison, known throughout the
world. And we, innocently it seems, then find ourselves watching the
protagonist, a young man named Ed Japhet, practicing magic tricks in front of a
large mirror in his parents’ bedroom. Of course I could have started with that
scene, but I preferred the gentle buildup of omens that something is wrong in
the village where the action takes place, in the country, perhaps in the world.
The reader’s apprehension has been raised. Something is going to happen. And it
does.
Sometimes
a single omen can do the work of several if it starts the engine of the novel.
A novel is like a car—it won’t go anywhere until you turn on the engine. The “engine”
of both fiction and nonfiction is the point at which the reader makes the
decision not to put the book down. The engine should start in the first
three pages, the closer to the top of page one the better.
Josiah
Bunting, novelist and college president, had a penchant for finding the place
where the engine turned on in other people’s books. He read a novel of mine
called The Childkeeper in manuscript and immediately pointed to the
place where the engine started. It’s here as an example of how even a slight
omen can encourage the reader to keep reading.
In the
first two pages we learn that Roger Maxwell, a banker content with wife and
children, has just received a promotion that enables him to buy a new house for
his family. Friends put him on to the best real estate agent in the vicinity of
Chappaqua and Pleasantville, a man named Stickney.
On the
phone, Stickney asks a few questions. Note how innocuous they seem:
“Children?” asked Stickney.
“Four,” said Roger. “One’s away at college, but we’ve got
to keep a room for him.”
“Guests?”
“Sometimes. Especially the children. They like to have
their friends sleep over.”
And so it goes for a few more lines, while Stickney flips
through his cards listing houses that might be suitable. Then he says:
“Could
you come up Sunday, say at two?”
“Of
course.”
“You’ll
bring the children?”
“Yes.”
Stickney
was pleased. Children were part of his strategy.
That last sentence, according to Josiah Bunting, was when
the engine turned on. As it happens, we soon learn that Stickney intends to
sell Maxwell a house that’s a haven for children. It has a huge two-story room
with bunk beds made of canoes and a forest of stuffed animals. The novel,
published in 1975, long before child abuse became a front-burner topic, was
about its opposite, parent abuse. We see evidence of that in the most ordinary
context, bit by bit, until the story explodes.
The
only hint of the theme is in the epigraph that appears before page one.
Epigraphs, please note, can be useful omens. I turned a saying of Oscar Wilde’s
on its head:
Parents begin by loving their children; as they grow
older they judge them; sometimes they forgive them.
It is a
useful exercise for writers to spend time in their libraries at home or in
public libraries, looking at the first few pages of the books that have pleased
them most in order to find the exact place where the engine turns on, where the
reader will not want to put the book down.
There
are many ways to arouse the reader’s interest at the start of a story or novel.
A character can want something important, want it badly, and want it now. Or a
likable character can be threatened. The reader who savors language can be
aroused by the author’s language, but that arousal won’t last unless the reader
also becomes involved in the life of a character who is quickly more
interesting than most of the people who surround us in life.
If your
aim is publication, your best bet is to start with a scene that the reader can
see. Where do you start that scene? As close to its climax as is feasible if
your aim is to involve the reader quickly.
Nonfiction
At the beginning of a piece of nonfiction, the goal of the
writer is the same as that of a writer of fiction: to spark the reader’s
interest sufficiently to engage him in reading the rest. The principle applies
to both transient and durable nonfiction.
Most
writing for newspapers, for instance, is by its nature transient, usually
written one day, read the next, and no longer available thereafter. Most
writers of books, essays, and similar work hope that what they write will
endure. These categories overlap. Much that appears in hardcovers isn’t
durable. And some writing for transient media has remained as part of the
culture that is passed from generation to generation.
Though
the work I have guided has been mainly durable in its intent, journalists and
others have persuaded me of their eagerness to make their transient copy
livelier, stronger, and more enjoyable. The once “good, gray” New York Times
is no longer gray but colorful.
An easy
way to interest the reader at the outset is by the use of surprise. Here are
two examples from the Times by Stephen Manes and Keith Brasher
respectively:
When it comes to shopping for a computer, the most
important peripheral runs at 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit and is known as a friend.
Here on a stony meadow in West Texas at the end of 10
miles of unpaved road through mesquite-covered, coyote-infested shrub land, several hundred bearers of a strategic
commodity of the United States of America are gathered.
They are goats.
The trend toward such openings is resisted by some who
think that lively writing is somehow impure. For them I have an image that I
convey to my classes. Imagine a continuous line, with Life at one end, Death at
the other.
Life---------------------------------------------------Boredom-----------Death
On that line boredom—a loss of experience—belongs close to
death. Successful writing immerses the reader in heightened
experience—emotional, intellectual, or both—more rewarding than the life around
him. Dull writing doesn’t provide pleasure. And whatever information and
insight it contains will be available only to those who are prepared to
tolerate the task of mining dull prose.
For
purists I would point out that much academic writing is counter-educational
because its dullness insulates its information from nearly everybody. Geoffrey
Cotterell is credited with saying, “In America only the successful writer is
important, in France all writers are important, in England no writer is
important, in Australia you have to explain what a writer is.” As this
extravagant exaggeration entertains, it manages to make its point much better
than a straight-faced dissertation on the same subject would.
If
readers could talk back to writers (they sometimes do by not reading their
work) they might say, “Would you knowingly go to a physician who was weak in
his craft? Would you attend a badly conducted concert just because it was
available? Would you bring your car for a tune-up to a mechanic who thought
fine-tuning was a waste of his time?” The reader trusts the writer to do his
best. If he does his second-best, he shouldn’t be surprised if his reader finds
another writer to read.
During
most of the thirty-six years in which I was a publisher of books, I had the responsibility
of seeing a hundred new titles reach the public each year. The great majority
were nonfiction; a few became standard works. There is no reason why
nonfiction—including journalism—cannot be as interesting and enjoyable as
fiction. Information sticks best when it is crafted to touch the reader’s
emotions. The journalist or biographer or historian need not also be a novelist
to use the devices of fiction to have his work provide a more intense
experience for his readers.
When
the journalist crams who, what, when, where, and why into the first paragraph,
how can he hold the reader’s attention for the whole of what he has written?
Naked facts are frequently not enough to invite a reader’s attention to the
rest of the story. It is their context—the writing, the container of the
information—that illuminates facts for the reader and gives them significant
meaning. Writers of nonfiction have the right—perhaps even the
responsibility—to access the wonders of the writer’s craft to make their work
interesting and enjoyable.
It was
once thought that responsible journalism in reporting the news required
adherence to dry fact and that only columnists and feature writers could allow
color, metaphor, and even exaggeration for effect into their writings. As an example
of how untrue that is of today’s journalism, I chose the following lead
front-page story from the New York Times quite arbitrarily on a day when
I was addressing this subject in public. Needless to say, there are worthy and
interesting newspapers in quite a few cities from which examples could have
been chosen. Here is the first paragraph under the byline of Calvin Sims:
An 87-year-old water main ruptured outside of Grand
Central Terminal just before the morning rush hour yesterday, unleashing a deluge
that ruined a newly renovated subway station and plunged commuters into a snarl
of flooded subway lines and pulverized asphalt. The 20-inch main, which runs
east and west along 42d Street between Park and Lexington Avenue, broke at
about 5:45 A.M. Water surged upward, heaving 42d Street into a small mountain
range, then cascaded down staircases and ventilation grates like so many
waterfalls, flooding the subway tracks below. The repair process was delayed
for hours because the city’s Environmental Protection Department misidentified
the site of the rupture and mistakenly shut off the wrong main.
Note the colorful exaggeration that strays from strict
fact. The street asphalt was not literally crushed into powder (“pulverized”)
but broken into slabs and pieces. And 42d Street did not literally become “a
small mountain range,” which my dictionary identifies as “a mass of land that
rises to a great height, especially of over one thousand feet.”
The
reporter’s use of exaggeration and metaphor apparently caused no qualms among
his editors. Those opening sentences were meant to tempt the reader to read on.
On the
same front page quoted above, there was a related story under a three-column
headline plus a subhead:
A Day That New York Shoulda
Stood In Bed.
EXPRESSWAYS STALL, SUBWAYS
STUMBLE AND BUSES STAGGER
That headline and subhead serve as the beginning, hooking
the reader. As for the subhead, expressways don’t stall, cars do; subways
cannot stumble, nor can buses stagger. But all that colorful inaccuracy gets the
idea across with a touch of humor and pulls the reader into a story in which
buses “limped up and down avenues” and “Taxis crawled along at a speed
somewhere between that of a turtle and a snail”—none of which was literally
true. What counts is that the reader is entertained while reading about what
happened, and none of the similes, metaphors, and exaggerations mislead a
single reader one bit.
Exceptionally
good first paragraphs buoy editors and prize-givers as well as readers. A
terrific ending will never be experienced by readers put off by a poor
beginning, which is why beginnings get so much emphasis here. What can the
journalist writing news stories on the run do to hook the reader?
When
John F. Burns of the New York Times won a Pulitzer Prize for his
reporting in 1993, his paper reproduced the following paragraph as an example
of his prize-winning style in his reporting from the former Yugoslavia:
As the 155-millimeter howitzer shells whistled down on
this crumbling city today, exploding into buildings all around, a disheveled
stubble-bearded man in formal evening attire unfolded a plastic chair in the
middle of Vase Miskina Street. He lifted his cello from its case and began
playing Albinoni’s Adagio.
Burns helps us see a besieged city by focusing on a single
individual performing an eccentric and somehow beautiful act. Spotlighting an
individual who is characterized, however briefly, is an excellent way of
involving the reader’s emotions.
Can it
be done in the course of a reporter’s harried work? John Burns wrote 163
articles in the former Yugoslavia in a little over nine months, 103 of them
with Sarajevo datelines at a time when TV crews couldn’t get into the city or
get their film out of the city. If Burns could write so many articles in so short a period and still
remember not just to report facts but to involve the reader’s emotions by
focusing on an individual, no journalist in a more comfortable environment has
an excuse for not trying.
The
workaday experience of reporting news, particularly local news, does not have
the built-in drama of reporting from a war zone, but that doesn’t prevent the
use of the same techniques to hook readers into local news stories. Let’s look
at some examples and determine what makes them work:
Yesterday morning Henry Sorbino walked into the K-Mart on
Eleventh Street carrying an umbrella and walked out carrying an umbrella and
someone else’s purse.
What is the key ingredient that makes that opening
sentence work? Did you note that repeating the word “umbrella” underscored
Sorbino’s walking out with someone else’s purse? That technique—repetition for
effect—increases the dramatic impact of what’s being described.
Can you
pick out the ingredient that makes the difference in the following lead?
At exactly 10:19 a.m. yesterday, a grandmother’s purse on
a conveyor belt at Orange County airport set off an alarm that caused two
security guards to rush to the scene.
Did you note the word “grandmother”? The reporter could
have said her name, Alice Hackmeyer, instead, but it wouldn’t have created the
same contrast with the event as “grandmother” does.
Did you
note also that the introduction of action—the security guards rushing to the
scene—helped dramatize that first sentence?
Here’s
another easily adaptable technique. First the blah version:
The Buschkowski family moved from a rented apartment into
its own home for the first time today.
That doesn’t sound like news. And it certainly doesn’t
sound interesting, though it is factually accurate. How might a first sentence
excite the reader’s curiosity?
It took fourteen years for the Buschkowski family to move
two blocks.
That lead turns on the engine of curiosity, the driving
force that gets readers beyond the first sentences.
Here’s
another blah beginning of a kind that’s found in hundreds of papers every day:
Carl Gardhof was sentenced in Superior Court to eighteen
months in jail this morning.
It sounds as if the reporter, bored with reporting endless
routine cases, decided to bore his readers in turn. If he’d trained himself as
an observer, he might have written the following:
Carl Gardhof, his head held high as if he had done
nothing wrong, was sentenced in Superior Court to eighteen months in jail this
morning.
A visual element can almost always be introduced to perk up
a lead. This one conveys the attitude of the person without the cliché of
“maintaining his innocence.” We haven’t yet found out what Carl Gardhof did.
It’d be nice if it was for something like this:
Carl Gardhof, his head held high as if he had done nothing
wrong, was sentenced in Superior Court to eighteen months in jail this morning
for stealing a Bible.
But even if it was for punching a policeman, or a third
offense of shoplifting, or whatever, that first sentence has it made because of
the visual that starts it, which needn’t be a head held high:
Carl Gardhof, who had trouble keeping his eyes on the
judge, was sentenced in Superior Court to six months in jail this morning for
his fourth conviction of flashing in public. :
Most reported offenses sound ordinary. A visual touch can
make them seem out-of-the-ordinary and stimulate the reader to continue with
the story.
If
court reporting can be lifted out of dullness, think what technique can do for
the reporting of routine social events:
George Brucell was led into the meeting room by the
chairman.
Again, blah.
George Brucell, a tall man, had to duck his head as the
chairman ushered him into the meeting room.
Head-ducking is not much of an action, but a reporter who
is a keen observer of small detail would have the advantage of the novelist in
picturing Brucell and giving him an action, however small, like ducking his
head:
George Brucell, a tall man, had to duck his head as the
chairman ushered him into the meeting room to loud applause.
Better because of the introduction of sound.
The
following are all from the New York Times. Note how they involve the
reader by focusing on a person:
Since learning last year that he had multiple sclerosis,
Andy Torok has become less and less steady on his feet, and his worries have
accumulated along with the hand prints on his apartment’s white walls.
That story made page one. Its real subject was the
suspension of auto union talks because workers were loath to chip in for health
care costs. All the facts are in the body of the story, but the reader, hooked
by a beginning that focuses on an individual, gathers the facts as he reads an
interesting piece.
In
enhancing journalism with the techniques of fiction, caution is required. It’s
easy to overdo the attempt at analogy. One can feel the New York Times reporter
straining for effect in the following attempt to lure the reader into the
sometimes dull material of a House of Representatives vote:
Washington,
Aug. 5 [1993]—If politics is theater, as the skeptics say, tonight was classic
Hitchcock, with a very large dose of Frank Capra.
There on the House floor,
Bill Clinton’s budget package and his Presidency clung to credibility every bit
like Eva Marie Saint in “North by Northwest,” clinging to the face of Mount Rushmore.
Mr. Clinton’s Democratic supporters held a 216-to-214 margin.
The following Times story starts the right way:
It
is nearly 10 p.m. and the toll taker at the Triborough Bridge’s Manhattan Plaza
is near the end of her shift. Her routine is methodical, icily efficient. She
glances out the window to see the kind and size of vehicle approaching. She
then pushes a button to electronically post the fare on a display screen.
In a practiced movement, she
reaches out for money. She hands back a token or change. She does this 300
times an hour, three seconds a car, an endless stream of stop-and-go.
Such are the labors of one
of life’s invisible people, a toll taker for the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel
Authority, which last year collected $653.6 million from 277 million vehicles.
This particular transaction is recorded in grainy black-and-white images on a
jerky surveillance video tape. The woman, who officials would not name, is
about to become a statistic, one of 26 Bridge and Tunnel officers to be robbed
at gunpoint this year, already three times the number in all 1992.
A black car stops. A man in
a ski mask thrusts a sawed-off shotgun through his window. As quickly as the
human mind can perceive and respond, the toll taker shoves a trayful of money
into his hands. The car lurches into the darkness.
So far so good. The writer, Douglas Martin, has pulled you
through four paragraphs of a story about robberies at tollbooths by focusing on
an individual. But the hazard of overdoing it is there. The next paragraph reads:
The woman pivots to catch the license plate number. Then
her head drops like a rock, her back heaves convulsively and she bites her lip.
An armed sergeant is at her window in 10 seconds. The robber has not been
caught.
That paragraph needs editing. The account turns
melodramatic. The toll taker’s head drops like a cliché, her back “heaves
convulsively”—and unbelievably. She clichés her lip. And suddenly there is an
armed sergeant at her window. Did she get the license plate? We’ll never know.
Journalists
seeking to pack as much information as possible into the opening paragraph
might usefully attend to the following by Natalie Angler, from the science
section of the New York Times:
As any serious migraine sufferer knows, an attack can
bring pain without pity or horizon, a pain so stupendous that it obliterates
work, family, thought, otherness. Yet for all its galactic sweep when it
strikes, migraine is a mundane and commonplace ailment, afflicting about 12
percent of the population. It is a trait passed along from parent to offspring
with the seeming ease of wispy hair or nearsightedness: three-quarters of all
sufferers are thought to have an inherited predisposition to the disorder.
Note the use of metaphoric language, “pain without pity or
horizon.” How much stronger “horizon” is than “endless” would be. Note also
“galactic sweep,” an effective and original way of conveying degree. Contrast
helps. In the same sentence as “galactic sweep” the ailment is characterized as
“mundane and commonplace.” (“Commonplace” alone would have served. See “One
plus one equals one half,” page 205.) Instead of just tossing “genetic
predisposition” at the reader, Angier talks of “wispy hair or nearsightedness.”
It’s a writerly paragraph that arouses our expectation not only of information
but fine writing as well.
Here is a short list of reminders that can help if you’re
drafting a first paragraph in a hurry to meet a deadline: Does your first
sentence trigger curiosity to make the reader want to continue? What will the
reader see in that first sentence? Have you focused on an individual?
Have you given us a visible characteristic of that individual? Have you
portrayed the individual doing or saying something? Is there a startling or odd
fact that will trap attention?
Let’s see what some experienced writers of features,
articles, and books have been doing with first sentences.
Andy Warhol, draftsman of shoes, is dead, and the people
viewing his remains are mostly wearing scuffed white sneakers.
Note the visual parallel. An obit or memorial piece
doesn’t have to be dull. That was Stuart Klawans, writing in Grand Street.
Jay
McInerney knows how to make his opening sentence visual:
A year after his death, the recurring image I associate
with Raymond Carver is one of people leaning toward him, working very hard at
the act of listening.
A novel comparison also makes a good hook:
At the Academy Awards, the entrance to the Shrine Civil
Auditorium is flanked by four giant Oscars quite, or so it seems to me, like
sullen art deco Nazis.
The sentence might have been improved by omitting “or so
it seems to me” but the comparison is startling and strong nevertheless. It was
by Stanley Elkin for Harper’s magazine. Here’s another:
I’m talking to my friend Kit Herman when I notice a
barely perceptible spot on the left side of his face.
That’s Randy Shilts in Esquire focusing on an
ominous blemish. Here’s a lead that might be a turn-off:
The doctor told me that I had cancer of the prostate.
But Anatole Broyard was a brilliant as well as brave
writer, and here’s how he actually started his essay “Intoxicated by My
Illness”:
So much of a writer’s life consists of assumed suffering,
rhetorical suffering, that I felt something like relief, even elation, when the
doctor told me that I had cancer of the prostate.
He enhances the hard fact with contrast, resonance, and
surprise. In death, life.
Can you
bring a fresh insight to your first sentence? Fiction writers are said to
“reach down their throats” for truths that enable them to write from the
inside. Can candor at the beginning help your article, perhaps something you
would rather the world not know that you might keep secret if you were not a
writer?
Alternatively,
can you mint a new description for a familiar object the way Stanley Elkin did
when he saw the Academy Award statues as Art Deco Nazis?
Let’s
look at some examples of first sentences from short nonfiction that has
endured:
Saints should always be judged guilty until they are
proved innocent ...
That’s just the first half of the first sentence of George
Orwell’s essay “Reflections on Gandhi.” We don’t think of judging saints. And
Orwell inverts the usual “innocent until proven guilty,” producing two
attention-getters in half a sentence.
Orwell,
though best known for his novels Animal Farm and 1984, was one of
the best nonfiction writers of the century. No journalist, whether or not he
covers political events, should miss reading Orwell’s essay “Politics and the
English Language.”
Can
good writing about natural history hook the reader at the start? Here’s an
example by Loren Eiseley:
I have long been an admirer of the octopus.
Octopus? Admirer? That opening is both surprising and a
touch amusing. One goes on reading, which is what first sentences are supposed
to encourage.
A first
sentence can be used to announce a theme dramatically. Witness the following by
Robert Warshow from Encounter magazine:
The two most successful creations of American movies are
the gangster and the Westerner: men with guns.
To demonstrate the use of effective first sentences in
longer nonfiction, I have selected first sentences from two autobiographies by
authors I knew well:
Many problems confront an autobiographer, and I am
confident that I have not solved them.
I see no reason why the reader should be interested in my
private life.
Both examples entice with a slight surprise because they
do the opposite of what we expect. Both seem to be disclaimers. Each is a
cover-up for a fault. They both might be characterized as pseudo-candor, which
can be as effective as candor. They are both interesting beginnings that invite
us to go on.
The
first is from Sidney Hook’s Out of Step: An Unquiet Life in the 20th
Century. The second is from Bertram D. Wolfe’s A Life in Two Centuries, a
book important enough to make the front page of The New York Times Book
Review.
Let’s
move from first sentences in longer nonfiction to first paragraphs that invite
the reader to continue:
From all available evidence no black man had ever set
foot in this tiny Swiss village before I came. I was told before arriving that
I would probably be a “sight” for the village. I took this to mean that people
of my complexion were rarely seen in Switzerland, and also that city people are
always something of a “sight” outside of the city. It did not occur to
me—possibly because I am an American—that there could be people anywhere who
had never seen a Negro.
That first paragraph is by a then largely unknown writer
named James Baldwin. The last sentence in the quoted paragraph could have been
its first, an immediate hook, but if the author had done that, the paragraph
would wind down instead of building toward a climax, which is more effective.
The
subject of another first paragraph was the republication by Scribner’s of Peter
Fleming’s first book, written right after an adventure when he was only
twenty-four. A blah lead-in would have been:
Peter Fleming was only twenty-four when he experienced
and wrote his Brazilian Adventure.
Here’s how it was done:
Children, those energetic dervishes, are too busy testing
themselves against the world to know the meaning of boredom for very long; high
adventure waits for them in every breakable object. It is in adolescence that
boredom, time without life, insinuates itself into each passing day. But the adolescent
with a good mind and a university education to acquire may wait until he is 24
or more before life begins to pall. That is precisely the age at which Peter
Fleming, in 1932, answered an advertisement.
The fact in the last sentence of the paragraph would
normally have gone into the first sentence. It was put last for two reasons. It
was given the job of thrusting the reader forward into the next paragraph. More
important was the establishment of tone.
In my
first reading of nonfiction I sometimes find that a good lead is buried
elsewhere in the draft. Brought forward it can replace a less worthy beginning and help ensure that a
reader will be turned on to reading the whole.
Thomas Henry Huxley was a nineteenth-century physician
credited with popularizing Darwin’s ideas and other scientific thought of his
time. Popularizing? Try, if you can, this opening paragraph of his famous essay
“The Method of Scientific Investigation”:
The method of scientific investigation is nothing but the
expression of the necessary mode of working of the human mind. It is simply the
mode at which all phenomena are reasoned about, rendered precise and exact.
There is no more difference, but there is just the same kind of difference,
between the mental operations of a man of science and those of an ordinary
person as there is between the operations and methods of a baker or of a
butcher weighing out his goods in common scales and the operations of a chemist
in performing a difficult and complex analysis by means of his balance and
finely graduated weights. It is not that the action of the scales in the one
case and the balance in the other differ in the principles of their
construction or manner of working, but the beam of one is set on an infinitely
finer axis than the other and of course turns by the addition of a much smaller
weight.
Huxley’s essay, believe it or not, is used as a model in
some twentieth-century textbooks. It is not, to put it mildly, a model of
clarity, and it certainly isn’t interesting to read. Let’s look at someone
else’s treatment of the same material:
Scientific investigation is a precise yet commonplace way
of examining information. A baker or a butcher weighing out his goods and a
chemist performing a difficult and complex analysis with finely graduated
weights are doing the same kind of thinking.
The edited example contains fewer than one quarter the
words yet gets the idea across. It is not the brevity that counts but the fact
that the Huxley version is bloated with abstractions and is boring to read.
Huxley may have done his work as a scientist but not as a writer. I would be
willing to wager that any writer who has absorbed the material in this chapter
could write an opening paragraph that’s a lot more interesting than Huxley’s.
Which
leads me to an important point. The craft of creative writing is at least as
complex as the craft of science. I have one student who is an aeronautical
engineer and another who is an obstetrician, and I dare say both would admit
that writing to a professional standard involves craft at least as complex as
their occupations. You wouldn’t want a layman walking into a hospital operating
theater to deliver a child. Nor would you want a layman to design the next
airplane you travel in. But writing? Can’t everybody do it?
Welcome to the Twentieth Century
Imagine this: You are in a theater in the midst of a
packed audience. The curtain goes up. The stage is set, but you don’t see
actors. You can hear them talking offstage, though the words are unclear. By
the sound of their voices, the actors must be doing things. But what? It’s all
happening offstage!
The
audience is restless. Everyone wants the actors to come onstage so that they
can be seen. Such is the yearning of today’s audiences for what we have come to
call “immediate scenes,” scenes that take place before the eye.
In the
nineteenth century, novels and stories were filled with summations of offstage
events, past or present, almost always told to the reader in summary form.
These clumps of narrative summary are not experienced by today’s readers with
the immediacy and excitement of a witnessed event. With good reason. Even in
societies that are not technologically advanced, a high proportion of the
people born in the first half of this century experienced the phenomenon of
moving pictures, which revolutionized entertainment even for the illiterate. In
mid-century, the advent of television brought a visual medium into homes.
Television and movies are full of immediate scenes, visible to the eye, ready
to be experienced firsthand. This has influenced stories and novels more than
we realize. Twentieth-century audiences now insist on seeing what they are
reading. If you examine twentieth-century fiction, you’ll find a dramatic
increase in immediate scenes and a corresponding decrease in narrative summary.
There has also been a decrease in descriptions of indoor and outdoor places
that put the story on hold, making impatient twentieth-century readers start to
skip.
* * *
Understanding the difference among the three main
components of fiction—description, narrative summary, and immediate scene—can
be of immense help to a writer of nonfiction also. The nonfiction writer who
learns to use immediate scenes wherever he can will also find a dramatic
improvement in the reception of his work. Nonfiction writers should pay close
attention to the three forms of fiction—which I am about to define
again—because the principles involved relate to their work as well.
Description
is a depiction of a locale
or person. The Latin root of the word “depiction,” pingere, means “to
picture” or to fashion a visual image.
Narrative
summary is the recounting of
what happens offstage, out of the reader’s sight and hearing, a scene that is
told rather than shown.
An immediate
scene happens in front of the reader, is visible, and therefore filmable.
That’s an important test. If you can’t film a scene, it is not immediate.
Theater, a truly durable art, consists almost entirely of immediate scenes.
Just as
every form of writing that is expected to be read with pleasure moves away from
abstraction, every form of pleasurable writing benefits from conveying as much
as possible before the eye, onstage rather than offstage.
John
Cheever is a master of using description to do much more than describe. Witness
the beginning of Bullet Park, which describes a railroad station in a
manner that is also a depiction of the narrator’s state of mind at the outset
of the book:
Paint me a small railroad station then, ten minutes
before dark. Beyond the platform are the waters of the Wekonsett River,
reflecting a somber afterglow. The architecture of the station is oddly
informal, gloomy but unserious, and mostly resembles a pergola, cottage or
summer house although this is a climate of harsh winters. The lamps along the platform
burn with a nearly palpable plaintiveness. The setting seems in some way to be
at the heart of the matter. We travel by plane, oftener than not, and yet the
spirit of our country seem to have remained a country of railroads. You wake in
a pullman bedroom at three a.m. in a city the name of which you do not know and
may never discover ...
Cheever’s description is not static. It is part of the
storytelling, and that is a key to description as it is used by our better
writers: It has more than one function.
For instance, in The End of the Affair, Graham Greene uses description
of a room to characterize the person whose room it is:
I had never been in his study before: I had always been
Sarah’s friend, and when I met Henry it was on Sarah’s territory, her haphazard
living-room where nothing matched, nothing was period or planned, where
everything seemed to belong to that very week because nothing was ever allowed
to remain as a token of past taste or past sentiment. Everything was used
there; just as in Henry’s study I now felt that very little had ever been used.
I doubted whether the set of Gibbon had once been opened, and the set of Scott
was only there because it had—probably—belonged to his father, like the bronze
copy of the Discus Thrower. And yet he was happier in his unused room simply
because it was his: if one possesses a thing securely, one need never use it.
Narrative summary, if written well and briefly, can
transport the reader from one immediate scene to another, though this isn’t
always necessary. Fiction and reporting have now borrowed a film technique
called “jump cutting,” moving from one scene into the next with no transition
for time to pass or locales to change. If the scenes must be linked, brief
narrative summary can do the linking. How brief?
Martin double-locked his door and went to work. In the
office ...
In the first part of the first sentence, we actually see
Martin locking his door. That’s immediate scene. “Went to work” is narrative
summary. Just three words get us from one scene to the next.
Narrative
summary, if kept short, can be useful in setting up an immediate scene:
I am
lying on the familiar couch, listening to the sound of Dr. Koch breathing,
waiting for me to continue talking. I’d been telling him about the botched
weekend, about Bill and Thomassy. I don’t want to talk any more, to him or to
anybody. Finally, I tell him I’m fed up, I don’t want to be in therapy, I want
to be back in life.
“You do not stop living,” he
says, “when you take time to stop and think.”
We can visualize the narrator on the psychiatrist’s couch,
listening to the doctor breathing. When the doctor speaks, we are back in the
immediate scene.
If a
narrator tells the reader that Herman sat at a lunch counter “drinking endless
cups of coffee, waiting for Jill,” that’s narrative summary. The reader cannot
see “endless cups” of anything. A summary of repetitive action does not create
a clear image. It’s easy enough to fix:
As Herman sipped the last dregs of coffee, he looked up
to see the counterman holding the pot ready to refresh his cup. When the steam
stopped rising from the cup, he sipped again. As the counterman approached for
the third time, Herman shook his head, and got up from the stool. He reached
into his pocket for bills, and tossed two singles on the counter. Jill could go
to hell.
The tiny bit of action keeps the author from intruding
with a summary. The reader is able to feel something of what Herman feels when
he is kept waiting.
Editors
tell us that a primary reason for the rejection of novels is that they consist
of far too much static description and narrative summary. Even a successful
writer like P. D. James can tax a reader with an excess of description that
does not move the story along:
There is Miss James’s insistence on describing absolutely
everything. ... so much of her scene-setting serves no other purpose than to
create impenetrable atmosphere. For instance, pages are devoted to describing
in loving detail the locale of a lunch that Dalgliesh eats with a friend ... yet
the story never returns there. ... A character can’t enter a room without being
lost in its furnishings. A result is the loss of all sense of pace.
That public reprimand from the chief daily book critic of
the New York Times, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, appeared in a review of
James’s 1995 novel Original Sin. If an experienced writer like P. D.
James can slip, why hazard the ice? My advice to writers yearning for
publication is to minimize description, and be sure you don’t stop the story
while describing. You are a storyteller, not an interior decorator.
Though
today’s readers want immediate scenes as the primary source of their
experience, editors still see too many manuscripts with a plethora of narrative
summary as if written for nineteenth-century audiences. The news is that the
authors of these manuscripts are writing for audiences that are dead. Readers
today insist on seeing characters onstage.
That
doesn’t mean we can’t enjoy the works of previous centuries. We can and do. But
as creatures of our time, we often find the pace of earlier writing slow, the
descriptions languid, and the recounting of offstage matters less involving
than scenes before our eyes. Imitating nineteenth-century writing impedes the
chances of publication.
I am
not arguing for so-called action as it is abused in popular media. In fiction,
action consists of what people do and say. Hemingway said it perfectly: “Never
mistake motion for action.” Adversarial dialogue is action. Combative words can
excite readers’ emotions more than sword-play. When characters speak, we see
them as they talk, which means that dialogue is always in immediate scene.
Stage plays are in immediate scene. So are films, and now, for the most part,
novels.
To keep
the reader reading, you want his involvement to be a continuous experience. The
best reading experiences defy interruption. I think I am especially sensitive
to glitches that interrupt the reader’s experience because of my years as a
playwright. In the theater, we instantly know if there is a loss of audience
attention. Playgoers, if taken out of their experience even for a moment, cough
and rustle in their seats. Writers of books don’t have the advantage of seeing
and hearing their audience’s reaction. We have to train ourselves to detect and
remove interruptions of the reader’s experience. Static descriptions interrupt
the story. So does a summary of what has happened offstage between scenes or
elsewhere.
The
ideal is not to break the reader’s experience even for a few seconds. Which
leads me to a common fault of the inexperienced writer. He is writing a scene
that the reader can experience, but he feels the need to provide some
information. Instead of finding a way to have the information come naturally
out of the characters in the scene, he states the information baldly. The
author’s voice interrupts the scene.
When I
speak to groups of writers, I sometimes hold up a large pane of glass. I ask
the writers to imagine that the glass separates the writer from his readers.
The readers are having their experience entirely on the other side of the
glass. If they hear the author even for a phrase or two, it interrupts their
experience. Information that seems to come from the author rather than a
visible character is an intrusion from the other side of the glass. Writers are
directors of what transpires on the other side of the glass. They are not one
of the actors.
In sum,
if you want to improve your chances of publication, keep your story visible on
stage and yourself mum.
Fiction
Competing with God: Making Fascinating People
Think of
the novels you have loved most. Do you remember a character you lived with page
after page, perhaps hoping the book would never end? What do you remember most
clearly, the characters or the plot?
Now
think of the movies you’ve seen that affected you the most. Do you remember the
actors or the plot?
There’s
a book called Characters Make Your Story that you don’t have to read
because the title says it all: Characters make your story. If the people come
alive, what they do becomes the story.
Writers
of literary and much mainstream fiction usually begin by imagining a character.
The same is true of the writers of the most popular mysteries centered around a
character: Sherlock Holmes, Miss Marple, Hercule Poirot, or Kinsey Millhone.
The characters engage us first and are remembered most. The plots of individual
books are chapters in their lives.
Some
writers of popular and transient fiction begin with a character, but a large
percentage who write category books (e.g., adventure, spy, westerns, science
fiction, romance novels) start with a plot, then populate it with characters.
That method usually results in hackwork, at which some writers have become so
skilled that they have made millions with stories that even their devoted
readers acknowledge seem “made up.”
Other
writers can’t help starting out with a theme that obsesses them. They imagine
characters whose lives might involve the theme, or they work out a plot first.
If their allegiance is to character, their theme-originated story has a better
chance of survival.
During
all the many years in which I was an editor and publisher, what did I hope for
when I picked up a manuscript? I wanted to fall in love, to be swept up as
quickly as possible into the life of a character so interesting that I couldn’t bear to shut the
manuscript in a desk overnight. It went home with me so that I could continue
reading it.
We know
what love is, we think of the other person at odd moments, we wonder where they
are, what they are doing, we seem a bit crazy to the rest of the world. That’s
exactly the feeling I have about characters I fall in love with in books.
From
those experiences I am convinced that we need to know the people in the car
before we see the car crash. The events of a story do not affect our
emotions in an important way unless we know the characters. Some books center
on catastrophic events that don’t move me at all. The characters in those books
come across as stereotypes with names. If they are not alive, why should I care
if their well-being is threatened?
Let’s
look at proof that characters come first:
Harry jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge.
The typical reaction is “So what?” Who’s Harry? Suppose we
add just one word, a second name of someone you may remember, a popular singer
and film star. With the addition of a second name, does your reaction to the
sentence change?
Harry Belafonte jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge.
Suddenly the sentence means something. If you remember the
singer Harry Belafonte, you can visualize the character. Why did he jump? With
no characterization beyond a name, because it’s someone we know about, we begin
to care. Of course this example has nothing to do with the real Harry
Belafonte, whose name we have borrowed for this demonstration.
One of
the devices used by successful thriller writers is to give a small role to a
real person, usually a high officeholder. That’s what Jack Higgins did in his
breakthrough novel, The Eagle Has Landed, in which Winston Churchill
makes a cameo appearance. Writers who use this technique do not attempt to
characterize famous individuals in depth. A trace to jog memory is enough.
Watch what happens in the following:
Harry Truman was not a man to be governed by rules. When
he was President, he used to take long walks each morning to destinations of
his own choosing, trailed by Secret Service agents who sometimes had trouble
keeping up with him. What few people know is that once, when visiting New York,
Harry Truman decided to stroll across the Brooklyn Bridge against the advice of
his Secret Service escort—he never listened to them. Halfway across Truman saw
another early-morning walker, an old man wearing a fedora pulled down almost to
his eyes, trying to hoist himself up onto the railing. Truman, the most
universally admired President of the last half century, realized instantly that
the old man could have no other purpose than to jump.
We get interested in the action of a man about to jump off
a bridge because we know the observer. What will Harry Truman do? The engine of
the story has turned on. Our curiosity is involved. We want to know more.
When
neighbors report gossip to us about people we know, we can be titillated or
sometimes even moved. A writer cannot depend on “sometimes.” His
characterization must elicit emotion from a wide variety of readers without
fail. How does he do it? He learns the art of characterization, adding details
and depth until he has created a character whom we may know better than all but
our closest friends.
Let’s
take it one step at a time. How does a writer characterize in simple ways?
What we
do in life is lazy. We say the first thing that comes into our heads. Think of
a ticket taker at a movie house. He sees people passing in a stream. He can
only make quick generalizations. That man is tall, that woman is skinny. How
does a writer deal with similar facts?
Frank is so tall, he entered the room as if he expected
the lintel to hit him, conveying the image of a man with a perpetually stiff
neck.
The man is not just tall, he is being characterized through
an action.
What
about the woman who was described as skinny? How does a writer deal with that
fact?
She always stood sideways so people could see how thin
she was.
Again, the writer is not just describing; he is
characterizing by an action. We individualize by seeing characters doing
things and saying things, not by the author telling us about them. Don’t ever
stop your story to characterize. Avoid telling the reader what your character
is like. Let the reader see your characters talking and doing things.
Let’s
look at some examples of characterization by novelist Nanci Kincaid, in her
talented first novel Crossing Blood:
Once we looked in Patricia’s window and saw her in her
half-slip. ... First she curled her eyelashes, holding a mirror in her hand.
Then, out of the blue, she picked up a lipstick, smeared it on, and kissed the
mirror. Kissed it. She made little kiss marks and looked them over real close,
studying them. She was dead serious about it. Jimmy got mad and made us get down
off the trash cans and stop looking. He swatted Donald to make the rest of us
stop laughing at Patricia.
The same author will now introduce a character called
Skippy. Kincaid doesn’t tell us Skippy was brave; she lets the reader
experience Skippy’s bravery through an action:
Skippy will pick up a snake as quick as he will a cat. He
will let one crawl on his neck and down his arm, a black snake, until me and
Roy go crazy watching him. More than once he let me and Roy hold one, which we
did, but we had to practically quit breathing to do it.
Exaggeration
is another technique for characterizing:
Laverne weighed two tons naked.
Nobody believes for a second that Laverne
weighed four thousand pounds. In speech we hear it said about an object that
“it weighed a ton.” We exaggerate constantly. It’s a way of communicating
quickly, and often effectively.
Comparison
to a known quantity or quality is sometimes a useful form of exaggeration:
Archie was Wilt Chamberlain tall.
Bruce wafted me around that dance floor. If I’d shut my
eyes, he could have been Fred Astaire.
Exaggeration can be especially useful when dealing with
children. Here’s Nanci Kincaid again:
The worst thing about George, though, worse than his
nasty mouth, full of missing and broken teeth, worse than his fleas and sore
spots, was the fact that he was missing one eyeball. He had an empty hole in
his head. You could poke your finger in there and he wouldn’t even twitch.
Reproving someone who is late, a layman might write, “I’ve
been waiting a long time for you.” That doesn’t characterize either the speaker
or the latecomer. “I’ve been waiting forever for you” is an exaggeration—and
also a cliché. It doesn’t characterize. Here’s how an experienced writer, Rita
Mae Brown, did it in her novel High Hearts:
“Girl, my fingernails could grow an inch just waiting for
you.”
In The Best Revenge I needed to introduce a
character who would prove to be influential, a tough lawyer named Bert Rivers,
who is short and bald. If he was described as short and bald, that would be a
movie-house ticket taker’s description. Nick Manucci, in the company of his
lawyer, Dino, sees his opponent’s lawyer for the first time, and says:
“This distributor has a lawyer so short you wouldn’t be
able to see him if he sat behind a desk. And he’s Yul Brynner bald. But when he
shakes your hand you know this dude could squeeze an apple into apple juice.
Every time Dino opens his mouth, this lawyer pisses into it.”
That’s not the author talking, it’s a character talking,
and therefore an acceptable exaggeration. It also characterizes the speaker.
Can you characterize more than one person at a time? Of
course you can. You characterize the speaker as well as the person spoken
about. A novice writing what first comes to mind might write, “My father is a
pompous judge.” That’s telling the reader, not showing him. Here’s the way it
was done in the voice of a character named Jane Riller in The Best Revenge:
My father is still living, but less and less. Judge James
Charles Endicott Jackson, his “appellations” as he called his full name, that
tall, lean, hollow-cheeked man who had made such a religion of the law,
preached from the head of our dining-room table each evening of my young life.
A character would not likely say, “My mother always gave
in to my father.” That’s telling the reader. Here’s how Jane Riller says it:
When they stood next to their car at the bus station, for
a moment I thought my mother was going to leave the Judge’s side long enough to
come forward and say a few words more than good-bye. But it was only the wind
ruffling her dress, not a movement of her body that I saw. I admired her as one
would a pioneer farm woman, someone who had lived a life no longer possible.
What great and unacknowledged actresses the women of my mother’s background
were; to avoid shattering the fragile innocence of their spouses, some of them
simulated not only their orgasms but their entire lives.
Jane’s snapshot of her mother also characterizes Jane. It
shows what she, as a young woman, rebelled against. She wanted to go out into
the world where you could experience everything. Note that the paragraph starts
with a visual image—the parents standing next to their car at the bus
station—and ends with the character’s conclusion. Had the order been reversed,
the effect would be lessened. Also note that Jane is characterizing not only
her mother but a whole class of people.
Can
characterizing a whole class of people be done by a beginning writer? Here’s
another example from Nanci Kincaid’s first novel to demonstrate that it doesn’t
take decades of experience to use the techniques that writers have developed
over centuries:
Migrant kids know they are white trash, so they never
speak a single word the whole two weeks they come to school. The rich kids will
not sit by them at lunch. They invite each other to birthday parties held at
the swimming pools in their backyards. The rich daddies usually go into
politics. They slowly get bald and fat and buy up everything for miles around.
When the legislature is in session Tallahassee swarms with them. Mother says
half of them have girlfriends put up at the Howard Johnson’s.
Is it possible to characterize with a single word?
In a
work in progress, I wanted to reintroduce two characters who’ve been in several
of my books, the lawyer George Thomassy, and Gunther Koch, a sixty-year-old
Viennese psychiatrist. Dr. Koch is lecturing Thomassy, a successful trial
lawyer, about how to detect jurors who might disadvantage Thomassy’s case. The
lawyer reacts to being lectured:
Thomassy didn’t take this kind of shit from a judge, why
the hell should he take it from this accent.
The word “accent” characterizes not Koch but the speaker
Thomassy. He deprecates Dr. Koch because he doesn’t like being lectured. The
trace of prejudice against foreigners is especially meaningful because Thomassy
has tried hard to repress his own immigrant background.
If
there is a common error among inexperienced writers, it’s that they say too
much, they try to characterize with an excess of detail instead of trying to
find the word or phrase that characterizes best.
The
words you select depend on the circumstances under which you introduce the
character. For instance, when we first see a character at any distance,
physical size makes an instant impression. If we are seeing a character at
closer range, we often notice the eyes first. What inexperienced writers often
do is give us the color or shape of eyes. That’s not as effective as conveying
how the character uses his eyes. If on meeting a person he averts his eyes, it
usually connotes something negative. Good eye contact is usually perceived as
positive. Unrelenting eye contact can be negative to a shy or withdrawn
character:
I couldn’t make eye contact with her. She was looking for
invisible spots on the wall.
She said, “I don’t love you anymore,” but her eyes belied
her words.
She didn’t answer me. She just continued to glare as if
her eyes said it all.
Another error of inexperienced writers—or journalists in a
hurry—is to confine characterization to the obvious physical attributes. For
females, facial features, breasts, hips, buttocks, legs. For males, broad
shoulders, strong arms, chiseled features, and so on. That’s top-of-the-head,
thoughtless writing. Such clichés are common in speech. We expect better of our
writers.
Instead
of clichéd attributes, consider using physical characteristics that relate to
your story. For example, if you are writing a love story between a woman and a
man, consider the belief of some psychologists that a woman’s most prominent
sexual characteristic is her hair. (If that surprises you, imagine a woman you
think attractive as bald. Would she still be sexually appealing?) The same
psychologists hold that the most important
sexual characteristic of a man is his voice (And if that surprises you, think
of a man you believe to be attractive and imagine him with a squeaky,
high-pitched voice. Would he still be sexually appealing?)
If you
want to convey an antisexual attribute to your reader, consider the
characteristics of hair and voice in a negative way.
There are at least five different ways to characterize:
You’ll
want to avoid generalizations or similes that have been overused, such as “She
shuffled like a bag lady” or “She carried herself like a queen.” One of my
students described a character this way: “George was a big fellow.” That passes
on information, but evokes nothing. The student was encouraged to think how he
might revise his material to stir a feeling in the reader. This is what he did:
When George came your way, you thought you were being run
down by a truck.
We know immediately that George is a big fellow, but more
important we feel his size as threatening. The writer has characterized by an
action, which is far more effective than characterizing by description.
Characterization
should be kept visual whenever possible: “He walked against an unseen wind” is
visual. Opportunities are available in a character’s gait, posture, demeanor,
and other physical behavior. For instance, there are a lot of ways that a
character can get across a room. Walking is the easy, lazy answer. The writer’s
aim should be to pick a way that both characterizes and helps the story.
Think
of the many ways a character can walk. She can promenade, take a leisurely
walk, stroll. She can amble, which means to move easily, to saunter. She can
wander aimlessly.
You can
pick up the pace, and have a character hasten, scurry, scoot, rush, dash, dart,
bolt, spring, run, or race. Each of these words harbors a nuance that can help
both to characterize and to convey a visual image. You can even use a metaphor effectively, as
in “She flew to the store to get there before it closed.”
A
writer who always has his characters “walk” is missing opportunities. Variants
on walking should be used with caution, however. Their overuse annoys readers.
In considering the possible variations for walking, you have been doing what
writers should do every day—reflect on the meanings of individual words.
It is
also possible to characterize by going into great detail about how a particular
character walks. Witness the following from a John Updike story:
She didn’t look around, not this queen, she just walked
straight on slowly, on these long white primadonna legs. She came down a little
hard on her heels, as if she didn’t walk in bare feet that much, putting down
her heels and then letting the weight move along her toes as if she was testing
the floor with every step, putting a little deliberate extra action into it.
One author whose work I edited found a way to walk his
character straight to bestsellerdom. The story hinged on the relationship of a
husband to his wife and his mistress. The novel wasn’t working because the
husband and wife were characterized successfully, but the mistress seemed to be
all sex, a one-note characterization that failed to make her come alive. A
triangle doesn’t work unless all three participants are characterized fully.
I asked
the author to describe how the mistress would walk across the room. He said he
saw her walking across the room like a young lion—a male simile that opened up
a new way of characterizing the mistress. Male traits were then used to
describe her elsewhere in the book. It made her come alive, which in turn made
the relationship credible. The book went on to become the number-one bestseller
for thirty-seven consecutive weeks.
One can
describe a way of moving that gives us a sense of personality:
Henry moved through the crowd as if he were a basketball
player determined to bounce his way to the basket.
The character needn’t be in motion. Posture can provide
personality:
He had the bearing of a man who had been a soldier a long
time ago.
Physical behavior can give the reader a sense of
personality: tapping a finger, pointing with eyeglasses, snickering, laughing,
clapping hands wildly.
A broad
range of psychological attributes is available to the writer. Let’s look at one
that can create a dramatic effect:
He said nothing.
I demanded an answer and he just stood there.
“Say something,” I said.
His silence was like a brick wall between us.
“Come on! Speak!”
That’s an example of someone who gets his way by refusing
to do something. Psychological attributes can be much more direct:
She bombarded them with questions nonstop as if their
answers were irrelevant.
Calvin’s glazed expression said, “I’m not paying
attention. I’m listening to the music in my head.”
She was only nine years old, but she could look directly
into your soul as if in a previous life she had been a Grand Inquisitor and
your lies were condemning you.
Characterizing through psychological attributes can be
rewarding because they often connect to the story:
He dealt with his friends as if they were employees. He
talked and they listened.
If you got in a car with her you’d find that her
sentences were at least ten miles long.
At a party he’d come on to a woman—any woman—as if she
were the only woman in the room.
Physical and psychological attributes can also be combined
for purposes of characterization:
As he
moved slowly across the room, age and arthritis made him seem brittle, but when
he spoke—anywhere about anything—people stopped to listen as if Moses had come
down with new commandments.
If you develop a characteristic that’s especially
pertinent to your character, or original, it’s a good idea to use it on the
character’s first appearance, to “set” the character. For instance, if you now
know that your character will first be seen walking, then gait is a
characteristic that should appear right away. If the character is the kind who
always interrupts other people in conversation, you might consider introducing
that character as he or she interrupts. For instance:
George and Mary were at the kitchen table, debating how
to handle their misbehaving teenager when Alma walked in and said, “I don’t
know how you people can just sit there talking instead of getting off your
butts and giving that child of yours a lesson with the back of your hand.”
There are many ways in which characterization can go wrong
in the hands of a less experienced writer, but two stand out because they are
so common in rejected fiction. There is the protagonist with a weak will, and the
villain who is merely badly behaved.
First,
consider the “hero” who is not heroic, who lacks drive, a will to attain his
objective. Let’s face it, readers aren’t interested in wimps. They are
interested in assertive characters who want something, want it badly, and want
it now.
Test
yourself. Would you want to spend ten or twelve hours with a wimpish character
who is weak and ineffectual? Don’t ask the reader to. A wimp in life is a
social bore. A wimp in fiction is an obstacle to reader enjoyment.
I have
talked to writers whose problems with wimpish characters in their work had a
direct link to their own lives. There are children who, damaged by authority,
become fighters against authority. There are also people who, damaged by
authority in childhood, become relatively passive adults as a means of
camouflaging their aggression and anger to save their hearts and lives.
Camouflaged anger is useful in stories, but it is the final unleashing of the
anger that attracts readers most.
In
working with such writers, or with shy writers who produce shy heroes, I have
found a way, once they understand the inhospitality of fiction to passivity, to help them get rid of
a wimpish protagonist who is de-energizing their fiction. I ask the writer to
imagine that he is in his study with the door closed. A person outside wants to
come in. The writer orders the intruder to stay out. I ask the writer to
imagine a second person outside his door who says to the first, “Get out of my
way,” then comes into the writer’s study without asking. The writer starts to
object and this second intruder says, “You shut up and listen for a change!”
That
second person is the writer’s replacement for the wimp. That’s his new
protagonist. I urge the writer to listen to the character, rude as he is, and
then compose a letter from that new non-wimp character to the writer that is
assertive, candid, and at least a touch eccentric.
As to
villains, bad behavior on its own is not as effective as mean spiritedness,
deriving satisfaction and even pleasure from hurting the hero or preventing him
from attaining his goal. (A section on characterizing villains begins on page
68.)
In the course of developing a character, there are some
questions I will ask myself. Does he behave differently toward strangers than
he does to members of his family? Such a difference is revealing. Would my
character behave differently when he met an old friend who is now famous than
when he bumped into another friend of the same vintage who is down on his luck
and ashamed? I also ask myself if my character ever talks to people in a way
they find offensive. Does he realize he is offending them? Does he try to
apologize or change? Or doesn’t he care? We know that people reveal themselves
more when they raise their voices than when they speak normally. If my
character had reason to shout, what would we hear? Or if my character is the
kind of person who would never shout, what thought is he repressing? It adds to
the drama to have contrast between what the character is doing and what he is
saying to himself. As you can see, my questions provoke both good and bad
characteristics and lead me into the character’s relationships and into story
scenes.
When
I’m planning a character, I also try to listen to his or her dialogue as if the
character were in the room with me. Do they use figures of speech and
expressions that characterize strongly? I search for conscious and unconscious
mannerisms of my character. As to a character’s clothing, I try to focus on one
item that will stand out in the reader’s mind, for instance the fact that my
character always wears a raincoat even when the sun is shining.
Eventually
I have to ask myself about my character’s attitude toward himself. If he is
sometimes self-deprecating, does he reveal it through some physical tic or in
things he says when he first meets people? If he is arrogant, what does he do
that will make the reader feel he is arrogant without his saying a word? An
arrogant action, I find, works better than arrogant speech.
I have seen talented writers hurt their chances of
publication because they persist in writing about “perfectly ordinary people.”
Of course there have been numerous successful novels in which the main
characters were not extraordinary. What the writers mean by “perfectly ordinary
people” are characters who are seemingly no different from the run of people we
meet who do not seem in any way distinctive.
People
who are exactly like other people probably don’t exist. But people who seem
like most other people litter our lives, and we don’t usually seek their
company because they are boring. Readers don’t read novels in order to
experience the boredom they often experience in life. They want to meet
interesting people, extraordinary people, preferably people different from
anyone they’ve met before in or out of fiction.
The
experienced writer will give us characters—even in common walks of life—who
seem extraordinary on first acquaintance. Are there exceptions? Of course.
In my
novel The Resort, the leading characters are an “ordinary” middle-aged
couple, Henry and Margaret Brown, who find themselves in horrific circumstances
at the end of chapter one. If Henry and Margaret Brown were truly ordinary,
they wouldn’t have interested the reader. And so I had Margaret Brown become a
physician at a time when few women were in medical school. I also made her
outspoken, extraordinarily curious, and smart as hell. And I had Henry, a
businessman, spend his off hours in ways few businessmen do.
I made
the Browns just different enough to interest the reader, but it was important
that they not seem “special.” Therefore, when calamity hits the Browns, readers
from any walk of life can identify with their plight, which is critical for the
story. Stephen King usually has quite ordinary-seeming characters get involved
in extraordinary circumstances. In most instances, however, you’ll want to make
your characters as distinctive as possible rather than “ordinary.”
The
extraordinary quality of a character should usually be made evident almost
immediately after he or she appears in the story, unless the thrust of a story is to have the gradual
unveiling of a character’s unusual habits or ambition.
Beware
of characters who are so extreme as to seem like cartoon characters. Some
characters in Charles Dickens’s novels seem wildly exaggerated. Such characters
are difficult to make credible to readers of mainstream fiction today.
Most
authors seek high ground between the character who seems “perfectly
ordinary”—and therefore uninteresting—and the wildly exaggerated cartoonlike
character. Let’s get a fix on the most fertile areas of characterization.
What
makes a character extraordinary? Personality? Disposition? Temperament?
Individuality? Eccentricity? How much overlap is there?
Let’s
explore each of those terms in as much depth as we can. My students find that
their work in characterization improves markedly after they’ve considered the
full span of meaning of those terms.
First, personality.
We know that people at a party will cluster around people with personality.
Personality refers to the distinctive traits of an individual, a set of
behaviors, attitudes, manners, and mannerisms that identify a person.
Personality speaks of an individual’s makeup, nature, and combined traits, his
essence. It means the specialness of a person, which in some may involve
likability, power, charm, magnetism, and charisma. The constituent parts of
personality are disposition, temperament, individuality, and eccentricity.
I’m not
pushing these definitions as definitive. I’m trying to suggest that exploring
an important term in depth can produce a stimulating variety of definitions
that are valuable tools for thinking about a character.
The disposition
of a person is her attitude toward the people and places of the world, her
customary response, particularly her emotional response. Disposition can
involve a person’s qualities, outlook, mood, frame of mind, inclination, bent,
bias, tendency, and direction, her proclivity, predilection, penchant, and
propensity. Today, disposition is sometimes thought of as a predisposition, a
mind-set. As you can now see, there are inspiring convolutions of meaning for
these words that together define what a writer is trying to achieve in
characterization.
Temperament
is a person’s manner of
behaving, thinking, and particularly reacting to people and circumstances, his
characteristic way of confronting a new day or a new development. Temperament
can also be seen as a person’s mettle, spirit, leaning, or inclination.
Temperament often connotes a negative tendency toward anger or irritability,
though the term “even temperament,” of course, means the opposite.
Individuality
is the aggregate of
qualities that distinguish one individual from others. It connotes that
person’s distinctiveness, difference, and, most important, her originality and
uniqueness. A writer describes a character’s singularity with the particulars
of concrete detail. These are the characteristics by which an individual is
recognized by others. Her differentness is her identity. It can be said that the
individuality of a person marks her off, singles her out, sets her apart, and
ultimately defines her.
I’ve
left for last a definition that speaks most to the point of giving your
characters special and unusual characteristics.
Eccentricity
is an offbeat manner of
behavior, dress, or speech that is peculiar to a person and greatly dissimilar
to the same characteristics of most other people. We think of the eccentric
person as odd, a card, perhaps somewhat kinky, a queer fish, a quirky
individual different from the other people we know. When we speak of an
eccentric person, don’t we refer to him or her as a “character”?
The
idiosyncrasies of a person are, of course, as seen by others rather than that
person, who often believes his or her idiosyncrasies to be “perfectly normal.”
Eccentricity
is at the heart of strong characterization. The most effective characters have profound roots in human behavior.
Their richest feelings may be similar to those held by many others. However, as
characters their eccentricities dominate the reader’s first vision of them.
If you
were to examine the surviving novels of this century, you would find that a
majority of the most memorable characters in fiction are to some degree
eccentric. Eccentricity has frequently been at the heart of strong
characterization for good reason. Ordinariness, as I’ve said, is what readers
have enough of in life.
When a
great number of young men take to wearing an earring, that is not eccentricity.
When young women iron their hair as many did in the sixties, that is not
eccentricity. They are conforming to a widespread group mode.
Eccentric
behavior is sometimes said to be nutty behavior, implying strange behavior,
which is perfectly suitable for fiction. But “nutty” can also mean crazy, which
is not intended here for an important reason. There are two types seldom seen
in fiction: people who are psychotic and habitual drunks. Readers find it
difficult to identify with their behavior. There are exceptions, of course, as
in horror stories. In Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, the leading character
is crazy, though we don’t know it for certain until quite near the end.
Alcoholics sometimes play secondary
roles in novels, and there have been several novels featuring alcoholic
individuals or couples. But the most memorable alcoholic, who saw a giant
rabbit called Harvey, involved a playful use of alcoholism that would probably
not be attempted today with the recognition of the severity of the illness.
Dostoevsky’s
opening of Notes from Underground has a character explaining himself. He is so
self-contradictory that when I read this opening aloud to students, they
invariably laugh:
I am a sick man. ... I am a spiteful man. An unattractive
man. I think that my liver hurts. But actually, I don’t know a damn thing about
my illness. I am not even sure what it is that hurts. I am not in treatment and
never have been, although I respect both medicine and doctors. Besides, I am
superstitious in the extreme; well, at least to the extent of respecting
medicine. (I am sufficiently educated not to be superstitious, but I am.) No,
sir, I refuse to see a doctor simply out of spite. Now that is something that
you probably will fail to understand.
Consider also Captain Ahab in Melville’s Moby Dick, certainly
an eccentric. In Mark Twain’s celebrated novels, what captures our attention is
not the ordinariness of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn but their eccentricity.
Think of the twentieth-century novels of Hemingway, Faulkner, Graham Greene,
Kafka, Garcia Marquez, Fitzgerald, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, J. D. Salinger. Or
the short stories of John Cheever. Their most memorable work springs from
eccentric characters.
Think
of the most eccentric person you know. What makes him (or her) eccentric? What
is the most eccentric thing they have ever done? What might they do that would
seem even more eccentric? Then think of your character doing that very thing!
Unlikely? Unreasonable? Surprising? All of the above? If such behavior would be
out of character for your protagonist, then what variation of it would be in
character?
If your
character isn’t capable of any important eccentricity, you may have picked a
character who will not be greatly interesting to readers. People notice the
eccentricity of others. They talk about it with their friends. It becomes the
subject of gossip and rumination. When people do only what they are expected to
do, they don’t make us eager to spend a dozen hours in their company.
You may
be wondering if I am suggesting too much complexity in characterization. I
don’t expect you to use it all, but your explorations will stimulate thoughts that add to the
potential richness of the characterization. To the extent that the complexity
reflects the intricacy of human nature, the characters will come alive to the
reader and remain alive in the reader’s memory.
One
reason characters in transient fiction don’t linger in the reader’s memory is
the shallowness of the characterization. If Ian Fleming’s James Bond is
remembered, it is as a kind of cartoon character. The reader doesn’t concern
himself whether James Bond lives or dies except when he is in the middle of
reading a James Bond story, and even then he doesn’t worry much because the
cartoon character has to live another day—for another book!
Sherlock
Holmes is a wonderful character. But we don’t think about him as we would about
a member of our family or a close friend, living or dead. We think of him as a
character in a book or film. In the best of mainstream fiction, and in literary
fiction, the most complex characters seem to graduate to a permanent place in
our memory, as good friends do.
The
same is true of villains. Professor Moriarty doesn’t occupy our lives except
when we are reading about him. But the reader carries the memory of Iago and
Lady Macbeth for a lifetime.
Contrast is a useful technique for characterization. It
sometimes has the extra virtue of surprise. I recall attending a convention
once where I sat in back of a large room. Several rows ahead of me sat a woman
dressed in an immaculately tailored gray suit, her hair kempt, her posture
markedly straight, and she was picking her nose. What helped characterize her
for me was the contrast between her appearance and her nose-picking.
Characterizing
through unusual clothing or the manner of wearing clothing is another often
neglected possibility. What it requires is to avoid the easy description that
first comes to mind. “Jerry always wore his cap backwards” isn’t writerly. It
can be improved:
His cap worn backwards was a message to the world: Jerry
did things differently.
A layman might say, “Ellen looked terrific in her gown.”
That’s top-of-the-head writing, which can be improved:
In her gown, Ellen looked like the stamen of a flower
made of silk.
The first description doesn’t say anything particular
about either Ellen or the gown. The second is visual and tells us how Ellen and
the gown came across in a way that made them both look good.
One of
my students took the easy way out in describing his character Martin. “Martin
was an informal dresser who didn’t like other men getting all dressed up.” I
persuaded him to rethink the sentence:
Martin referred to men who wore shirts and ties all day
not as people but as “suits.”
An important technique that is used too seldom by
novelists is to give a character life by introducing attributes that go against
the character’s dominant behavior in the scene to come. Early in The Best
Revenge there is a scene in which the hero, the Broadway producer Ben
Riller, whose current play is in severe financial difficulty, goes to see Aldo
Manucci, the moneylender Ben’s father used to go to many years earlier. In the
scene, done from Ben’s point of view, Ben is in the position of pleading for
money, and Aldo presumably has the power to save him. Therefore, in
characterizing Aldo on his first appearance, I gave him a variety of
weaknesses:
At last she wheeled him in, a shrunken human stuffed by a
careless taxidermist. He was trying to hold his head up to see me, an eye
clouded by cataract. He took an unblinking look, then let a rich smile lift the
ends of his mouth as his voice, still bass though tremulous, said, “Ben-neh!”
which made my name sound like the word “good” in Italian.
A common fault in fiction is the portrayal of characters
as all good or all bad. Therefore, when introducing a character who will be in
a position of power in a scene, suggest that character’s vulnerability before
the character exercises power. Conversely, when introducing a character who
will be hurt emotionally or physically in the scene to come, show the character’s
strength at the outset.
In a
short story there is usually time for only one event or episode. A character
comes to life, the event takes place, the story’s over. There is room for a
change of attitude toward something specific. Most often there isn’t room in a
short story for a character to experience enough to cause a profound change.
In a
novel it is common and desirable for the principal character to change by the
end of the book. If the protagonist is a risk taker, he may step into adulthood
by learning that some kinds of risks are foolhardy. If the protagonist accepts
certain conditions as a part of life, he may have learned that some of those
conditions can change. And the protagonist who at the start is a pessimist
about human nature may discover that a single human being can make a difference
for a large number of fellow humans.
These
are just a few examples of how a character might change in the course of a
novel. The writer has to ask, is the change consistent with the character as
portrayed? A change can be surprising, but it should not seem out of sync with
what we know about the character.
Somerset
Maugham said, “You can never know enough about your characters.” When you have
trouble improving a particular characterization, you need to know more. The
remedy may lie in viewing your character from a different perspective.
Another
way is to have your character complain bitterly about something. In life,
complaining is more effective when it is done in a normal voice, the words
speaking for themselves. However, bitter complaining connotes an emotional
overload. At such times, your character is speaking, as it were, from the gut
or the heart rather than the head. Listen to the character in that state. It
will help you with the part of characterization that is normally hidden from
public view.
Imagine
your adult character secretly dressed in children’s clothes. Why is he doing
that? What you want is not your answer, but the character’s answer to that
question. The child in an adult character may have a poignant memory of a
lasting hurt. Or a marvelous secret to reveal.
Yet
another way is to visualize your character as suddenly rather old. How would
that change her appearance, dress, walk? Is there anything that you can
incorporate in your characterization at your character’s present age? Some
people preserve characteristics of their childhood, others seem prematurely old
in some way. So do some characters.
Imagine
your character in an armchair talking to you. Ask your character questions that
are provocative. Let your character challenge you. Disagree with your
character. Let him win the argument.
Unfetter
your imagination. Can you see your character flapping arms, trying to fly? Or
trying to kiss everyone at a party? Or walking in the snow without shoes?
Readers are interested in the out-of-the-ordinary. All these questions involve
the character in action, the ideal way to characterize.
Last,
imagine your character in the nude. This one almost always works if you portray
your character in the nude honestly and in detail. People in the nude become
especially vulnerable. This doesn’t mean you should necessarily portray your
character actually in the nude. Your character may not want to get undressed,
or may want to dress quickly to cover up. Or your character can just be
thinking in the bath or shower. An author of mine, Edwin Corley, had a
remarkable success with a first novel called Siege, which started with a
scene of a black general in his bathtub. Everything the general did later was
more believable because a person seen realistically in the nude is immediately
credible.
CHARACTERIZING VILLAINS
Once upon a time, readers tolerated mustache-twirling
villains with no countervailing virtues in their makeup. Today’s readers can be
roughly divided into two groups, those who accept the fantasy villains of
childhood, as in the James Bond stories and Arnold Schwarzenegger films, and
those who insist on credibility. In life, villains do not uncurl whips and
snarl. They seem like normal human beings. But normal humans are not villains.
What distinguishes the true villain is not just the degree to which he hides
his villainy under an attractive patina to snare his victims, but his contact
with evil. There is no social solution to the true villain’s villainy, he cannot
be reeducated and become a nice guy. His villainy is an ineradicable part of
his nature.
In the
successful TV series NYPD Blue, a senior police official from outside
the precinct makes the precinct captain’s life miserable at every opportunity.
The official is not a nice guy, he is a bad guy. The audience dislikes him more
than it dislikes the criminals who are brought in. Every time the official
hurts one of the good cops, we wish something bad would happen to him. Then,
when the official overreaches and blunders, we are exhilarated. The official
has boxed himself into a corner. We like that. Finally, when the official has
to choose between defending a civil lawsuit he can’t win and resigning from the
force, we are joyful. The villain is getting his due.
What
the writers have been doing with this character all along, of course, is
manipulating our emotions, which is exactly what your role is when you are
pitting characters against each other to create a story.
Some suggestions to consider in characterizing an
antagonist:
Can he
have a physical mannerism that would be at least slightly disturbing to most
people, for instance an involuntary blinking of one eye? Or sniffing? Frequent
nose-wrinkling? Earlobe-pulling? Elbow-scratching? It is the repetitive nature
of such mannerisms that grates on readers.
How
does your antagonist behave toward people he’s never met before? Does he effuse
charm, is he overly deferential, or is he discourteous, uninterested, openly
bored, arrogant? All of these are characteristics that would help form the
reader’s attitude toward your villain.
Another
possibility is to have your antagonist do something frequently that most people
do only occasionally. For instance, does he blow his nose every few minutes
(though he is not sick), does his forehead sweat a lot though it is not
especially hot, does he scratch himself, cough unnecessarily, wink at others as
if there were some implied meaning in what they or he were saying?
To
weave individual characteristics into a story, as much as possible let them
come out during or as part of an action. The object is to avoid holding up the
story and to keep the writer’s explanations out of it. To see how it’s done,
let’s examine a work-in-progress in which a successful young businessman, driving
to work in what becomes a severe rainstorm, passes a hitchhiker, then out of
compassion and guilt, turns his car around to pick the man up:
As the man clambered in I could see he was one of those
assless thin fellows who hikes his pants up higher than most men do.
The hitchhiker had his hand stretched out to shake. I was
of the belief that hitchhikers, like waiters and mailmen, don’t offer their
hand, but this man’s was stuck out there like an embarrassment, so I held on to
the wheel hard with my left hand and put my right hand out to shake the man’s
rain-wet palm.
I could tell the man’s breath was the kind that
toothpaste didn’t cure.
The hitchhiker introduces himself. Even his name has an
evil sound. He is characterized by clothing, sight, smell, and now touch:
The skin of Uck’s hand seemed flaked, reptilian. Even
when the man tried to smile, his face didn’t cooperate. Like Peter Lorre’s, his
lips thinned, but that was all. I thought if this man’s mother had pressed a
pillow on his nose and mouth when he was a baby, would anyone have convicted
her?
The protagonist is so repulsed by what he sees, smells,
and touches of the hitchhiker, that his mind jumps to wishing the man dead.
That puts the reader’s emotion on the defensive. The reader—whatever his conduct
in private life—doesn’t believe or wish to believe that he would hope a man
would drop dead just because he was repulsive. “Hey,” the reader thinks, “this
guy’s human.”
That’s
the key, of course. Uck is human. We meet his wife and child. He can be charming
if he wants to. Nevertheless, he is fundamentally evil in the way he attaches
himself to the life of the protagonist and won’t let go. He is not just getting
a lift in the rain, he is the leech that cannot be pulled off the skin. Uck has
taken the first step in pushing himself into the protagonist’s life and has
begun the process of forcing the protagonist out of his job and home, a true
villain.
You
need to ask yourself about your antagonist, Is he curable? Is he bad but can be
straightened out? Bad will work, but evil will provide a more profound
experience for the reader.
We have
seen that wimpishness is off-putting in a protagonist. We have a sense that will—desire
reinforced by ambition—is what makes protagonists drive us through their
stories. In the example just given, the protagonist is intensely interested in
his work that has brought him a comfortable life, his wife, his house. The
hitchhiker who appears in the rainstorm is set to take that from him and cannot
be bought off by ransom of any kind. From that clash of these two characters,
we get the kind of conflict that attracts readers.
CHARACTERIZING MINOR PLAYERS
Major characters deserve and get our primary attention.
That doesn’t mean we should settle for stereotypes for minor characters.
Sometimes they are given a name, a sex, an age, and no characterization. I’ve
seen minor characters given too much characterization, fooling the reader into
thinking they had some larger role to play. Sometimes all you want is for the
reader to be able to see the minor character. Here’s how Nanci Kincaid
does it:
You think you never saw white completely until you see
Roy’s butt.
The most efficient technique for making minor characters
come alive is to select one memorable characteristic that singles them out from
the rest of humanity. This is particularly true for fleeting characters, those
that appear and vanish, not to return. Early in Hemingway’s A Farewell to
Arms the reader comes upon:
The priest was young and blushed easily.
In just seven words, the priest is visible even before his
special uniform is described. Note that blushing is an action that
characterizes, important here because the priest, in military service, is about
to be picked on by a senior officer.
Irwin
Shaw, in a story called “No Jury Would Convict,” shows us this:
The man in the green sweater took off his yellow straw
hat and carefully wiped the sweatband with his handkerchief.
Simple enough, but what makes us see that man is not a
description of what he is wearing but an action, wiping the sweatband.
When a
writer characterizes beautifully, we indulge him. Every page of Dennis
McFarland’s first novel, The Music Room, is a delight because it is so
well written. McFarland doesn’t pass up any opportunity to characterize. Here’s
how he deals with the most minor of characters, a hotel desk clerk, seen from
the point of view of the protagonist, whose brother has just died:
... the man behind the hotel desk, whom I had never seen
before—dark, and sporting the handlebar mustache of a lion tamer in a
circus—seemed to know me, and to know my trouble. I watched him cheerfully help
a man just ahead of me, then turn decidedly sorrowful as he shifted his gaze in
my direction. It was with great sympathy that he handed me the pink slips of paper
on which my telephone messages were written, and I couldn’t help noticing that
the skin on his hand appeared a bit too moist and white, and the several hairs
on the back of it were a bit too coarse and black, individual, and rooted, as
if magnified.
Characterizing a minor character through the eyes of an
important character is a valuable technique. Note how Anne Richardson Roiphe
does it in Up the Sandbox!:
... the
dwarf lady who lives in our building is hurrying across the street, her
shopping bag filled, her fat legs bare and her feet encased in their usual
heavy orthopedic shoes. Her face is round and her features are broad, distorted
by thick glasses. I had never seen a dwarf till we moved to this building. It’s
been four years now, and each time we pass my skin crawls. Despite all the
humane teachings I have of course heard, I still feel not considerate,
compassionate or easy in the company of cripples. I hold to the medieval
conviction that someone has been criminal, perhaps in bed, or maybe only in
imagination, but someone has committed a crime, perhaps the victim herself.
Minor characters can not only help characterize the major
players in a story, but can also advance the plot. In the first three pages of The
Best Revenge, I introduced five characters in addition to the protagonist
in order to characterize the protagonist, Ben Riller, and to get the main plot
line going: Ben is in trouble.
A
theatrical producer, Ben is just entering the reception room of his office. An
elderly messenger is at the desk of Ben’s assistant, Charlotte. She is trying
to signal to him, but Ben’s attention is on the waiting actors. Let’s see how
the messenger is used:
The geriatric who’d been wrangling with Charlotte spots
me at last. Some of the best actors in the world are close to eighty. Their
age-lined faces exude character. In the movies you can do repeated takes, but
in theater the scourges of the body haunt eight performances a week. Old people
chip at my heart. I see my father, Louie, in every one of their faces. ... It
aches to turn an old man down. I smile as he approaches me. I think he wants to
shake my hand.
What he wants to do, it
turns out, is to provide me with personal service of a subpoena.
I try to hand it back to
him, but he’s out the door with a gait a younger man would envy.
I used the messenger to help fill out the characterization
of the protagonist, Ben. Characterizing a minor player gives us a chance to
characterize a major player.
In that
same paragraph, several other things come across. The reader learns the
producer’s feelings about the theater, age, the differences for actors in film
and on the stage. It also introduces the producer’s father, Louie, a major character. The point to note
is that when depicting a minor character, you can seize the opportunity to
convey much else. The most important thing in that brief bit with the messenger
is that it takes us—through an action—into the heart of the plot: the hero, Ben
Riller the successful producer, is in trouble.
The point I want to leave you with is that the
permutations of character are endless and the techniques for achieving them are
many. When you are engaged in the complex task of characterization, consider
the techniques in this chapter the equivalent of calling 911.
I have
tried in this chapter to convey a variety of ways to characterize both minor
and major characters. I have an additional suggestion. Spend some time reading
or rereading two or three of the classics in which characterization is both
profound and memorable: the novels of Dostoevsky and Flaubert from other
cultures; Shakespeare’s great plays, particularly the tragedies; such
twentieth-century writers as Joseph Conrad, Graham Greene, Henry James, to
pluck a few from among the many. You’ll find that one of the characters resonates
in your memory or speaks to your view of life more than most. As you are
readying yourself for sleep, imagine a scene in which that character and the
character you are working on have a conversation about the story of your book.
Imagine what one says and how the other answers. In due course, let yourself
sleep. You might find that in the first moments of wakefulness the next
morning, you’ll want to reach for a pad and paper at your bedside to record
some thoughts about your character, enriched by his or her conversation with a
character you loved.
Ultimately, the job of characterization among the best of
writers is governed by that writer’s understanding of human nature. In the
early twentieth century, a novel called Pollyanna by Eleanor Porter put
a new word into our language. “Pollyanna” has come to stand for a blindly
optimistic person. We speak of an ostrich attitude, putting one’s head into the
sand, pretending what is out there and real does not exist. A writer cannot be
a Pollyanna. He is in the business of writing what other people think but don’t
say, which leads us to markers, the subject of the next chapter.
Markers: The Key to Swift Characterization
Lionel
Trilling, one of the influential critics of the mid-twentieth century who was
also an infrequent but interesting writer of fiction, declared that fiction at
its heart involved the differences between classes. While this observation is
invaluable to writers of fiction, it is also a match tossed into flammable
material. The fact that acute differences exist between social and cultural
classes seems to be acknowledged in most of the world, but in the United
States, where democracy is often confounded with egalitarianism, even the idea
that social classes exist has long been taboo. It is, however, a writer’s
specialty to deal with taboos, to speak the unspoken, to reveal, to uncover, to
show in the interaction of people the difference between what we profess and
how we act. Moreover, because touchy subjects arouse emotion, they are especially
useful for the writer who knows that arousing the emotions of his audience is
the test of his skill.
When we
discuss cultural differences, we are not talking about economic differences or
equal opportunity. Cultural differences arise from inherited characteristics,
upbringing, and individual temperament. The best literary fiction often
confronts these differences. Even transient or popular fiction can benefit from
an awareness by the writer of this rich lode.
Wonderful
stories can be crafted about people’s inherited characteristics, upbringing,
and individual temperament. Characters, just like people, can strive to
overcome this baggage and training. Some people succeed in doing so, some
can’t, and the same is true of the characters available to our imaginations.
Many dramatic moments in theater and film come from
clashes between characters based on differences in background. How can we
overlook the source of audience
interest in Shaw’s Pygmalion or its rendering as a musical in My Fair
Lady? Put the garish and tacky Eliza Doolittle in touch with Henry Higgins,
and you have a clash of social and cultural differences instantly recognized by
millions.
These
differences are at the heart of what is in my judgment the best play by the
best American playwright of the twentieth century, Tennessee Williams’s A
Streetcar Named Desire. The play and film derive their power from the
cultural conflict between Blanche DuBois, the fallen “lady,” and Stanley
Kowalski, the blue-collar brute, who strip each other’s pretenses, witnessed by
Stella, who married beneath her, and found herself in the world of
card-playing, beer-swilling male animals.
Characters
of different cultural classes caught in a crucible are, of course, ideal for
fiction. The dramatic heat generated by cultural differences, inherited or
nurtured, added to the differences of individual temperaments, can help writers
create wonderful stories. These differences are a valuable resource for scenes
as well as entire plots. It is the underlying basis of conflict in fiction.
Most
people, regardless of their background, prefer others whom they think of as
“their own kind.” Which means that there is a widespread prejudice against “the
other kinds.” While this prejudice can be controlled and even overcome to some
degree in life, a vestige of feeling about “otherness” remains even in most
people who deny it. That feeling of “otherness” is useful to the writer in
plotting because readers’ emotions can be quickly committed when they observe
two characters of differing backgrounds in the same story.
It is
useful for writers to step onto the thin ice of this subject matter with a
clear understanding of terms and meanings.
A culture
consists of the behavior patterns, beliefs, traditions, institutions,
taste, and other characteristics of a community passed from one generation to
another. The adjective “cultured” is usually used to connote a superior level
of aesthetic and intellectual development that results from education and
training.
A class
is a stratum of society whose members share cultural and social
characteristics. “Class” used by itself—as in “she had class”—connotes superior
style or quality.
Good
writers have come from every imaginable social class, and some stand ready to
defend their turf. A writer has to squelch his emotional reactions consciously
in order to get enough distance to use them in his work as a writer.
People
in civil society usually try to overlook the kind of differences we have been
talking about. But they don’t succeed. Their attempts to cover up noticed
differences sometimes fail, hurting others. In general, cultural differences
are noticed by almost everybody. When people learn to set aside cultural
differences, we speak of them as “open-minded.” Yet “open-minded” people
sometimes say inappropriate things to make people of other social classes feel
“more at home.” This makes the others feel less comfortable, not more
comfortable. Therefore, despite noble intentions, social and cultural
differences can be a source of high feeling and high drama. As we shall see,
for plotting purposes, differences are more important than similarities.
Action
movies categorize people into good guys and bad guys. In many of the films that
are nominated for Academy Awards, the discernment of differences becomes more subtle.
That discernment becomes a necessity in the best literary and mainstream
fiction.
The
butting together of characters of differing backgrounds can be extreme, as in
D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover. It can produce comedy if a
good old boy joins the ladies and gentlemen of Virginia on a fox hunt. What we
expect of a good old boy is that while he, too, hunts for pleasure, it is in
the company of men who hunt in packs, dressed in rough clothes, who would laugh
at the gaudy dress of traditional fox hunters. Social and cultural differences
strike sparks both for the writer and the reader.
In
literary fiction, the clash of differences is often more subtle than in My
Fair Lady or A Streetcar Named Desire. One of my favorite stories, which won a place in The Best Short
Stories of 1991, was Kate Braverman’s “Tall Tales from the Mekong Delta.”
Let’s look at the beginning of that remarkable story and observe the clash of
background and values:
It
was in the fifth month of her sobriety. It was after the hospital. It was after
her divorce. It was autumn. She had even stopped smoking. She was wearing pink
aerobic pants, a pink T-shirt with KAUAI written in lilac across the chest, and
tennis shoes. She had just come from the gym. Her black hair was damp. She was
wearing a pink sweatband around her forehead. She was walking across a parking
lot bordering a city park in West Hollywood. She was carrying cookies for the
AA meeting. She was in charge of bringing the food for the meeting. He fell
into step with her. He was short, fat, pale. He had bad teeth. His hair was
dirty. Later, she would freeze this frame in her mind and study it. She would say he seemed
frightened and defeated and trapped, cagey was the word she used to describe
his eyes, how he measured and evaluated something in the air between them. The
way he squinted through hazel eyes, it had nothing to do with the sunlight.
“I’m Lenny,” he said,
extending his hand. “What’s your name?”
She told him. She was
holding a bag with packages of cookies in it. After the meeting, she had an
appointment with her psychiatrist, then a manicure. She kept walking.
“You a teacher? You look
like a teacher,” he said.
“I’m a writer,” she told
him. “I teach creative writing.”
“You look like a teacher,”
Lenny said.
“I’m not just a teacher,”
she told him. She was annoyed.
“Okay. You’re a writer. And
you’re bad. You’re one of those bad girls from Beverly Hills. I’ve had my eye
on you,” Lenny said.
She didn’t say anything. He
was wearing blue jeans, a black leather jacket zipped to his throat, a long red
wool scarf around his neck, and a Dodgers baseball cap. It was too hot a day
for the leather jacket and scarf. She didn’t find that detail significant. It
caught her attention, she touched it briefly and then let it go. She looked but
did not see. They were standing on a curb. The meeting was in a community room
across the boulevard. She wasn’t afraid yet.
“You do drugs? What do you
do? Drink too much?” he asked.
The narrator and Lenny come from different worlds. We find
out how different as the story goes on. Lenny is invading her world just as
Henry Higgins invaded Eliza’s and Blanche DuBois invaded Stanley’s—with
different intent, of course. The reader senses the difference early from the
clothes they are wearing, from the woman’s fear and need to be polite, and
Lenny’s impolite, aggressive questioning and assumptions.
The
process of identifying different worlds for the reader can be accomplished
quickly through markers, easily identified signals that to the majority
of readers will reveal a character’s cultural and social background. Clothing,
as we’ve seen, is a useful marker. A woman in a tailored suit suggests
formality. Would we expect to see that woman walking in the street with a man
wearing a totally sleeveless “muscle” shirt or a cap with a slogan on it? The
reader assumes they are not together because they have the appurtenances of
widely different backgrounds. But if they are walking arm in arm, what is the
reader to think or feel?
Today,
people of every background seem to wear jeans. But if a man wears designer
jeans with a pressed crease do we assume he’s just come off his job at a construction site? Suppose
the reader sees someone on a construction site who is wearing designer jeans
with a pressed crease, what does the reader think? He thinks phony. Phoniness
can be useful to a writer.
While
no marker is an absolute designation of background or class (there are
exceptions to almost all of them), the reader will feel a reaction to the
markers. For instance, if we are in a courtroom where a young man is being
charged with a criminal offense, what do we expect to see? We expect that his
lawyer will have made him get dressed up, often with a suit and tie. If in that
courtroom that same young man is dressed in his usual cut-off blue jeans, dirty
sneakers, and a T-shirt with an obscene slogan, what would we think? That his
lawyer had neglected to do his job? What would the judge think? Surely the
judge knows that lawyers dress up their clients. Will the judge think that the
lawyer or client is showing contempt for the dignity of the court? The reaction
to clothing is often a reaction to the surroundings in which the clothing is
worn. Keep that in mind when you’re describing a character in a specific scene.
When in
fiction, theater, and film the writer brings together people of differing
social and cultural backgrounds, he needs to step back to watch the inherent
drama of differences explode. Differences assume opposition. That’s what makes
writing dramatic. If dealing with social and cultural differences makes the
writer uneasy, that’s good. Emotion-inciting material is the most desirable
kind. If social and cultural differences between characters excite emotion, the
tension of any story will surely increase.
Many
aspects of cultural class distinction have been used in fiction. Some
characteristics that once denoted upper and lower classes have diffused in
time.
In
countries with diverse cultures like the United States, regional differences
sometimes become more apparent than class distinctions. Generational
differences also produce changes. For instance, while a conspicuous tattoo
still suggests “lower class” to the reader, and the larger the tattoo the lower
the class, in recent years some young people of all classes have had themselves
tattooed with small objects such as a heart, a rose, or a butterfly.
Though
the characteristics that once connoted “lower class” and “upper class” to
readers are no longer absolutes, they still work as markers in which readers
find connotations and associations. Those markers continue to be invaluable to
the writer.
Let’s
look at some common markers, some of which have been overused:
Hair
worn in curlers under a head scarf in public usually connotes “lower class” to
readers.
For a
woman, fingernails the size of animal claws and garish nail polish used to make
a statement about class. Clawlike fingernails and excessive rouge continue to
suggest unsophisticated artifice, which can be useful to a writer. Black under
the fingernails of a man dressed up to go out might be a marker of a person who
does dirty work with his hands and never quite gets them clean. The writer
doesn’t have to say what I’ve just said. All he has to show the reader are the
fingernails; they are effective markers.
Public
conduct with children is an immediate marker. A woman walking with a
“dressed-up” child connotes one thing. A woman screaming at her children in the
supermarket suggests another.
What
does the incessant chewing of gum suggest about a character? What would an
ankle bracelet convey to a reader about a character? What about a man wearing
multiple large rings, or a diamond ring?
Mannerisms
can be important markers. How does the reader react to a male character who
publicly picks his nose, scratches under his arms and in his crotch? Would the
reader instantly assume that the character is couth or uncouth?
Even
the transportation used by a character can be a marker. If a reader knew
nothing about a character except that he owned a pickup truck, a motorcycle,
and a souped-up car with oversize tires and a noisy muffler, what would the
reader think about that character’s background?
Food,
drink, and the places they are consumed are markers. If the reader knows a
character drinks popular brands of American beer, rye whiskey, and chilled red
wine, what does the reader guess about the character’s background? If the
character drinks Scotch, Perrier, and martinis straight up, does the reader
have a different view? Of course. These markers are useful. Fizzy wine or
coolers would not be the choice of people with educated palates. Nor would you
be likely to find people with educated palates on line in a fast-food take-out
joint. Conversely, a construction worker, even if dressed in his Sunday best,
is likely to feel mighty uncomfortable in one of Manhattan’s posh East Side
restaurants, where all the waiters are dressed in black tie and the menu is in
French.
If your
character brought his mouth down to his food rather than his food up to his
mouth, the reader would likely draw an instant assumption about his upbringing.
However, some distinctions in eating habits are poor markers because they are too complex to describe succinctly. For
instance, the British use a fork in the left hand and a knife in the right. The
left hand brings the cut food to the mouth. Americans keep switching hands and
bring food to the mouth with the right hand. Distinctions of that sort are not
good markers for the writer because they require too much description and
readers might still not get the point without the author telling them
explicitly. A marker should convey its point instantly.
Perhaps
the most frequently used marker is found in the vocabulary and expressions of a
character’s dialogue. If a character uses words like “ostensibly,”
“exacerbate,” “primordial” correctly, and with ease, what would you, as a
reader, think about them? That vocabulary is indicative of someone who is well
educated. But it could also reflect a pompous person. One of the most common
vocabulary markers is heard on television when a police officer talks about a
“perpetrator.”
In most
of my novels I have at least one character with an accent, a distinguishing
marker. In The Best Revenge at least three characters have accent
markers that differ noticeably from each other. Many politicians speak in
incomplete sentences peppered with clichés. Street people use four-letter words
and vulgar expressions. All of these markers characterize quickly.
The
content of a character’s speech can also generate markers. If a character
displays knowledge of what went on in previous centuries, is interested in
international issues, reads books and appreciates them as physical objects, and
votes regularly as a matter of principle, what will the reader think about his
or her background? Markers provide the writer with an opportunity to show the
character’s background instead of telling the reader about it.
Attitudes
can also be used as markers:
Arthur came to New York expecting to be insulted or
mugged by every passerby.
An inexperienced attitude toward travel can be an
important marker, for instance, a preference for group tours, being intimidated
by foreign languages and customs, or buying up mass-produced souvenirs.
However, be wary of cliché markers such as an American tourist abroad in search
of a restaurant that serves hamburgers.
I have
a strong preference for action markers, that is sentences that describe what a
character does and at the same time reveal something about the character’s
upbringing or background:
Every time Zelda ate in a restaurant, she found some
reason to send food back to the kitchen.
Louis always played it safe by overtipping the waiter.
As usual, Angelica let her food get cold because she was
busy watching everyone else in the restaurant.
We have just seen three quite different instant
characterizations in the same location, a restaurant.
I have sometimes found that even accomplished writers
neglect to ask themselves some fundamental questions about their important
characters that could provide useful markers. For instance, what trait
inherited by the protagonist has most influenced his adult life? What custom of
the protagonist’s family still haunts his life? Which personal habit has he
tried to break, unsuccessfully, for years? What family tradition has had the
most positive influence on the protagonist? What is the single most important
factor in the villain’s upbringing that contributed to his reprehensible
conduct?
If you
are presently writing a novel, have you examined it to see if there are some
social or class differences between your two most important characters? How do
those differences influence the story? If you have neglected such differences,
how might you bolster your story by adding some social and cultural differences
that arouse emotion?
And now
that you’re mastering the creation of characters, it’s time to ask, “How do you
plot that story?”
Thwarting Desire: The Basis of Plotting
We are
driven through life by our needs and wants. So must the characters we create be
motivated by what they want. The driving force of characters is their desire.
Inexperienced
writers, sometimes ill read in the great works of their own and previous times,
often try to write novels with a relatively passive protagonist who wants
little or has largely given up wanting. I have met more than one writer who
says that his character doesn’t want anything—he just wants to “live his life.”
That always brings to mind something Kurt Vonnegut said:
“When I used to teach creative writing, I would tell the
students to make their characters want something right away even if it’s only a
glass of water. Characters paralyzed by the meaninglessness of modern life
still have to drink water from time to time.”
The most interesting stories involve characters who want
something badly. In Kafka’s The Trial, Joseph K. wants to know why he is
being arrested, why he is being tried, what he is guilty of. In Fitzgerald’s The
Great Gatsby, the central character constructs his life with the sole
object of reuniting with Daisy, the woman he loves. In Flaubert’s Madame
Bovary, Emma Bovary, her head full of romantic notions, wants to escape the
dreariness of her husband and her life. If your character doesn’t want anything
badly enough, readers will have a hard time rooting for him to attain his goal,
which is what compels readers to continue reading. The more urgent the want,
the greater the reader’s interest. A far future want does not set the reader’s
pulse going the way an immediate want does. The want can be negative, wanting
something not to happen, as in Frederick
Forsyth’s The Day of the Jackal, in which the reader hopes that de
Gaulle will escape the assassin’s bullet.
In the
chapter on characterization, I suggested that some of the most memorable
characters in fiction were eccentric. To carry the point a step further, I
suggest relating the character’s deepest desire to the character’s fundamental
difference from other characters, especially the character of the antagonist.
Which
brings us to the essence of plotting: putting the protagonist’s desire and the
antagonist’s desire into sharp conflict. If the conflict isn’t sharp, the
tension will be lax. One way to plan is to think of what would most thwart your
protagonist’s want, then give the power to thwart that want to the antagonist.
And be certain there is a two-way urgency: your protagonist wants a particular,
important desire fulfilled as soon as possible, and the antagonist wants to
wreck the chance of that happening, also as soon as possible.
Those
are the three keys: the want and the opposition to the want need to be
important, necessary, and urgent. The result should be the kind of conflict
that interests readers.
A word
of caution: these plotting guidelines are basic and to some degree
simplistic. They are intended to provide the writer with the easiest route to
publication. The well-read writer will be familiar with complex plots that
deviate from the norm. What they do not deviate from is the fierce desire of
the protagonist and the conflict engendered by obstacles.
The
essence of dramatic conflict lies in the clash of wants. You need to be certain
that the conflicting wants are connected significantly and are over something
that the reader will view as important. For instance, if the hero wants to
preserve his valuable stamp collection and the villain has stolen it and
intends to sell the items in it piecemeal to conceal his theft, their wants are
clearly on a collision course. However, ask yourself, does the reader care
enough about the stamp collection? If the stamp collection belonged to President
Franklin Roosevelt, an avid stamp collector, the theft of that collection could
have interfered with matters of state until it was resolved. The reader will
care about the stamp collection to the degree that he cares about the
protagonist and what the protagonist loves. That’s one of the reasons why the
best plots develop out of character.
It is
easier for the reader to identify with a want that is close to universal and
not too specialized (a stamp collection is relatively specialized). The wants that interest a majority of
readers include gaining or losing a love, achieving a lifetime ambition, seeing
that justice is done, saving a life, seeking revenge, and accomplishing a task
that at first seemed impossible.
In
transient fiction (sometimes called “commercial” or “popular” fiction), the
wants are less personal and often more melodramatic. Events happen rather than
grow out of character. Though my personal preference is for literary fiction, I
have worked with a number of highly successful professional bestselling
novelists who didn’t seem to care whether their characters were remembered
years later. They mastered craft; their storytelling was suspenseful and
compelling for large numbers of readers. The wants of their characters tended
to be different from those in literary fiction. For them and other writers of
popular fiction, the following wants were paramount:
The clash between your characters can be based on almost
anything as long as it is involved with their desires. The most common causes
of a clash are money, love, and power. Power connotes control, usually over
other human beings. Therefore, in a community of two people, if one has power,
the other doesn’t have it. Some of the most interesting plots involve a
character who has power in one arena up against a character who has power in
another arena, and both characters are caught in the same crucible. (We will
deal with the crucible in its own chapter.)
When
planning your story, it is important to remember that small clashes result in
stories that seem relatively trivial. Larger clashes resonate for the reader.
Ask yourself these questions: Does the conflict you are working on lead to
profound unhappiness, injury, or death? Or is the conflict over an object that
is exceedingly valuable to the main character? Is the conflict over an
important life decision—to move far away, to change one’s career, to leave for
another partner, to follow a hazardous opportunity, to avoid intolerable
circumstances?
Ask
yourself, will the clash between your protagonist and your antagonist seem
inevitable to the reader? Have you avoided coincidence as the cause of their
clash? Will the clash take place in a highly visible environment so that the
reader will see the action?
If you
have some concern about the intensity of your plot, ask yourself, Does the
conflict you’ve invented involve the best possible thing that could happen to
your protagonist? Is what happens a surprise to anyone? Can you make it
surprising by setting up an action and then showing the opposite of what your
reader is likely to expect?
Would
the conflict you have described result in a verbal or physical struggle? Would
that struggle call for strong scenes in which your characters clash in an
exciting way? Remember your book is told in scenes each one of which should
produce an excited reaction in the reader.
If any
scene seems not yet exciting enough, think of introducing a new character into
it, which always generates possibilities for conflict, especially if the new
character has something important at stake in what is happening in that scene.
If you
get stuck, there’s another device some writers use. Think of the worst thing
that could possibly happen to you right now. Don’t censor. A layman
instinctively covers up. A writer disciplines himself to uncover.
Now
think of your very best friend. Conjure up a picture of him or her in your
mind. Remember the good times with your best friend. What is the worst thing
that could happen to him or her at this very moment? It has to be something
different from the worst thing you imagined happening to you. It should be
linked to your friend’s character, ambitions, or desire.
Now
imagine the same worst thing happening not to your best friend but to the
character in your story. Would that create a suitable obstacle in the plot you
are developing?
The
protagonist’s biggest obstacle is usually the antagonist and what he does. But
there can be numerous other obstacles that will thwart the protagonist on the
way to achieving his goal, including, perhaps, what you imagined happening to
your friend.
There
are other techniques to get your plotting motor going. By thinking of certain
conventional obstacles, less conventional obstacles will occur to you. For
instance, your character needs to get someplace right away. The car breaks
down. (In a melodrama, the breakdown may have been precipitated by the villain
or an accomplice.) Or the weather changes drastically and impedes progress. If
the weather won’t do, think of any unexpected, uncontrollable event.
Here
are some other stimuli. A deaf person fails to hear something. A blind person
fails to see something. A recluse refuses to tell what he has seen. An airplane flight is aborted on
takeoff. Water is needed immediately for an urgent purpose; suddenly there is
no water in the tap.
There
are larger obstacles that can stimulate your plotting: a sudden illness of an
important character. Help is unavailable. An accident happens on the highway to
someone the reader cares about. Or an accident at home—someone falls in the
bathtub or off a ladder. A natural disaster (flood, earthquake, hurricane,
forest fire) puts your character at great risk.
It’s
common to think of the obstacles of all being generated by the villain, but
we’ve seen that acts of nature can also be obstacles. And there are always
other people butting in. You can devise an unwanted intervention by someone who
wants to help but makes things worse. Or you can have an unwanted intervention
by someone unrelated to the villain who wants to block the protagonist for
reasons of his own. You can have a previously absent person return who causes
problems because she is not up on what has transpired during her absence. The
list could go on. But you get the point. You can always check your daily
newspaper for obstacles in the lives of people in news stories.
One
caution. Some obstacles need to be planted ahead of time so as not to seem
arbitrary devices of the author.
Writers
who feel the need of discipline in plotting can sometimes benefit by preparing
a list of every obstacle they plan to use in their plot. They then can ask
themselves, is the first obstacle strong enough to hook the reader? Do the
obstacles build? That means as each obstacle is faced and overcome by the
protagonist, an even greater obstacle has to present itself.
I know
novelists who have very strong first obstacles, but they do not follow up with
stronger obstacles, with the consequence that the reader feels the story
winding down. As a result, the reader either gives up reading before the end
or, even if he’s persistent, won’t rush to get that author’s next book.
Some
writers I’ve worked with find it difficult to develop plots because they’re not
sure their plot ideas would be of interest to readers. Here are some clues to
areas of reader interest:
Surprises are not difficult to create. Look at each
important incident in your plot and see what you would normally expect to
happen next. Then have the exact opposite happen. At least half the time an
idea will suggest itself that will surprise your characters as well as
yourself.
You can
surprise yourself (and your readers eventually) by picking an unusual locale
that you know well enough to depict accurately. Then choose a character you
have already created who is most unlikely to show up in that locale. Put that
character in that locale. Imagine what happens when the character shows up
there, and other characters react.
Finally, I would like to suggest an easy means for getting character-derived plot ideas. Sometimes even experienced writers get stuck. I counsel them to examine the classified personal ads, which frequently have the following characteristics:
The personal ads I’ve seen that are useful appear in New
York magazine, the Village Voice, L.A. Reader, L.A. Weekly, and the New
York Review of Books. Some are available nationally at better newsstands or
by subscription. The New York Review of Books, a highbrow biweekly with
a large international following, is a fine source because some of its ads are
quite imaginative. I quote one of my favorites:
VERY UNUSUAL MAN
I’m looking for a very special woman—probably someone who
rarely if ever, answers ads. Very well-educated and extraordinarily bright,
funny, beautiful, athletic, sophisticated, outdoor oriented, honest, nurturing,
vulnerable, financially secure, very sensual and able to be open and present to
other people. Someone who is very successful in her own way, courageous and
psychologically grownup. Probably 35-45, with a great appetite for exploring
life with another person. I’m extremely well-educated, post-doctoral in
humanities, and work at the top of the business community. Handsome, 6’, 180
lbs., athletic, very, very successful financially and professionally. I am a
psychologically secure, well-balanced man who is totally natural and curious,
sometimes brilliant, intuitive, funny, honest, genuine, direct and very open. I
spend two to three months a year off doing interesting things other than work.
I am a very complex, very special man with deep values and a good heart. I need
to find someone who has gotten to the same place in her life and is headed in
the same direction. Note/phone/photo a must.
I’ve read that ad at a number of writers’ conferences.
Invariably, the audience keeps laughing throughout. They laugh because of the
discrepancy between their image of the advertiser and the person’s self-image,
ideal stuff for stories. If several writers were to choose the same ad as a source for a character-based plot, I can guarantee
that they would come up with entirely different plots. Personal classified ads
are a good emergency resource.
In this
chapter we have covered the elementary essentials of devising a plot. Now let’s
take a look at some innovative ways of plotting.
The Actors Studio Method for Developing Drama in Plots
A plot
consists of scenes: What follows is an excellent way of creating almost any
scene.
In
mid-twentieth century, the home away from home for most superbly talented
American actors was a white wooden church on scruffy West 44th Street in New
York City that had become the locus of the Actors Studio. The building
contained offices and rehearsal areas, but its core was the auditorium one
flight up with its makeshift stage and hard seats. The physical environment
didn’t matter. All who entered there knew they were in the cathedral of
American theater, where the most talented aspirants got a chance to be scourged
by Cardinal Lee Strasberg and where celebrated stars honed their work.
In time
an associated Directors Group brought some of the best stage and film directors
to work in the Actors Studio. Missing were writers, the playwrights who needed
to see their work-in-progress being performed by professional actors, guided by
experienced directors, all willing to commit long hours of rehearsal and
performance without compensation except for the arduous pleasure of work and
the spurt of hope that once in a great while a scene coming to life at the
Actors Studio might turn into a production and a job.
In 1957,
along with Tennessee Williams, William Inge, Molly Kazan, and Robert Anderson,
I was one of ten founding members of the Playwrights Group of the Actors Studio
in New York. As word of the group got around, it expanded to include talented
newcomers like Edward Albee and Lorraine Hansberry, and novelists like Norman
Mailer who hoped to write for the theater. Writers could now see their new work
performed by superlative actors guided by talented directors. During its
earliest years, the weekly meetings of the Playwrights Group included a trial
performance of a play or a part of a play before an audience of fellow writers, directors, and actors, who
would afterward comment on the work.[2]
For us
writers, a high learning time came from the less formal exercises that did not
require weeks of rehearsal by actors. In these exercises, writers were
transformed into actors for the benefit of their colleagues. I was one of two
writers picked by the director for an early exercise. The other writer was Rona
Jaffe, the author of several bestselling novels. The director who worked with
us that day was Elia Kazan, director of five Pulitzer Prize-winning plays and
winner of two Academy Awards. For the writers in the audience—and for the
“victims,” Rona Jaffe and me—it was an experience that gave us one of the most
valuable techniques a writer can have.
We were
to improvise a scene for which there was no script. I was to play the part of
the headmaster of the Dalton School, a private establishment in New York for
the privileged young. Rona Jaffe was to be the mother of a boy who had been
expelled by the headmaster. That’s what the audience knew.
Then
Kazan took me aside, out of everyone’s earshot, and told me that the mother of
the expelled boy was coming to my office, undoubtedly to try to get the boy
reinstated. This incorrigible boy had disrupted every class he was in, did not
respond to the warnings of his teachers, and under no condition was I to take
him back.
After
this briefing, which took half a minute, I returned to the makeshift stage and
Kazan then took Rona Jaffe aside. What do you think he told her?
None of
the writers—myself included—knew what Kazan told Rona Jaffe till afterward. He
told her that she was the mother of a bright, well-behaved boy, a first-class
student, that the headmaster was prejudiced against him, had treated him
disgracefully, and that Rona had to insist that the headmaster take the boy
back into the school immediately!
Rona
Jaffe and I were turned loose on the stage to improvise a scene in front of the
audience. Within seconds we were quarreling, our voices raised. We both got red
in the face and yelled at each other. The audience loved it. We were battling
because each of us had been given a different script!
That’s
what happens in life. Each of us enters into conversation with another person
with a script that is different from the other person’s script. The frequent result is disagreement
and conflict—disagreeable in life and invaluable in writing, for conflict is
the ingredient that makes action dramatic. When we get involved with other
people, the chances of a clash are present even with people we love because we
do not have the same scripts in our heads. And the tension is even greater when
we are involved with an antagonist.
You are
now armed. The secret of creating conflict in scenes you write is to give
your characters different scripts.
Over
the years, in teaching writers at the University of California and at writers’
conferences and workshops, I have stage-managed an exercise involving members
of the audience that enables these principles to be remembered. In teaching the
Actors Studio method of creating conflict, I ask for one male and one female
volunteer. I take the male student around a corner out of earshot and tell him
that he is to visit a woman he loves and tell her, “I got your message.” No
matter what she answers, he is to insist he got her message. I then take the
female student out of earshot and tell her that a fellow she thinks is
obnoxious is coming over. She didn’t leave a message for him. She just wants
the money.
When
both students come on stage in front of the group, the male student arrives at
a make-believe door, knocks, is let in, and says, “I got your message.”
The
woman, as instructed, answers, “What message? Did you bring the money?” The
usual reaction is loud laughter from the audience. Whatever the man and woman
then say, the audience enjoys their adversarial dialogue, each relying on a
different script.
That’s
what you do with your characters. Whatever scene they are in, give them
different scripts and you’ll have conflict in the scene and an entertained
reader or audience. This technique works well for scenes in both commercial and
literary fiction, with the scripts in literary fiction differing more subtly.
This craft technique contains a range of possibility for every kind of writing.
Let’s
clarify this simple procedure. You are imagining a scene with two characters.
Before you write the scene, make a note as to the “script” or tack (keep it
simple) of the first character and then of the second character. Make sure the
scripts are different and at odds. Only you will be privy to the scripts of
both characters. Let them play out the scene in front of you as you write. And
if you have a third character in the scene, give that character a script
different from the other two.
A
“script” in this exercise is not the actual lines of dialogue, only the
intent of the character in that scene. Think of the character as getting instructions from you, the writer. It is
important to keep the instructions brief. In the example devised by Elia Kazan,
my script consisted of knowing who I was supposed to be (the headmaster of the
Dalton School) and that I had thrown out a badly behaved boy. Rona Jaffe’s
script was equally simple: the headmaster was in the wrong and she was
determined to get her marvelous boy reinstated.
One of
the values of using this method is that if Kazan had used two different writers
for the exercise and given them the same scripts, the audience would have heard
different extemporaneous dialogue and perhaps the scene would have taken a
different direction than it did with Rona Jaffe and me. If you gave those
scripts to a dozen different writers, you’d get a dozen different stories.
As an
exercise, jot down the scripts of each of the characters in a given scene of
any novel you may be reading. The writer probably wasn’t thinking of the
character’s positions as scripts. The Actors Studio technique is a shortcut to
the intuitive and learned processes that experienced writers use in creating
dramatic confrontations in stories and plays.
It’s a
wonderful technique. Use it well.
The Crucible: A Key to Successful Plotting
In the
previous chapter, we were privy to the Actors Studio technique, giving your
protagonist and antagonist different scripts and letting them tangle. While two
characters can have different scripts throughout a book, the Actors Studio
technique is most valuable for planning individual scenes.
For
plotting an entire work, I especially like the use of a crucible. In
ordinary parlance a crucible refers to a vessel in which different ingredients
are melded in white hot heat. The word has come to mean a severe test, which
leads us to its use in plotting fiction. Author James Frey refers to a crucible
as “the container that holds the characters together as things heat up.”
Characters
caught in a crucible won’t declare a truce and quit. They’re in it till the
end. The key to the crucible is that the motivation of the characters to
continue opposing each other is greater than their motivation to run away. Or
they can’t run away because they are in a prison cell, a lifeboat, an army, or
a family.
The
following examples are drawn from memorable fiction that most writers will have
read:
A crucible is an environment, emotional or physical, that
bonds two people. It can be a scene or a series of scenes, but more often the
crucible is an entire book. The crucible is a relationship, often one
influenced by locale. Two prisoners in a cell are in a crucible because of
where they are, and their confrontations are accelerated by the fact that they
are thrust into the cell with different scripts. The Kiss of the Spider
Woman is an excellent example. In my novel The Magician, the
crucible is a high school. The villain, Stanley Urek, goes to the school, and
so does the protagonist, Ed Japhet. Neither is free to go elsewhere. The crux
of the conflict between the two boys derives from Urek’s role as leader of a
gang that extorts protection money from the other students and Japhet’s refusal
to pay. Both boys must continue in school and live in the same community. The
school, and in a sense the community they live in, is their crucible.
In The
Best Revenge, Ben and Nick start out as archenemies. Ben is producing a
play for Broadway that is in deep financial trouble. Nick is a gangster
nouveau, a new-style moneylender whose terms are severe, but Ben has no choice
except to borrow from Nick and involve him in the production of the play. They
are locked in the crucible of the play Ben is producing and Nick is financing.
Ben is forced into a relationship he cannot leave. Nor does Nick want to leave
once he gets a taste of the excitement of being involved in theatrical
production. Remember that the essence of a crucible is that the characters are
drawn more to the crucible than to escaping from it. In the end, the enemies,
Ben and Nick, become friends, their lives melded in the crucible.
In his
book How to Write a Damn Good Novel, James Frey came up with some
excellent examples of characters caught in a crucible. I have adapted them and
added others for use by my students:
Some situations do not lend themselves to creating a
crucible environment in fiction, but you’d be surprised how many do. Test the possibilities. If the locale you have chosen
for a particular scene does not add the stress of a crucible, can you change
the location of the scene, making it difficult for one of the participants to
leave? Or is there anything that you can add to the background of either or
both characters that would link them in a crucible and thereby raise the stress
of their relationship?
Putting
two characters in a crucible is an excellent way to proceed in plotting. Some
writers, however, prefer to work with a simpler concept, that of a closed
environment, the locale where the action takes place. Here are some
examples to illustrate the difference:
When devising a locale for a scene, it always pays to give
a few moments thought to the possibility of choosing a closed environment. It
will invariably increase the tension of the scene. The ideal time to think of
that locale is when you are first imagining your characters. What crucible
might they be in? If you can find the right crucible, you will be on the way to
a mesmerizing plot.
Suspense: Keeping the Reader Reading
Your predecessor, a storyteller of many centuries ago,
recited his stories around a fire. If he failed to arouse his listeners’
anticipation and droned on, or if his audience guessed what happened next, they
either fell asleep or killed him.
You are
lucky! If you fail to arouse your reader’s interest, the worst that will happen
is that is you won’t get published. However, if your goal is publication,
whatever the nature of your story please pay close attention to what follows
because suspense is the most essential ingredient of plotting.
You can
have a remarkable style and intriguing characters, but if your writing doesn’t
quickly arouse the reader’s curiosity about what will happen, the reader will
close the covers of your book without reading further. Suspense is achieved
by arousing the reader’s curiosity and keeping it aroused as long as possible.
Readers
aren’t articulate about what keeps them reading a particular work. Some,
impatient to find out what happens to the characters next, will say, “I can’t
put this book down,” which means the reader’s curiosity is greater than his
need to do almost anything else. Suspense is strong glue between the reader and
the writing. I remember my pleasure at getting a letter from Barnaby Conrad,
founder of the Santa Barbara Writers Conference and author of many books,
including the novel Matador. Conrad had just finished reading a novel of
mine, which, he said, he had been unable to stop reading except once when he
“got up to micturate.” The function of suspense is to put the reader in danger
of an overfull bladder. Of all the reviews of my novels, the line I remember
best was in the New York Times: “If you bury yourself in a Sol Stein
book while walking, you’ll walk into a wall.” That’s the idea: immerse the
reader so deeply in the story that he’ll let go of the book only when the real
world intrudes.
“Suspense”
derives from the Latin word meaning “to hang.” Think of yourself as a hangman.
You take your reader to the cliff’s edge. There you hang your hero by his
fingertips. You are not to behave like a compassionate human being. You are not
a rescuer. Your job is to avoid rescuing the hero as long as possible. You
leave him hanging.
Hanging,
of course, is an extreme situation from melodrama. Suspense can take many
forms, some of them subtle. Suspense builds when the reader wants something to
happen and it isn’t happening yet. Or something is happening and the reader
wants it to stop, now. And it doesn’t.
Suspense
needles the reader with a feeling of anxious uncertainty. Here are examples of
the kinds of situations that create suspense:
The writer’s duty is to set up something that cries for a resolution and then to act irresponsibly, to dance away from the reader’s problem, dealing with other things, prolonging and exacerbating the reader’s desperate need for resolution.
Therefore:
The point, of course, is that you don’t resolve the
suspense you’ve aroused. Your duty is to be mean. You are giving the reader a
thrill he yearns for in books and
detests in life. You frustrate the reader’s expectations.
Let’s
look at some examples.
Isak
Dinesen, a remarkable short story writer, began The Sailor-Boy’s Tale with
a young sailor observing a bird caught high in the rigging, flapping its wings,
turning its head from side to side, trying to get loose. The young sailor
thinks, “Through his own experience of life he had come to the conviction that
in this world everyone must look after himself, and expect no help from
others.”
The
reader wants the young sailor to climb the rigging to free the bird. That
action is delayed by the young sailor’s thoughts about the past. The delay
causes tension in the reader. In the fourth paragraph, the boy is climbing up.
The bird turns out to be a peregrine falcon, which has special meaning for the
boy. But just as he frees the bird, the falcon hacks him on the thumb, drawing
blood. The reader wanted the bird freed, and look what happened.
The
reader has to wonder what will happen now to the sailor boy, to the falcon, to
the young sailor’s notion that “everyone must look after himself, and expect no
help from others.” In other words, the reader’s curiosity is thoroughly aroused
by boy, bird, and theme, all in a few paragraphs of a short story that ends not
many pages later. The novelist’s job is even harder, for he must arouse the
reader’s curiosity enough to hold him for hundreds of pages. That means that
suspense and tension must be constantly renewed.
In
popular or transient fiction the author usually relies much more on plot than
character to arouse suspense initially, as Frederick Forsyth does in The Day
of the Jackal.
Forsyth’s
ingenuity in creating suspense is worth noting. Based on an outline of the plot
alone, more than twenty publishers turned down his first novel, The Day of
the Jackal, I among them, because the plot was about an assassin out to
kill General de Gaulle—who was already dead! However, when Forsyth, unanimously
rejected, wrote the actual novel, he skillfully held the reader with powerful
negative suspense, the reader hoping that the assassin would be stopped before
he could kill de Gaulle. In other words, the reader was forced to suspend
disbelief for the sake of the plot. And he was made to do so by the author’s
technical skill in arousing suspense, not through character as much as through
the intended action that the reader wanted desperately to see stopped. The
Day of the Jackal is worth studying for its use of suspense.
* * *
One of the most common complaints heard from editors is
that a novel “sags in the middle.” By “sag” they mean the story loses its
momentum, suspense flags, the reader no longer has his curiosity aroused about
what will happen next.
To
prevent this problem from happening in the first place, you must understand the
ideal organization of a novel and how each chapter can be made to contribute to
the suspense of the whole.
In
speaking before writers’ conferences, I demonstrate a method for achieving
suspense throughout a book by summoning eight or ten volunteers up onstage. I
ask each person to think of a location for a scene and to announce it to the
audience. The likelihood is that we get a series of wildly unconnected places,
the desert near Palm Springs, Chicago, Hong Kong, a cave in Virginia, an island
off the west coast of Florida, and so on. The audience laughs, enjoying the
wild hopping about in space. We enjoy the surprise of moving around to
unexpected places.
I
organize where each person stands to get the most interesting mix of locations.
Then I ask each person in turn to remind the audience where his or her scene is
located. I then point out how suspense will work throughout a book consisting
of those eight or ten different scenes.
Let us
say that the first scene takes place in the desert near Palm Springs. The scene
will end with the hero in serious trouble in the desert. Do we then start the
next scene (or chapter) in the desert with the hero? Absolutely not. We leave
the reader in suspense and go to the next location, Chicago, where we see a
scene with a different character, say the hero’s fiancée, getting into trouble.
We still want to know the outcome of what happened to the hero in the desert,
but our attention is now diverted to the heroine in Chicago. At the end of
scene (or chapter) two, we desperately want to know what the heroine in
Chicago, who is in serious trouble, will do to extricate herself.
We now
have two lines of suspense going: what will happen to the hero in the desert at
Palm Springs and, most urgently, what will happen to the heroine in Chicago.
We
begin the third scene in either of two places. We can go on to a third
location, Hong Kong, and leave the reader in suspense about both the hero and
heroine, or we can go back to the desert and continue the story of the hero at
Palm Springs, leaving the reader in suspense about the goings on in Chicago. Of
course, at the end of scene three, the hero is facing an even greater obstacle
than he did at the end of scene one, and the reader is left hanging, and in
scene four we go back to the heroine in Chicago, or to a third person in Hong
Kong.
The
places don’t need to be as far apart as Palm Springs and Chicago and Hong Kong.
The entire novel can take place in Marshalltown, Iowa, with the first scene
ending with a bank being held up, and our hero, the bank manager, being tied up
and gagged by the daring robber, and shoved into the vault. The second scene
can then be, say, in the bank manager’s home, where his wife is preparing
dinner and wondering why her husband, always on time, hasn’t arrived home yet.
The wife, nervous, cuts her hand badly. She tries to stop the bleeding but has
difficulty tying a tourniquet with one hand. She runs to a neighbor’s house.
The neighbor isn’t home. She gets in her car, and drives to the next neighbor,
who is quite a distance down the road, meanwhile getting blood all over the
seat of the car. As she arrives at the second neighbor’s yard, she passes out
in the car. End of second scene.
The
reader is now concerned about the bank manager in the vault and even more about
his wife. The third scene starts with a local roofer working on a building
across the street from the bank. He’s an observant fellow and has noticed
people going into the bank, but no one coming out. It’s none of his business,
but his curiosity gets the better of him. He slings his hammer into the leather
carryall around his waist, eases himself down from his perch on the roof, and
trots over to the bank. He looks in and immediately realizes what is going on
and is ready to back off and call the police when the lookout for the bank
robbers spots him, and thinking the hammer at his belt is a gun, fires at the
roofer, hitting him and alerting the robbers in the bank.
Whew!
The reader is now concerned about three things, the bank manager in the vault,
the bleeding wife passed out in a distant neighbor’s yard, and the roofer,
lying shot in the street. All of these events are in the same town, but by
starting each scene in a different location and focusing each on a different
character, we now have three lines of suspense going at the same time.
It
helps to jot down the location of each of the scenes in your book to see if
they can be arranged in an order that will take each scene to a location
different from the one at the end of the preceding scene. It isn’t necessary to
do this with every scene in a book. I find that if you change location or
character in a majority of instances, you can also, where appropriate, continue
the action of a suspenseful scene in the following chapter. The plan should be
followed to achieve the purpose of suspense, not to follow a rigid pattern.
Many writers also find this exercise useful in imagining different locations,
which always increases reader interest.
Making
a simple chart like the one that follows will be of help. On each line, note
the location (different from the location of the preceding scene, if possible),
the principal character in the scene, and, briefly, the action that takes
place there. Be brief. (Keep in mind that if there is no action, you don’t
really have a scene.)
One of the frequent failings of novelists is the inclusion
of material between scenes. This usually takes the form of a narrative summary
of offstage happenings. By using the simple outline above, the temptation to
include material between the scenes may diminish. Remember that a reader’s
interest is in the scenes, not the interstices between the scenes. When I have a
group onstage, each representing a locale where a chapter takes place, I have
the writers first hold hands in a circle, then drop their hands to indicate
visually that transitions between scenes aren’t needed. Those transitions
almost always constitute the offstage parts that make a book sag. Today’s
reader is used to jump-cutting.
The
next step requires discipline also. Look at your list of scenes and find the
weakest one, where your own interest flags. If you eliminate your weakest
scene, you will strengthen your book as a whole. It takes guts, but do it!
If
you’ve eliminated the weakest scene, you now have another scene that is
weakest. If you’ve got the guts of a writer, you may now be able to eliminate
the second-weakest scene. It’s an ideal way to strengthen a book. Remember,
your intent is to build a publishable novel. You are not a scene preserver!
It will help to keep in mind the difference between a
scene and a chapter. A scene is a unit of writing, usually an integral
incident with a beginning and end that in itself is not isolatable as a story.
It is visible to the reader or audience as an event that can be witnessed,
almost always involving two or more characters, dialogue, and action in a
single setting. A chapter is a part of a longer work that is set off
with a number or a title. A chapter may have several scenes or scenelets. When
each chapter of a novel (except the last) ends, the reader’s interest should be
aroused anew, thrusting him forward in the novel. The key is not to take the
reader where he wants to go.
To refresh our understanding, let’s look at that ideal
architecture of a suspenseful novel in terms of chapters.
Chapter
1. The chapter ends with a turn of events that leaves the reader in suspense.
The reader wants to stay with the characters and action of that chapter.
Chapter
2. The reader finds himself in another place and/or with a different character.
The reader still wants to know what happens in Chapter 1. Chapter 2 ends with a
turn of events that leaves the reader in suspense. The reader wants to know how
Chapter 2 turns out. Two lines of suspense are operating.
In
Chapter 3, the reader finds himself in a continuation of the suspenseful events
in Chapter 1. He is still in suspense about Chapter 2. By the end of Chapter 3,
a new line of suspense has been created. Two lines of suspense are still
operating.
If you
keep doing this with successive chapters, the reader will be kept continuously
in suspense and there will be no sag in the middle of the book or anywhere
else.
If you
think this kind of architecture is crafty, you’re right. It is an important
part of designing a novel to influence the emotions of the reader. And as we
know, the emotions of the reader are affected by suspense more than by any
other factor.
If you
want to group your scenes into chapters, here are some guidelines:
One of the best ways of accustoming yourself to the idea
of continuing suspense is to study novels that you have found difficult to put
down. Pick up any well-known suspense or thriller writer’s work and look at the
chapter endings. You’ll see how most of the time each chapter ends on a
suspenseful note and throws the reader forward into the next chapter. The most
experienced suspense writers start the next chapter somewhere else or with
other characters.
In
literary novels, of course, the suspense is often more subtle. All forms of
fiction have one thing in common: the chapter endings arouse the reader’s
curiosity about what will happen next.
Your
chapters are not cemented in place. You can reorganize them in any fashion that
accelerates the suspense of the whole. Watch out for time shifts that would
disturb the reader. Try to keep moving only forward in time until you’ve had a
good deal of experience.
A word
of caution. In reorganizing the chapters in a book it is crucial to avoid
disimprovement. Whenever shifting locations, keep a copy of your present
architecture, then play with rearranging the chapters in another order. You may
find that what you will be putting into new places are parts of chapters or
scenes within chapters. That’s fine.
If you
change the sequence of chapters or scenes, you may also have to do some
stitching at the seams. Obviously, this rewriting is much easier if you’re in
an early draft, and still easier if you’re in the planning stage.
I
cannot overemphasize the importance of architectural suspense. It has been a
major factor in the success of writers I have worked with. Mastering this
technique can in itself improve the chances of a book’s acceptance for
publication.
The Adrenaline Pump: Creating Tension
Writers are
troublemakers. A psychotherapist tries to relieve stress, strain, and pressure.
Writers are not psychotherapists. Their job is to give readers stress,
strain, and pressure. The fact is that readers who hate those things in life
love them in fiction. Until a writer assimilates that fact he will have
difficulty in consciously creating sufficient moments in which the reader feels
tension.
Tension
is the most frequent cause of physiological changes in the reader. The sudden
stress causes the adrenal medulla to release a hormone into the bloodstream
that stimulates the heart and increases blood pressure, metabolic rate, and
blood glucose concentration. The result is an adrenaline high that makes the
reader feel excited. That excitement is what the reader lusts for. Like all
excitement, it is endurable for brief bursts, which is one of the factors that
distinguishes tension from suspense. Suspense can last over a long period,
sometimes for an entire book. Tension is felt in seconds or minutes. There are
occasions in fiction when it lasts longer and begins to border on the
unbearable. The best novels have respites in which the reader is allowed to
relax so that the tension can ebb, but not for long.
The
word “tension” is derived from the Latin tendere, meaning “to stretch.”
Tension is a stretching out. Think of stretching a rubber band more and more.
If you stretch it too far it will break. We experience moments of tension as
seeming longer because we want the tension to end. Tension produces
instantaneous anxiety, and the reader finds it delicious.
The
writer’s job is to create tension consciously, and in my lectures I sometimes
demonstrate how tension is created. Without warning, I will suddenly adopt a
stern expression, point a finger at someone in the first row, and in a commanding
voice demand, “You! Get up out of your chair!”
For a
moment, the person I’ve singled out doesn’t know what to do. The audience is
hushed, watching. I order, “Stand up!” The person—face flushed—wonders why I am
ordering him to stand. “Stand up!” I repeat. The tension in the room is great
as long as he disobeys. When the person finally stands up, the tension in the
audience is broken. I quickly point out that the way to create tension is to
cause friction (ordering “Stand up!”) and to have the recipient of the order
not stand up; the tension will continue only as long as the disobedience.
Several
times luck has been with me during this demonstration. I order a writer in the
front row to stand up, and he remains frozen in his chair. Again I order him to
stand up. By this time the rest of the audience is as tense as he is. I step
off the stage and come physically closer to the writer. In the voice of a
marine drill instructor, I bellow the order to get up. The writer starts to
stand, and before the tension can break I shout, “Lie down on the floor!”
Telling
someone to stand is not necessarily unreasonable. Asking someone to lie down on
the floor of an auditorium full of people seems unreasonable. That’s when the
tension in the audience breaks. People laugh. Others titter. Finally, the
victim in the front row joins in. He doesn’t have to lie down. The tension is
over.
Our
instinct as human beings is to provide answers, to ease tension. As writers our
job is the opposite, to create tension and not dispel it immediately. In
examining the manuscripts of hundreds of writers over the years, a common fault
I’ve observed is that the writer creates a pressing problem for a character and
then immediately relieves the pressure by resolving it. That’s humane but not a
writer’s function. His mission is to manipulate the emotions of the audience,
and when it comes to moments of tension, to stretch them out as long as
possible.
A
common way to create tension in a novel is to simply note a “fact” that is
likely to chill any reader. The following is the opening sentence of a thriller
I recommended earlier, The Day of the Jackal by Frederick Forsyth:
It is cold at 6:40 in the morning of a March day in
Paris, and seems even colder when a man is about to be executed by firing squad.
Does the precise time convince you of the reality of
what’s taking place? Do you want to know who is being executed by firing squad?
Do you want to know why he’s being executed? So did millions of readers.
That
one sentence creates tension. I recounted the plot earlier. An assassin has
been hired to kill General de Gaulle. The reader doesn’t want de Gaulle to be
killed. That creates negative suspense (wanting something not to happen)
that lasts almost to the end of the novel. The tension of that first sentence
is momentary. The main line of suspense is book-long.
The
most important moment of tension in a novel is its first use, which should be
as close to the beginning of the book as possible. It puts the writer in charge
of the reader’s emotions.
You
might well say, “Wait a minute, Stein. Isn’t my job in the first few pages to
create a living breathing character that will interest the reader?” Yes, of
course. The closer writing gets to literature, the more likely it is that what
fastens us to the early pages is our interest in a character. And then, as soon
as possible, the writer creates some moments of tension for that character.
Here, in outline, are the kind of plot situations that provide opportunities to
create tension:
Dangerous
work is involved: The place
is postwar Bosnia. A likable demolitions specialist parks his five-year-old
daughter with a neighbor watching from a distance and then, a prayer on his
lips, goes about trying to dismantle an unexploded shell. The author describes
what the man is doing in minute detail. The reader, aware of the man as a human
being, aware also of the five-year-old watching from a distance, feels tension
mount with every turn of the screw.
A
deadline is nearing: Molly
knows that at six o’clock the villain will return. At four o’clock the hero,
Frank, has not yet arrived, and Molly, glancing at the time, is tense. So is
the reader. At five o’clock Molly is beginning to panic. At two minutes to six,
the reader’s tension is extreme. At one minute to six, Frank arrives
breathless.
An
unfortunate meeting occurs: The
heroine is in a department store elevator. She presses the button for the sixth
floor. The elevator stops on the fifth floor, and the dangerously neurotic man
she jilted gets on. The reader becomes instantly tense.
An
opponent is trapped in a closed environment: The protagonist, who in his youth hunted vermin on a farm, is now
seventy years old. He owns the only rifle in the neighborhood, where the
citizens are terrified by the rumor that a diseased mountain lion has come down
into the town and chased a woman into the basement of her house. The woman has
locked herself in the boiler room, and the mountain lion is roaring outside its
closed door. The elderly rifle owner is summoned to kill the lion. A younger man offers to take the rifle
and go down the cellar stairs to the trapped lion. The old man gives his rifle
to the younger man, but immediately sees that the younger man doesn’t handle
the firearm in an experienced way. He asks for it back, and enters the house.
At the head of the cellar stairs, he hears the lion below, but can’t see the
animal clearly, except for its eyes. The older man has a flashlight, but how is
he to hold the rifle with one hand and the flashlight with the other? As he
puts the flashlight down, the crazed lion bounds up the cellar steps.
Well,
we’ll stop right there. What we’ve done is add one tense moment to another,
piling up the degree of tension toward a climax. The temptation for the
inexperienced writer is to have the older man go in and shoot the crazed animal
right off. That makes short shrift of the tension. By adding the element of the
younger volunteer and the flashlight, we add to the tension, stretching it out.
Tension
can be as valuable in literary fiction as in thrillers. The opening story in
Ethan Canin’s collection of novellas, The Palace Thief, is called “The
Accountant.”
At the
very beginning, the accountant-narrator tells the reader that his crime was
small. We then hear him tell the circumstances and details of his crime. Far
into the story, when we are witnessing the crime, we don’t want the
accountant—whom we’ve gotten to like as a human being despite his faults—to
wreck his life by going forward with the crime. While he is in the process of
committing it, the reader becomes extremely tense. As the accountant takes an
object that doesn’t belong to him, we want him to put it back. This isn’t
suspense because he told us at the outset that he committed the crime. But
there are moments of high tension, stretched out. The reader keeps hoping that
any second the accountant will stop the clock, change his mind, not go through
with this stupid, unnecessary, trivial, bizarre crime, and yet he goes ahead
with it, wrecking his life. “The Accountant” is a story worth reading for pleasure
the first time, and worth studying the second time.
Relocating
a sentence to increase tension is a valuable technique. The “she” in the
following is a young woman who doesn’t yet know that a boy she had made love to
is dead. She meets several of his friends. Here’s the original:
“Before I got your message,
I thought we were going to meet over at Urek’s like usual. He in trouble
again?”
A fog of silence descended.
Nobody looked at anybody else. Finally, Feeney said, “She doesn’t know.”
I
transposed one sentence and created two new paragraphs. Note the increase in
tension, though no words have been changed.
“Before I got your message,
I thought we were going to meet over at Urek’s like usual.”
A fog of silence descended.
Nobody looked at anybody else.
“He in trouble again?”
Finally, Feeney said, “She
doesn’t know.”
One of the easiest ways to create tension is by means of
dialogue. The best dialogue sparks with friction, generating tension in the
reader as it does in life. In the next chapter, we’ll see how that’s done.
The Secrets of Good Dialogue
Success in writing dialogue is one of the most rewarding
aspects of the writer’s craft. By the time you finish reading this chapter you
should know more about dialogue than ninety percent of published writers. The
fact is that the majority of writers write dialogue by instinct with little
knowledge of the craft.
I was
lucky. Plays consist entirely of dialogue. Before I was a novelist I was a
playwright and had a chance to see my plays produced on and off Broadway in New
York, at the National Theater in Washington, and in California. For many years
I lived in a world in which the currency was dialogue.
In the
autumn of 1989, I was invited to give a twelve-week course on “Dialogue for
Writers” at the University of California at Irvine. In the class, writers of
fiction far outnumbered playwrights and screenwriters. When I returned east at
the end of those three months, the Los Angeles Times reported that the
students, some with many books to their credit but still learning, refused to
let the course end. They met weekly, insisting that I come back. I did each
winter, and many of those writers are still studying with me, perfecting their
dialogue and other aspects of their fiction.
Readers
enjoy dialogue in stories and novels. Those same readers would hate reading
court transcripts, even of dramatic confrontations. What makes dialogue
interesting and so much actual talk boring?
Talk is
repetitive, full of rambling, incomplete, or run-on sentences, and usually
contains a lot of unnecessary words. Most answers contain echoes of the
question. Our speech is full of such echoes. Dialogue, contrary to popular
view, is not a recording of actual speech; it is a semblance of speech, an
invented language of exchanges that build in tempo or content toward climaxes.
Some people mistakenly believe that all a writer has to do is turn on a tape recorder to capture dialogue. What
he’d be capturing is the same boring speech patterns the poor court reporter
has to record verbatim. Learning the new language of dialogue is as complex as
learning any new language. However, there are some shortcuts.
First,
let’s examine some of the advantages of dialogue. As you know from an earlier
chapter, fiction consists of three elements: description, narrative summary,
and immediate scene. The twentieth-century reader, influenced by a century of
film and a half century of television, is used to seeing what’s happening in
front of his eyes, not hearing about events after the fact. That’s why immediate
scenes—onstage, visible to the eye—dominate today’s fiction. Dialogue is
always in immediate scene, which is one reason readers relish it.
When
talk is tough, combative, or adversarial it can be as exciting as physical
action. Listen to this exchange from an early episode of the television series NYPD
Blue. The central character is a detective named Kelly. In court he sees
the murderer of an eight-year-old boy use legal technicalities to win a plea
bargain. Kelly is enraged. The judge warns him, “We govern by law, not by your
whim.” Not bothering to conceal his contempt, Kelly counters:
Don’t tell me how you govern. I work your streets. I
clean up after how you govern. The way you govern stinks.
Confrontational dialogue—whether in Shakespeare, a contemporary
novel, or a policeman talking back to a judge in a TV drama—is immediate,
creating a visual image of the speakers as it shoots adrenaline into our
bloodstream.
As the writer of fiction masters dialogue, he will be able to deal with characterization and plot simultaneously. Let’s prove that by taking a hard look at just four lines of dialogue and what we can accomplish with them.
First, some actual overheard conversation:
SHE: How are you?
HE: How am I? Oh,
I’m fine, how are you?
SHE: And the family?
HE: The family is
great. Everybody’s well.
It doesn’t take much of this to bore a reader out of his
skull. Let’s change those lines somewhat:
SHE: How are you?
HE: I suppose I’m okay.
SHE: Why, what’s the matter.
HE: I guess you haven’t heard.
Those simple changes introduce suspense. The second line, “I suppose I’m okay,” doesn’t sound like the character really is okay. The fourth line makes the reader want to know what happens next.
Let’s try another revision of those four lines:
SHE: How are you?
HE: Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t see you.
SHE: Is anything wrong?
HE: No, no, absolutely not. I just didn’t see you.
With that exchange, we know something is wrong and that
the man is lying. We’re beginning to get a sense of character.
In
life, speakers answer each other’s questions. We compliment a speaker by saying
he is direct. Dialogue, to the contrary, is indirect. The key word to
understanding the nature of dialogue is that the best dialogue is oblique. Take
another look at those first two lines:
SHE: How are you?
HE: Oh, I’m
sorry, I didn’t see you.
He doesn’t answer her question! He is not direct. His response is oblique. The writers I’ve coached who learn how to make their dialogue oblique have all taken a giant step toward improving their work.
Let’s try one more revision:
SHE: How are you? I said how are you?
HE: I heard you the first time.
SHE: I only wanted to know how you were.
HE: How the hell do you think I am?
Characters don’t need to make speeches at each other. From
just four lines the reader learns that these two people have probably had a
relationship in the past that is not resolved, and at least for one of them the
relationship is filled with bitterness.
We’re
not only characterizing, we’re building a story out of just four lines. A reader’s
emotions can be sparked with few words. That’s the power of dialogue.
Tension
can now be increased not only by the substance of their relationship but also
by incidental matters. For instance:
HE: It’s beginning to rain.
SHE: What do you suggest?
The conversation can now go in a number of directions. He
can say, “Why don’t we talk some other time.” Or “Why don’t we go in
for a cup of coffee.” Or “Come sit in my car for a few minutes.” Each
of these would take the plot in a different direction.
We’ve
come a long way from the original, boring four lines.
If you
need proof that dialogue and spoken words are not the same, go to a
supermarket. Eavesdrop. Much of what you’ll hear in the aisles sounds like
idiot talk. People won’t buy your novel to hear idiot talk. They get that free
from relatives, friends, and at the supermarket.
What is
the most frequently used word in real speech? Uh. It’s what people say to
borrow time to think of what they want to say. “Uh” is totally useless to a
writer. Dialogue is a lean language in which every word counts.
Count
for what? To characterize, to move the story along, to have an impact on the
reader’s emotions.
Some
writers make the mistake of thinking that dialogue is overheard. Wrong!
Dialogue is invented and the writer is the inventor.
Elmore
Leonard is considered a superb practitioner of dialogue, but does anyone in
life talk the way his characters do? Elmore Leonard’s dialogue is invented, it
is a semblance of speech that has the effect of actual speech, which is what
his readers prize.
If
you’re relatively new to dialogue, you might try an exercise I’ve developed
that is used by screenwriters as well as novelists. Let’s imagine two
characters, Joe and Ed. Joe says, “Ed?”
What is
Joe trying to accomplish by that one word?
There
are several possibilities:
Now
imagine that Joe adds one word and says, “Now Ed.” What is Joe’s
intention?
If
there were a comma between “Now” and “Ed,” it might mean “The time is now, Ed.”
But there isn’t a comma or pause. There are a couple of possibilities.
We don’t know which unless we know the context in which
the two words are spoken. But what is clear is that those two words in context
can mean a lot—an admonition or a warning.
Let’s
try one more. What does Joe mean by repeating Ed’s name three times: “Ed,
Ed, Ed”? If a dozen readers were to pronounce those three recitations of
Ed’s name, you’d probably get a dozen different intonations but only one
meaning: Joe’s feeling of disappointment in Ed’s conduct, derived from one word
repeated three times: “Ed, Ed, Ed.”
With
this exercise we are learning to listen to what words mean. The reader can get
all the words he needs from a dictionary. What the reader gets from your
fiction is the meaning of words. And most important, the emotion that meaning
generates.
We’ve
learned that what counts is not what is said but the effect of what is
meant. If you keep a journal, that’s worth writing down.
When I
worked with Elia Kazan on The Arrangement, we tested dialogue by reading
lines aloud to each other. As I noted earlier, the best way to judge dialogue
read aloud is to read it in a monotone without expression. The words have to do
the job.
When I
examine dialogue in chunks, mine or someone else’s, I ask myself the following:
The next step is to check if the lines spoken by each
character are consistent with that character’s background. Then I remove clichés
that are out of character. I remove any echoes that slipped in.
Talk is
full of echoes. Echoes don’t belong in dialogue. Here’s an example of echoing
conversation from a cocktail party scene:
SHE: Boy, am I glad to see you.
HE: I’m glad to see you, too.
It fails as dialogue. Here’s how it was rewritten:
SHE: Boy, am I glad to see you.
HE: You finally got your contacts in.
Let’s imagine a cocktail party at which a man is trying to
come on to a woman he has just met. He might say:
“You are the most beautiful woman in the world.”
Her instinct is to be polite. She might answer:
“Why, thank you.”
That is boring. Nothing is happening. Watch what happens
when her response is oblique:
HE: You are the most beautiful woman in the world
SHE: I’d like you to meet my husband.
Most conversation is square, and therefore turgid. There
is no story. In the example of dialogue above, the man makes a verbal pass, and
the woman declines it. Something is happening.
In
creating oblique dialogue, the questioner must provide the respondent with an
opportunity to be oblique. Otherwise, it might seem that the respondent didn’t
hear or didn’t understand. Certain forms of question call for a response. For
instance:
“Why are you giving me the third degree?”
Since the question is direct, a lack of direct response
may be noticed by the reader. We expect questions to be answered. A simple
change in the question can open the gate wide for an oblique response:
“What’s this third degree?”
It is highly unlikely that you have a group of friends all
of whom speak exactly alike. If they were a group of characters in a work of
yours, you’d want to differentiate each one’s speech. Most writers recognize
this, yet the chief fault of many television and film scripts as well as novels
is that the dialogue of different characters sounds the same. Even some
experienced writers are unfamiliar with the techniques available to them for
differentiating characters through their speech.
The
richest means of such differentiation are speech markers, signals that
are quickly identifiable by the reader. Vocabulary is an important marker.
Throwaway words and phrases are markers. Tight or loose wording is a marker.
Run-on sentences are markers. Sarcasm is a marker. Cynicism is a marker. Poor
grammar is a marker. Omitted words are markers. Inappropriate modifiers are
markers. Consider all these a mine for the jewels of dialogue.
Vocabulary
encompasses different kinds of markers, such as polysyllabic words and
professional jargon. Polysyllabic words like intricate, oxymoron, and antediluvian
indicate the speaker is well educated or pretentious, depending on the
context. The point is that the character’s speech can be differentiated from
others’ with just a word or two. Be warned. The words have to fit the character
you’ve created. Otherwise, the special vocabulary will jar the reader.
Jargon
is a two-edged marker that usually identifies the character’s profession and at
the same time conveys a negative impression of the speaker. There is a tendency
among people within a profession to use or create words whose meanings are
clear only to others within their narrow group and obscure to the rest of the
world. This tendency in all specializations is a barrier to communication and a
support of self-serving secrecy in an “in” group. Writers have an obligation to
defend their language against the assaults of jargon.
A
simple example most people have been exposed to comes from the fields of
psychology and social services, where “interpersonal relationships” is an
overblown expression for “relationships,” which means the same thing. The field
of medicine is notorious for its jargon. This provides an opportunity for
writers, particularly of comedy. For instance, a pretentious health worker
might say, “This capsule is suitable for oral administration.” The patient
might reply, “You mean I can swallow it?” Jargon is a marker of stuffiness. One
must be careful in its use. A touch is plenty. A surfeit of jargon quickly becomes caricature instead of
characterization.
Certain
throwaway words and phrases are useful markers. “Actually,” “basically,”
“perhaps,” “I dare say,” “I don’t know what to think,” “it occurs to me,” “you
see,” “anyway” are all words that can be cut unless you are choosing to use
them as verbal tics of a particular character.
Tight
or loose wording functions as a marker. “Beat it. Go home” is obviously tight
wording. “I would appreciate your leaving now” is loose wording. They each give
different signals to the reader about the character speaking.
Run-on
sentences can be useful to characterize a nonstop talker:
“The minute I was through the doors of that store I was a
fish in a barrel of minnows, my eyes bulging out of my head at the fancy vests,
scarves, jumpers, prints, knits, it seemed as if everything was on sale except
the clerks, and one of them, the way he came up to me and whispered in my ear,
maybe he was too.”
Also sarcasm:
“Anybody who can spend money the way you can must be
printing it.”
Or:
“You own the whole country or just this store?”
Poor grammar is an easy marker.
“If you was the last man on earth ...”
Diction refers to the writer’s precise choice of words for
their effect. I’ve pointed out that when a policeman uses the word
“perpetrator” it comes across as pretentious. When a teacher of young children
uses the word “albeit,” that, too, comes across as pretentious. Literary work
as distinguished from transient work is marked by a careful choice of words,
but when it comes to dialogue all writers must attend to diction. Even the
simplest of examples demonstrates how diction can differentiate one character
from another. “May I know your name?” comes across as a polite and perhaps excessively formal marker. “You, what’s your name?”
sounds impolite and aggressive.
Spelling
out pronunciations (for instance, “Anyone see my seester?” as an attempt to
indicate a Latino accent) is almost always a bad choice. I would also like to
caution against a use of dialect in which speech is differentiated from the
standard language by odd spellings. Though dialect was used quite extensively
in earlier periods, today it is seen as a liability for several reasons.
Dialect is annoying to the reader. It takes extra effort to derive the meaning
of words on the page; that effort deters full involvement in the experience of
a story. For example, Cockney, a dialect of British English, is difficult for
many English-speaking people to follow in film and TV, and on the printed page.
Dialect is offensive to some readers. Moreover, people do not hear their own
dialect or regional mode of speaking; only listeners from other communities
hear it. That means you are reducing your potential audience by the employment
of dialect. As a substitute for dialect use word order, omitted words, and
other markers. James Baldwin made a breakthrough in fiction conveying the
speech of blacks by word order and rhythm more than by dialect.
For
many kinds of ethnic characters, in addition to word order and rhythm, errors
in speech, particularly the omission of words, are useful:
“How you get so big?”
In addition, you can use the wrong verb, leave out the
articles “the” and “a,” devise incomplete or slightly malformed sentences, use
vocabulary oddities, and the occasional foreign word that would be understood
in context. Content references can also help; for instance, in The Best
Revenge, when the ancient Italian Aldo Manucci refers to actresses it is to
Gina Lollobrigida and Anna Magnani. Note the construction of his speech:
“You a much big man now,” Manucci said. “In papers all
time Ben-neh Riller present, Ben-neh Riller announce, Ben-neh Killer big stars,
big shows. You bring Gina Lollobrigida here I kiss her hand. I kiss her
anything,” he laughed. “Magnani, you know Magnani, she more my type.”
Manucci’s American-born son might say, “You’re a big man
now.” Aldo says much big man, using an inappropriate modifier. He
pronounces Ben in two syllables, Ben-neh:
“Know something, don’t give half that much to one party
even when I was king around here. Never mind. Nineteen seventy-nine dollar
nothing. When you was boy, Ben-neh, five cents buy big ice cream, five dollars
get someone off street for good.”
Note the details again. “Know something” would not be used
by someone schooled in good English, ethnic or otherwise. Aldo leaves out the
subject “Do you.” He doesn’t say “today’s dollar,” he describes it by the year.
Aldo uses the wrong verb and leaves the article out. Not “When you were a boy”
but “When you was boy.” And so on.
Small
changes in speech can make a big difference in characterizing any speaker, but
especially ethnic characters.
The
addition of a syllable to convey ethnic speech is used effectively by Joe
Vitarelli, an actor who has a strong talent for writing fiction. As a mob
chieftain in Woody Allen’s film Bullets Over Broadway, Vitarelli refers
to Shakespeare’s play as “Ham-a-let” and to a steak as a “sir-a-loin.”
Monologue,
or direct address to the reader by a character speaking in the first person,
uses the same principles as dialogue, though in self-characterization there is
a great danger of making a character sound as if he or she were answering a
questionnaire instead of talking. Even fine writers like E. L. Doctorow can
stumble. The first chapter of World’s Fair, headed “Rose,” the name of
the Russian immigrant speaking, starts this way:
I was born on Clinton Street in the Lower East Side. I
was the next to youngest of six children, two boys, four girls. The two boys,
Harry and Willy, were the oldest. My father was a musician, a violinist. He
always made a good living. He and my mother had met in Russia and they married
there, and then emigrated. My mother came from a family of musicians as well;
that is how, in the course of things, she and my father had met. Some of her
cousins were very well known in Russia; one, a cellist, had even played for the
Czar. My mother was a very beautiful woman, petite, with long golden hair and
the palest blue eyes ...
Doctorow’s monologue sounds as if Rose were answering a
questionnaire. It doesn’t come to life. Here’s how a monologue by a Russian
immigrant sounds when it doesn’t just rattle off biographical facts but reveals
character, and has other features of dialogue:
Of course I’m a wanderer! Moses wandered, Columbus
wandered, should I have rotted in the old country? Should I have stayed in my shtetl,
a subject not only of the Czar but of every Cossack who wanted a Jew to
beat? You don’t need to be an Einstein to know that nothing plus nothing equals
nothing. I got out because in Russia the future is for others. If I’d stayed,
would I have met a woman like Zipporah from a big city like Kiev? Would this
woman and I have produced an impresario like Ben?
Note that in the above speech by Louie Riller, a character
in The Best Revenge, the character’s ethnic background is evident not
from defects in speech but from the content, including the use of one Yiddish
word whose meaning is relatively clear even to people who don’t know it.
The art
of dialogue is a vast subject, itself deserving of a book. Before leaving that
complex subject, I want to add a word about dialogue of earlier periods for
those writing historical novels or stories.
Historical
novels placed in the Middle Ages do not use Beowulf’s or Chaucer’s English
because both would be unintelligible to the contemporary reader. John Fowles,
whose novel The French Lieutenant’s Woman takes place in the nineteenth
century, points out that writing dialogue for an earlier era involves
invention, not just research and mimicry. Fowles, in commenting on his own work[3] reinforces the point that dialogue is a semblance
of speech rather than an attempt to duplicate it:
In the matter of clothes, social manners, historical
background, and the rest, writing about 1867 (insofar as it can be heard in
books of the time) is far too close to our own to sound convincingly old. It
very often fails to agree with our psychological picture of the Victorians—it
is not stiff enough, not euphemistic enough, and so on; and here at once I have
to start cheating and pick out the more formal and archaic (even for 1867)
elements of spoken speech. It is this kind of “cheating,” which is intrinsic to
the novel, that takes the time.
In my dialogue classes I have often had some fun with my
students by redoing well-known speeches of previous centuries in the argot of
today. They not only sound absurd, but often the students cannot guess the
original, though the content remains the same. I can convey the idea most simply with an example from my baptism with
the semblance of historical speech. My play Napoleon takes place in
France during the early nineteenth century. Its cast includes the important
figures of the time, Talleyrand, Metternich, and of course Napoleon and
Josephine. In a confrontation between Talleyrand, the aristocrat who survived
his kings and adversaries, and the upstart Napoleon, Talleyrand provokes the
younger man into a flash of anger. Talleyrand couldn’t say “Don’t get so hot
under the collar” or “Cool it” in the argot of today. He says, “Save your blood
the journey to your face, I meant no harm.” You won’t find anything like that
in any of the recorded conversations of the time. It is dialogue invented to
suit a period, as John Fowles said, a form of “cheating” in which writers use a
newly minted language to simulate an old.
P.S. An
often overlooked advantage of dialogue in novels and stories is this simple: it
provides white space on the page that makes the reader feel that the story is
moving faster because the reader’s eyes move quickly down the page.
How to Show Instead of Tell
I recall
the time Shirl Thomas of the Southern California Chapter of the National
Writers Club phoned to say that numerous speakers had advised their members to
“show, not tell,” but nobody told them how to show. Would I address
their group on that subject? That’s what this chapter is about: how to show.
When
we’re young, before we can read, we get used to the idea that someone is
“telling a story.” A child being read to can experience a story, of course, but
the child is also aware of the person reading, whose skill as a reader is a
factor, who may read too fast or too slowly, who cannot imitate animals as well
as the child’s imagination can, who is in control, who can stop—unreasonably
from the child’s perspective—when the child wants to go on. Important also is
the fact that the child is hearing what’s happening in a book, as it were. If
and when the child becomes an avid reader, when he controls the reading
unhampered by a senior outsider, he is more likely to experience a story as an
adult does. It is an active experience. It is not about something, it is
something.
Growing
up, the child hears from others about what has happened elsewhere, stories
purportedly true, or gossip embellished by imagination. In school, the child is
asked to write about what happened elsewhere, during the summer vacation, or at
Christmastime. Stories are relayed rather than consumed as experience.
All of
these early exposures to offstage happenings contribute to the belief that
stories are told. They can be a liability to writers later in life
because the writer has to change his mind-set from telling what happened
somewhere else to creating an experience for the reader by showing what
happened.
Twentieth-century
readers, transformed by film and television, are used to seeing stories. The
reading experience for a twentieth-century reader is increasingly visual. The story is happening in front of his
eyes. This transformation from stories told to stories seen should not be
surprising. Who would deny that sight is our primary sense? We prefer to
witness an event to hearing about it afterward secondhand. Which is why I urge
writers to “show a story” instead of “tell a story.” One of the chief reasons
novels are rejected is that the writer, consciously or not, is reporting a
story instead of showing it.
The
advice “Show, don’t tell” existed well before the age of film and television.
Henry James gave that counsel.
The
late John Gardner, in his excellent book On Becoming a Novelist, insisted
that the one danger area for “telling” is what a character feels. That may be the
most important, but it’s not the only hazard.
There
are three areas in which the writer is particularly vulnerable to telling
rather than showing: when he tells what happened before the story began; when
he tells what a character looks like; and when he tells what a character
senses, that is, what he sees, hears, smells, touches, and tastes. Those are
all places where the author’s voice can intrude on the reader’s experience.
What
happened before the story began, sometimes called “backstory,” should be shown
rather than told about either in narrative summary or in a flashback. What
happens offstage can also be brought onstage and shown. This is a large
subject, and is treated separately in the next chapter.
What a
character sees, hears, smells, touches, and tastes can be shown through actions
rather than described. And feelings, of course, are best shown through actions.
Here’s
the silliest way that “telling” crops up:
“Henry, your son the doctor is at the door.”
One character should never tell another character what the
second character already knows—unless it’s an accusation. If this kind of
telling intrudes, it is really a dodge for the author to convey information,
which can be done subtly. For instance:
“Do you think Henry would look more like a doctor if he
grew a beard?”
That is sufficient for the reader to learn that Henry is a
doctor and sounds like something that one parent might say to another.
The
following is a more common way that writers “tell”:
Helen was a wonderful woman, always concerned about her
children, Charlie and Ginny.
There is nothing for the reader to see, therefore the
reader feels that he is being told about Helen. Here’s an example of showing
the same thing:
When Helen drove her kids to school, instead of dropping
them off at the curb, she parked her car and, one hand for each of them,
accompanied Charlie and Ginny to the door of the school.
We are shown Helen in action without being told that she’s
a mother who is especially concerned about her children.
The
reader wants an experience that’s more interesting than his daily life. He
enjoys and suffers whatever the characters are living through. If that
experience is interrupted in order to convey a character’s background, or
anything else that the author seems to be supplying, that’s telling, not
showing, a major fault because it intrudes upon the reader’s experience. Put
simply, the reader experiences what is happening in front of his eyes. He does
not experience what is related to him about offstage events. If his experience
is interrupted, he gets antsy. “Telling” starts the reader skipping. Elmore
Leonard said he avoids writing the parts that readers skip.
To
better understand how to show instead of tell, look at some examples:
He was nervous tells.
He tapped his fingers on the
tabletop shows.
Sometimes longer is better for showing:
I put a yellow pad in front of me on the desk. I placed a
pen on the yellow pad. This is ridiculous, I’ m not going to write anything,
just call.
That’s a character about to make an important phone call.
The reader isn’t told he’s nervous. The character is given a nervous action.
It’s useful to remember that an action can often show how a character feels.
Let’s
look at the evolution of telling into showing in the following examples:
She boiled water tells.
She put the kettle on the stove begins
to show.
She filled the kettle from the
faucet and hummed till the kettle’s whistle cut her humming short shows.
She boiled water in a lidless pot so
she could watch the bubbles perk and dance.
As you can see, we have gone from the general (“She boiled
water”) to showing a kettle being put on the stove, which conveys visually to
the reader that the character is boiling water. In the third example, the
addition of detail makes the visual come alive with more action. Finally, a
different approach to the subject matter adds characterization and distinction,
bringing us a long way from “She boiled water.” The key to the improvement is
particularity, a subject covered in greater depth in a later chapter.
One of
the best examples I know of showing instead of telling is in, of all things,
the series of television commercials for Taster’s Choice coffee that have
become famous for their interest as well as their effectiveness. The
commercials consist of extremely short episodes of encounters between two
attractive-looking neighbors, a man and a woman about each of whom little if
anything is known. The viewer immediately wants them to get together. And the
coffee provides the excuse. In one episode, the man shows up at the woman’s
door. To his dismay, another man opens the woman’s door. When we learn the
other man is her brother, we experience relief (for him, for ourselves). In a
later episode, when the neighbors are cohabiting, the woman’s adult son shows
up, a surprise. In all of these, the dialogue is minimal and much is left to
the reader’s imagination. The commercials are lean in the writing and subtle in
the acting, in contrast to most commercials in which the writing is excessive,
pushy, adjective-laden, and unbelievable in dialogue. If you get the
opportunity, tape the Taster’s Choice commercials so that you can study them.
They constitute a short course in subtle showing, in lively dialogue, and
dramatic credibility.
In my
novel The Childkeeper, some important scenes take place in a room that
the children of the family call the Bestiary because it contains several large
stuffed animals. In the first of these scenes, I wanted to make it evident that
one of the children, sixteen-year-old Jeb, bosses the other kids around. I
could have told the reader that by saying he was bossy. That’s telling, now showing. Here’s how I was able to get the
idea across by showing:
In the Bestiary, Jeb, sixteen-year-old caliph, lay stretched on an upper-level bunk bed, fingers twined on chest.
“Dorry!” Jeb’s command filled the room.
“Caliph,” which means the head of a Moslem state, conveys
the “boss” idea immediately. “Fingers twined on chest” helps the image. And
Jeb’s one word of dialogue seals the matter.
If a
writer said, “Polly loved to dive in her swimming pool,” he’d be telling, not
showing. Information is being conveyed to us. We do not see Polly. But the
writer I quote below is John Updike, who shows Polly to us in a writerly way:
With clumsy jubilance, Polly hurtled her body from the
rattling board and surfaced grinning through the kelp of her own hair.
The author is showing Polly in her “clumsy jubilance,”
hurling her body; we hear “the rattling board,” and see Polly surfacing,
grinning through “the kelp of her own hair,” the last a marvelously precise
image. Note that Updike didn’t say “her hair was like kelp” (a simile), but
“the kelp of her own hair” (a metaphor), an excellent example of particularity.
When
you stumble upon information in your work that sounds like the author’s
intervention, try to come up with a simile or a metaphor that shows what you’re
trying to tell.
Let’s
look at another evolution from telling to showing:
He took a walk tells.
He walked four blocks begins to
show.
He walked the four blocks slowly shows
more clearly.
He walked the four blocks as if it
were the last mile shows more by giving the reader a sense of the
character’s feelings, which the previous version did not.
He walked as if against an unseen
wind, hoping someone would stop him shows most of all because it gives the
reader a sense of what the character desperately wants.
One clue to whether a writer is showing rather than
telling is to determine if the passage is visual. In WritePro®, the first of my
computer programs for writers, there is a protagonist named Beth Reilly. If a
hundred writers characterize Beth Reilly, they’ll produce a hundred different
characterizations. The best ones, however, nourish our eyes.
One extraordinarily successful nonfiction writer, who tried her hand at developing a story with Beth Reilly, imagined Beth as the daughter of Irish immigrant parents, who at eighteen was crowned queen of the Chicago St. Patrick’s Day parade, received a scholarship to a fine college and went on to law school, only to have the ill fortune of being seduced by a married neighbor.
As you can see, that is all information passed
on in a nonfiction vein. What the writer needed to do was to transform the
information into a visual scene for fiction. Here’s the result:
You should have seen the blush on Beth Reilly’s freckled
face as the Mayor tried to make the too-small crown stay atop Beth’s full head
of hair. A reporter from the Chicago Tribune handed up two hairpins to the
Mayor to keep Beth’s crown in place. It seemed as if everyone at the St.
Patrick’s Day Parade expelled a breath of relief as good Queen Beth curtsied to
the crowd and the crown stayed in place. They applauded as she was handed the
certificate that would give her four free years at Boston College as her
reward. That day it seemed as if she could want and get anything. What she got
was a married man introducing himself by handing her an expensive bottle of
wine over a fence and with him, a future she kept secret even from her priest.
That’s not perfect yet, but conveying the information with
visual detail (the blush on Beth’s freckled face, the too-small crown, two
hairpins) showed the scene to the reader. No longer is the author telling.
Showing
need not be complex. Can you show merely by the use of color? One of the students
in my advanced fiction seminar, Linda Kelly Alkana, herself a teacher of
writing, started her novel this way:
Beyond the Arctic Circle, the color of cold is blue. But
deep beneath the Arctic water, the color of cold is black.
That’s an interesting beginning. We see the water. And the
change in color is ominous.
As I’ve
repeated often, what we as readers want from writing is to experience it.
Receiving information from the author doesn’t give us an experience.
Gloria
Steinem quotes an Indian saying, “Tell me, and I’ll forget. Show me, and I may
not remember. Involve me, and I’ll understand.” I’d like to amend that. “Tell
me, and I’ll forget. Show me, and you’ll involve me. Involvement is the first
step toward understanding.”
If you are concerned about whether in any passage or
chapter you are telling rather than showing, there are some questions you can
ask yourself:
Are you
allowing the reader to see what’s going on?
Is the
author talking at any point? Can you silence the author by using an action to
help the reader understand what a character feels?
Are you
naming emotions instead of conveying them by actions? Is any character telling
another what that character already knows?
While showing rather than telling is important throughout
a work, it can serve as a miraculous cure for the ailing first pages of a novel
or story. Showing means having characters do things that excite our interest,
making those pages visual, letting us see what happens firsthand.
I have
a small suggestion that carries with it a big reward. In a three-word note to
yourself say, show the story. Then hang the note where you will see it whenever
you sit down to write. Think of it as an antidote to a lifetime of hearing that
a story should be told.
Choosing a Point of View
If all but
one of the instruments on a surgeon’s tray had been sterilized, that exception
would be a danger to the patient. It can be said that one slip of point of view
by a writer can hurt a story badly, and several slips can be fatal.
The term point of view as used by writers is misdefined even in good
dictionaries. It means the character whose eyes are observing what happens, the
perspective from which a scene or story is written.
Without
a firm grasp of point of view, no writer of fiction is free to exercise his
talent fully. This chapter is designed to help you understand the advantages
and disadvantages of each point of view so that you can choose knowledgeably
which to use to accomplish what you have in mind.
Each
point of view available to the writer influences the emotions of the reader
differently. Since affecting the emotions of the reader is the primary job of
fiction, deciding on point of view is important.
In
general, I advise the less-experienced writer not to mix points of view within
the same scene, chapter, or even the same novel. It is unsettling to the
reader. If you mix points of view, the author’s authority seems to dissolve.
The writer seems arbitrary rather than controlled. Sticking to a point of view
intensifies the experience of a story. A wavering or uncertain point of view
will diminish the experience for the reader.
The
experienced writer who has mastered point of view can experiment with tightly
controlled yet shifting viewpoints. When I started out I used the most neutral
kind of third-person point of view. It was only after my confidence increased
that I started using multiple first-person points of view in different parts or
chapters, with the point of view established and clearly identified at the
outset of each part or chapter.
Writers
are often confused about point of view when they are presented with an
unnecessarily large number of choices. Let’s keep things as simple as possible
by examining the three main points of view:
I saw this, I did that.
No mistaking that one. It’s the first-person point of view. What about the next
example?
My friends Blair and Cynthia were doomed. I could feel
their fervor when I saw them embrace, yet in their eyes there was a wariness,
as if each of them knew that their happiness could not last. I must tell you
what happened the next day.
That is also first person, a story told from the sole
point of view of the narrator. He sees what he believes to be in the eyes of
his friends Blair and Cynthia, but it is not their view of how they
feel, it is his view.
The
narrator can be merely the observer of a story involving other people. This
form of first person was more common in the nineteenth century. Today, a
narrator is more often the protagonist or a principal character directly
involved in the action. He can even be the villain of the piece.
Can you
identify the point of view of the following?
He saw this, he did that.
Third person is correct. The simplest way of understanding third person is that it is the same as first person except that you have substituted “he” or “she” for “I.”
What about the second-person point of view?
You saw this, you did that.
Forget it. Second person is used so rarely that I suggest just shelving it. I think of it as the crackerbarrel mode, the storyteller seeking to involve the reader in the story as if he were a character. The fact is that the reader is quite prepared to be involved emotionally in the story not as himself but through identification with one or more of the characters.
Now let’s look at yet another point of view:
Kevin looked longingly at Mary, hoping she would notice
him. She not only noticed him, she wished he would take her in his arms. Mary’s
mother, watching from the window, thought they were a perfect match.
This writer is all over the lot. One moment he seems to be
in Kevin’s head, the next moment in Mary’s, and a second later in Mary’s
mother’s point of view. What’s going on?
In that
short paragraph the reader knows what Kevin is thinking, and also what Mary and
her mother are thinking. The author feels free to roam anywhere. That point of
view is called omniscient, which means all-knowing.
Let’s
recap the three main points of view so that we’re absolutely clear about the
differences. In first person, the character—frequently the protagonist—tells
the story from his or her point of view: I saw this, I did that.
The
easiest way to think of the third person point of view is to substitute “he”
for “I”: He saw this, he did that.
In the
omniscient point of view all characters and locations are fair game.
The
usual reaction of beginning novelists is “Why can’t I just use omniscient and
be done with it? I can go anywhere, do anything—sounds great.” Imitating God,
by seeing and hearing everyone, is tempting, but maturity usually provides
leavening. The Deity can’t pay attention to everybody all the time, and neither
can the writer. A story about everybody is a story about nobody. Before he’ll
let himself become involved, the reader wants to know whose story this is. He
expects the writer to focus on individuals.
Each
point of view has advantages and disadvantages.
The
advantage of first-person POV (writers usually refer to point of view as POV,
so let’s call it that) is that it establishes the greatest immediate intimacy
with the reader. It is an eyewitness account, highly subjective, and highly
credible. When a character speaks directly to us, it’s easier to believe what
the character is saying. If you are good at impersonating your characters, you
will be comfortable with the first-person POV. Better still, once you know the
character, you will become expert in talking with that character’s voice.
For
each plus there is, alas, a minus. The author of a first-person story must
constantly be on guard against telling the reader something that will sound like
the author rather than the character. Furthermore, many writers see a severe limitation in that the
first-person POV can convey to the reader only what that character sees, hears,
smells, touches, tastes, and thinks. You can’t have scenes your first-person
character isn’t a witness to. He doesn’t know what’s going on beyond his ken,
although there are ways of circumventing that liability, which I’ll demonstrate
in a moment.
Another
liability of first person is that it’s difficult for a character to describe
himself without seeming foolishly egotistical. Hundreds of writers, including
me, have used a mirror to get around that. Forget it. A character seeing
himself in a mirror is a cliché. However, a first-person character can think
about his looks, or changes in his looks. Or another character can say
something like:
“Are you dyeing your hair?”
This could lead to an exchange about the character’s hair.
Or:
“Are you getting taller?”
“I’m just stooping less these days.”
Dealing with the “I” character’s ego is more difficult. If
he sees himself as weak, the reader won’t have much interest in him as a
protagonist. If he sees himself as strong, the reader will think him a
braggart. Therefore, in the first-person POV the author relies on action and
the speech of other characters to reveal things—particularly good things—about
the “I” character. An unreliable or villainous first-person narrator can lend
credibility. A first-person commentary by a not terribly intelligent character
can provide an experienced writer with opportunities. In any event,
first-person POV can be exceptionally rich.
There’s
something you’ll want to watch out for using the first person. If the character
takes the reader into his confidence, the character can’t “forget” to provide
the reader with an essential secret or other important piece of information.
When the reader learns that something was withheld, he will feel cheated. The
most dramatic way of handling information that the character is reluctant to
convey is for another character to strip the secret from him in heated
conversation:
I
have been wedded to the truth my entire life. What would I be doing at a young
person’s bachelor party? I told Jonathan flat out, “I didn’t go.”
“Bullshit, Maurice, you were
there.”
“On my conscience, I swear I
didn’t go.”
“You don’t have a twin
brother, do you?”
I told him I didn’t know
what he was talking about. Jonathan pursued me across the room.
“Was it your twin brother
who came out of the John in his suspenders? Maurice, you left your jacket hanging
in the stall you were so drunk. You’re lucky somebody didn’t rifle your pockets
before Adam steered you back in for it.”
I was barely able to speak.
“You were there?”
Jonathan nodded. “I was
there.”
A point sometimes overlooked by beginners is that if a
story centers on the narrator’s ability to survive life-threatening dangers,
some suspense will be lost in the first person because the character will have
to survive to finish the story!
If you
examine an anthology of short stories that have been selected for their
excellence, you may be surprised by the number that are written from the
first-person point of view. Despite the seeming limitations of a single
character’s perspective, first person well done is immensely rewarding to both
experienced writers and experienced readers. The first-person point of view is
valuable, for instance, if you’ve drawn a character who is highly intelligent
or perceptive. His or her complex thoughts can be conveyed much more directly
and intimately to the reader.
Another
advantage of first person is that it can involve the reader’s emotions—even
empathy—with a protagonist who does horrible things. The New York Times Book
Review carried an interesting interview with Scott Smith, a first novelist,
that accompanied a review of his novel A Simple Plan:
Scott Smith’s protagonist Hank commits bloody acts. The
reader would find it hard to empathize with Hank if the story were told in the
third person. In fact, Smith’s choice of first person was “vital to overcoming
the reader’s natural distaste for Hank’s bloody acts.” Said Smith, “I think
there’s something very seductive about a first-person voice, you sort of fall
into it, no matter what horrible things the character does, and I wanted to
keep that up until the very end, at which point the reader would have to sort
of pull back. But no matter what he did, I was sympathetic to him. What’s
seductive to the reader is even more so to the writer.”
Sometimes using the first-person point of view is a
necessity. Jerzy Kosinski’s first and best novel, The Painted Bird, is a
story of tremendous power. I once loaned a copy to a man I’ll call Michael, a
hugely successful businessman who was expert in classical music, a collector of
first-rate art, and an avid reader who “never reads fiction.” We were
vacationing in adjacent cottages and after he’d read only a few pages, Michael
rushed over to ask, “Is this true?” I strung him along with “Do you think it’s
true?” and he kept coming back after several chapters, asking again, “Is this
true?” That book converted Michael to reading fiction from that time on.
The
amazing fact about The Painted Bird is that its language is full of
imaginative images and some of the events depicted are bizarre or aberrant, yet
because the use of first person is handled so skillfully the emotional
experience for the reader is “This is true.”
The
Painted Bird begins with a
preface in third person of less than two pages that sets the period and the
locale. (In general I advise against the use of prefaces in fiction. Some readers
skip them, and in doing so, miss essential information. I have found that the
essential material of prefaces can almost always be skillfully developed in the
story itself.)
Kosinski’s
novel, unlike the third-person preface, is in the first person. The narrator is
presumably a ten-year-old boy:
I
lived in Marta’s hut, expecting my parents to come for me any day, any hour.
Crying did not help, and Marta paid no attention to my sniveling.
She was old and always bent
over, as though she wanted to break herself in half but could not. Her long
hair, never combed, had knotted itself into innumerable thick braids impossible
to unravel. These she calls elflocks. Evil forces nested in the elflocks,
twisting them and slowly inducing senility.
She hobbled around, leaning
on a gnarled stick, muttering to herself in a language I could not quite
understand. Her small withered face was covered with a net of wrinkles, and her
skin was reddish like that of an overbaked apple. Her withered body constantly
trembled as though shaken by some inner wind, and the fingers of her bony hands
with joints twisted by disease never stopped quivering as her head on its long
scraggy neck nodded in every direction.
Her sight was poor. She peered at the light through
tiny slits embedded under thick eyebrows. Her lids were like furrows in deeply plowed soil. Tears were
always spilling from the corners of her eyes, coursing down her face in
well-worn channels to join glutinous threads hanging from her nose and the
bubbly saliva dripping from her lips. She sometimes looked like an old
green-gray puff-ball, rotten through and waiting for a last gust of wind to
blow out the black dry dust from inside.
At first I was afraid of her
and closed my eyes whenever she approached me. ...
This story is seen through the eyes of the narrator. If it
were told in the third person, it wouldn’t be credible. The fantastic old lady
would have seemed “made up.” In my judgment, the author didn’t have a choice.
First person was inevitable. Kosinski chose it and wrote a novel that is now an
established twentieth-century classic.
Third person is the most frequent choice of so-called
commercial novelists. A majority of the books on the fiction bestseller list at
any given time are likely to be written in the third person. It is a popular
form for action/adventure and mainstream stories. There is strong precedent for
today’s third-person stories. Before stories were written, the man who told
stories around a fire undoubtedly spoke of the adventures or experiences of others.
When man invents myths, he is using the third person. Third person works best
when the story is seen consistently from the point of view of one character
at a time, though the author is free to report what any of the characters
hear, smell, touch, and taste. Bottom-line editors and publishers favor third
person. Here’s an example:
Peter
Carmody opened the door of his home, set down his bulging briefcase, and
surveyed his domain. The two children were lying ass-up on the carpet, watching
television, and didn’t turn to greet him.
Were they ignoring him, or
had they simply not heard him come in?
He opened the door again and
this time let it slam. Twelve-year-old Margaret whipped over and in a second
was on her feet running toward his outstretched arms. Ah, he thought, she
hadn’t heard me the first time.
Jonathan, a blasé thirteen,
turned more slowly so that his eye would not lose sight of the television
screen until the very last second. By that time Margaret was swarming all over
her father, taking
his hat, holding on to his arm as it were the limb of a backyard tree.
There are many variations within the third-person mode,
which is often confusing to less experienced writers. Third person can be close
to first person, telling only the experiences of a single character as that
character would know those experiences, but always referring to him as “he.” As
the author takes advantage of the third-person form, he can move into a scene
from which the protagonist is absent, and show that scene from a different
character’s POV. But be warned: POV has to be consistent within a scene,
otherwise you’ll be crossing the line into the omniscient point of view, which
gives you license to go into any character’s head at will but involves the
danger of confusing the reader or losing him along the way.
Plausibility
is a major concern of third person. In the first person, a character can say,
“I ate six bananas” and perhaps we believe him. In the third person, when a
character says “Mary ate six bananas,” we are inclined to think, “Oh yeah?” We
accept things from a first-person speaker that we would question in a
third-person speaker, who has the same distance from the reader as a stranger
does in life. The first-person speaker becomes an intimate. We are inclined to
accept his word.
Once
the author establishes the limitation of the third-person point of view, he
must stick to it and the limitation becomes an advantage, a restraint, a
discipline. If you adopt a loose form of third person in which, say, each
chapter is seen from a different character’s POV, be sure to choose for each
scene the character who is most affected by the events of that scene.
Though
I have written in third person (The Magician, Living Room, The Childkeeper,
The Resort), I love writing in the first person and am partial to it (Other
People, The Touch of Treason, A Deniable Man, The Best Revenge).
In the “know-it-all” omniscient POV, the writer can go
anywhere, especially into the heads of more than one character even within a
scene. Hemingway in “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” skillfully gets
into the mind of a wounded lion. Look it up.
The
omniscient POV allows the author to speak in his own voice, to say things that
would be inappropriate for any of his characters to say. The author’s voice,
however, should have personality, authority, some wisdom, and ideally a fresh
sense of humor. The author, in other words, needs to be quite a character to
manage the omniscient point of view interestingly. One of my most talented
students, Anne James Valadez, whose work sparkles with originality, prefers the
omniscient point of view; her voice is unusually distinctive and exudes the
authority of myth.
The
danger of the omniscient POV is that the reader will hear the author talking
instead of experiencing the story. The omniscient POV lacks discipline. Because
the author can stray into anybody’s head, it is hard to maintain credibility
and even harder to gain a close emotional rapport with the reader. Total
freedom can be as upsetting to the writer as to the reader.
Even
authors with several published novels to their credit can make errors in point
of view. In a novel called Talent, the looseness of an uncontrolled
omniscient point of view results in passages like this:
“Driving
up here always makes me feel like Paul Newman at the wheel,” joked Allison.
She and Diana climbed
quickly to Mulholland, which twisted for miles along the spine of the ridge
like a carelessly abandoned garden hose.
The point of view at that moment is presumably Allison’s.
From the driver’s point of view, would a twisting road ever look “like a
carelessly abandoned garden hose”? The image is forced. But more important is
the fact that it mixes point of view within the same paragraph. A twisting road
might look like a garden hose from a helicopter or a low-flying airplane, but
from a car?
Readers
don’t notice point-of-view errors. They simply sense that the writing is bad.
Clifford
Irving handles the omniscient point of view skillfully. His novel Trial begins
with an objective view:
In Houston, Texas, in the early winter of 1985, a petty
thief named Virgil Freer devised a scheme to bilk the chain of Kmart stores.
Virgil’s scheme is outlined, but by the end of the first paragraph he was arrested and in jail. Virgil hires a young criminal defense attorney named Warren Blackburn. We get glimpses of what Virgil is thinking. He says to Blackburn,
“You got to help me.”
And immediately we are inside Blackburn’s head.
I’ve met a lot worse than Virgil, Warren decided.
In the first few pages, we’ve heard the author, and we’ve
been inside the head of Virgil and the lawyer he picks. Clifford Irving is
using a controlled omniscient point of view—with good results.
Let’s take a moment to examine the comparative
subjectivity of each point of view. In first person, the POV is entirely
subjective. Think of it this way: the character talking to the reader is not
only conveying everything the reader gets to know, the character is making a
case for himself. It’s his view of himself, the others, the world.
In
third person, the choice is greater. If the story can be told as if from a
single character’s POV, the reader will have some sense of subjectivity. The
writer can even choose to shift the subjectivity to another character, but has
to be careful not to shift about carelessly. Back in 1973, John Godey, a
thriller writer, published a book called The Taking of Pelham One Two Three,
about the hijacking of a New York City subway train. Godey wrote in the
third person, shifting from character to character every few pages. Every short
section was headed with the name of the person from whose point of view he was
writing. The problem was that in the first twenty-eight pages, I counted seven
characters into whose point of view the reader was admitted for a short period.
It was a dizzying experience.
If you
use the third-person point of view, you can be a partisan of all the characters
or some. You can be entirely neutral or objective, conveying nothing of the
characters’ thoughts or aims. Complete objectivity tends to be sterile of
emotion, particularly the kind of intimacy that readers enjoy in literary
novels, but it is useful in stories that are mainly action. Whatever genre you
write in, my recommendation is that you focus on the POV of one character at a
time, and sustain it, or you’re likely to get into trouble. If you’ve got to
let your readers know what everybody thinks, you’d probably be better off using
the omniscient point of view, the loosest of forms. You can more readily let
the reader know what each character thinks than you can in the third person, as
Norman Mailer did in his first novel, The Naked and the Dead. The novel
starts with:
Nobody could sleep. When morning came, assault craft
would be lowered and a first wave of troops would ride through the surf and
charge ashore on the beach at Anopopei. All over the ship, all through the
convoy, there was a knowledge that in a few hours, some of them were going to
be dead.
That is clearly an omniscient point of view. The next long
paragraph begins with:
A soldier lies flat on his bunk, closes his eyes, and
remains wide-awake. All about him, like the soughing of surf, he hears the
murmurs of men dozing fitfully.
The reader experiences everything in that paragraph and
the next long paragraph from the point of view of an anonymous soldier. That
paragraph ends with the soldier coming back from the latrine:
And as he returns, he is thinking of an early morning in
his childhood when he had lain awake because it was to be his birthday and his
mother had promised him a party.
The reader might expect to be taken back to the anonymous
soldier’s childhood party. Instead, the next paragraph introduces us to new
characters:
Early that evening Wilson and Gallagher and Staff
Sergeant Croft had started a game of seven card stud with a couple of orderlies
from headquarters platoon.
Then we get a scene of a card game with Wilson, Gallagher,
and Croft. We get inside Wilson’s head: He was feeling very good. In the
next paragraph, we enter Croft’s head for a second to find out he is annoyed by
the hands he’s been getting. Soon Wilson reflected for a moment, holding an
undealt card in his hand. Then we are told Wilson is dejected. We get into
Gallagher’s head—his conscience is bothering him, he is thinking of his
seven-month-pregnant wife back home. And so it goes. We are told things by the
omniscient author, and we go in and out of the minds of the three card players.
Young as he was when he wrote The Naked and the Dead, Mailer’s natural
talent overcame his lack of experience. His use of the omniscient point of view
seems instinctive, but he made it work
well because the reader feels the author is in control. The great danger in
using the omniscient point of view is the loss of control that is attributable
to the lack of discipline.
While
an author can write about characters more sophisticated than himself, it is
difficult to fashion a character who is more knowledgeable and intelligent than
the author, particularly if the author is going into the character’s most
profound thoughts. That’s why characters like scientists, public figures, and
intellectuals in some popular novels come across as stilted or fake. Similarly,
if the author is writing about people less intelligent than himself, he must be
careful not to put thoughts into a character’s head that are beyond that
character’s capabilities.
The major decision, of course, is which point of view to
use. Some of the authors I’ve worked with have an instinct for one or another
point of view based in some measure on their experience as readers. Those who
write thrillers usually write in the third person. Those whose reading has been
mainly literary are more often tempted by the first person. But that still
leaves a large terrain in the middle. Mainstream fiction is written in both
first and third person. My advice is to try the form that feels comfortable to
you. One advantage of understanding point of view is that if your work isn’t
satisfying you, you can always put the draft aside and rewrite it from another
point of view. If you’ve used third person, try first. If you’ve used
omniscient, try third or first. Or both. Switching points of view has saved
novels that were going nowhere.
Earlier
in this chapter I mentioned that there are ways to get around some of the
limitations of first-person point of view. The most important, of course, is to
get beyond the character’s horizon and let the reader experience an event where
the first person narrator was not present. In the following example, a
character named Florence is speaking:
“The old bitch threatened to blow the party if I was
invited, though the occasion was as much mine as Rose’s. Helen told me she put
her punch glass down in the first minute because the punch tasted as if it were
made with grape juice and gasoline. Debbie, would you believe it, phoned me
from her car to say the background music was so loud you couldn’t hear what
anybody said if you didn’t know how to lip read. I could hardly hear her
because of the traffic noise. Thank heaven Maryanne came zipping straight over
from the party to tell me Sally’s husband looked like he wouldn’t last another day. And Rose, she said Rose’s breath
kept everyone standing at least three feet away from her, looking for an excuse
to escape. I wasn’t invited, but I might as well have been. I probably know
more about what happened than anybody.”
Note that to help credibility, there is a sense of
cattiness and conflict in Florence’s attitude toward the people at the party. A
simpler but perhaps less credible way would be to give the first-person
character a legitimate reason to ask about what is for her an offstage event.
Or the first-person character addressing the reader can guess what might be
happening at that moment elsewhere. The point to remember is that you have to
motivate the reporting of offstage scenes. And whenever possible keep the
report visual. We see Helen putting the awful punch down. We hear Debbie with
difficulty as well as see her use her car phone. We smell Rose’s breath.
Finally, here’s a POV checklist to use in examining your own work:
Subjects taught in colleges and universities are called
disciplines. Writing is a discipline. And one of its most disciplined
techniques is that of point of view. The choice of point of view is yours, but
once you’ve decided, be sure that you stick to it as if your reader’s
experience of the story depended on it. Because it does.
Flashbacks: How to Bring Background into the Foreground
When he was young, Barnaby Conrad, founder of the Santa
Barbara Writers’ Conference, worked for Sinclair Lewis. Once he asked the
master how best to handle flashbacks. Lewis’s reply was succinct. He said, “Don’t.”
It is
true that even experienced writers sometimes handle flashbacks awkwardly. It is
also true that flashbacks are used too often, and frequently remove the reader
from the experience he is having. Nevertheless, you sometimes need to use
flashbacks, and therefore you should learn how to employ them properly.
Ideally,
all fiction should seem to be happening now. That sentence is worth
pasting on your makeup or shaving mirror or on your computer where you will see
it every day.
We
don’t read in real time. A writer can brush hours aside by one word: “Later
...” Some stories seem to read fast, some seem to drag. Proust, in Remembrance
of Things Past, dwells for dozens of pages on thoughts inspired by a
cookie. Zola, in his classic L’Assommoir, has a sumptuous meal that, as
I recall, lasts for fifty pages. If we don’t read in real time, why not go back
to some previous matter in a flashback? Why are editors so inhospitable to
flashbacks?
The
reason flashbacks create a problem for readers is that they break the reading
experience. The reader is intent on what happens next. Flashbacks, unless
expertly handled, pull the reader out of the story to tell him what happened
earlier. If the reader is conscious of moving back in time, especially if what
happened in the past is told rather than shown, the engrossed reader is
reluctant to be pulled out of his reverie to receive information. If we are
enthralled, we don’t want to be interrupted. Therefore, the art of writing
flashbacks is to avoid interrupting the reader’s experience. I’ll show you how
that’s done.
Let’s
be sure we understand each other. A flashback is any scene that happened
before the present story began.
Note
that I said any scene. A true flashback, however short, is a scene,
preferably with characters in conflict.
If you
find that you absolutely must use a flashback, there are a number of points to
engrave on your mind:
A flashback is presumably there because it provides
information. To the reader that information should not come across as
information about the past; it should be as immediate and gripping as a scene
in the present. If you’re riding in an elevator, you don’t want to see the
chains and pulleys of the mechanism. The reader doesn’t want to see your chains
and pulleys, he just wants the ride. Ask yourself:
If the
flashback is necessary, can the reader see the action in it as an immediate
scene?
Is the
opening of the flashback as interesting or compelling as the beginning of a
novel or story?
Does
the flashback enhance the reader’s experience of the story as a whole?
A good
flashback is a scene that is depicted exactly as it would be in the present
story except for how it is introduced and how the present story is rejoined.
Certain
words should carry warning labels for the writer. “Had” is the number-one
villain. It spoils more flashbacks than any other word. Most fiction is written
in the straight past tense. When writing flashbacks, as quickly as possible use
the same tense you’re using for the present scenes. That means in almost all
cases the straight past tense, not the variants. Instead of saying, “I had been
remembering ...”, say “I remembered ...”
Here’s
an example of an author who gets tangled up in “hads” that are totally
unnecessary:
I remember when my boss had called me into his office and
had said, “Sit down.” He had remained standing. In those days I was like a new
army recruit, I had taken everything said to me as an order. I hadn’t wanted to
sit down with him looming over me.
When that author’s editor finished, this is the way the
text read:
I remember the time my boss called me into his office and
said, “Sit down.” He remained standing. In those days I was like a new army
recruit, I took everything as an order, but damn if I wanted to sit with him
looming over me.
The first example has five “hads.” The second example has
none.
Sometimes
authors double up on a fault with “had had,” or use the contraction for “had,”
and compound the problem with another word to avoid in flashbacks, “then”:
Ellie had had a mother who wanted a boy and who’d made
Ellie wear boys’ clothes and cut her hair like a boy for years. Then one day...
The author should have written:
Ellie’s mother wanted a boy. She made Ellie wear boys’
clothes and cut her hair like a boy’s for years. One day ...
In starting a flashback, your aim is to get into an
immediate scene as soon as possible. Since dialogue is always in immediate
scene, one way of handling flashbacks is to use dialogue early. What most
writers don’t realize is that you can use dialogue even if the flashback is
short. Here’s an example from the second page of The Resort. Margaret
Brown, a physician, is reminiscing about her education in medical school. Watch
how the thought of a certain instructor almost instantly becomes dialogue:
Margaret
realized much too soon that the ultimate organ, the brain that harbored the
mind, was terra incognita for most of her fellow students. Her wisest
instructor, Dr. Teal, once asked her if brain surgery attracted her as a
specialty.
“No,” she said much too
quickly.
“May I ask why?”
“I find surgeons boring.”
Dr. Teal, a surgeon,
blushed. Margaret quickly apologized, explaining she meant those of her fellow
students who ...
Inserting those three lines of dialogue helps the rest of
the reminiscence become visible to the reader.
There
are two ways of introducing a flashback. First is the direct method. An example
I point to often is from Brian Glanville’s novel The Comic. The
protagonist is a comedian who is thought to be crazy. On the sixth page, he
tells his therapist:
“I’ve always told jokes, Doc.”
The next paragraph begins a flashback in a direct manner:
Which is true. Go back as far as I can remember, and I’m
telling jokes. In fact I think he’s right, it was a defense; or it began as a
defense. At home, at school. My father, big bastard, keeping that pub in the
Mile End road, always handy with his belt.
And so on, into the comic’s childhood. Brian Glanville
hooks us with an intriguing character. We want to know more about this “mad”
comic who is speaking to us over the head of his doctor, as it were. We’re glad
to have his background brought to us by the flashback.
There
are equally simple ways of concluding a flashback.
You can
use a line space (four blank lines) to mark the passage of time and restart the
present scene after the line space. Or you can begin a new paragraph with “One
week later ...”
Or you
can restart the present scene with dialogue: “Last week you didn’t talk this
way.”
You can
come out of the flashback by a direct statement. John, in bed with Anna, has
been remembering (in a flashback) a scene in the past:
The next day John got out of bed as if he had his whole
life to live all over again.
It needn’t be that direct:
Without taking his eyes off Anna’s sleeping face, John
slipped into his undershorts, buttoned his shirt, put one leg and then the
other into his pants, but when he sat on the bed to put on his socks and shoes,
Anna opened her eyes.
While flashbacks are to be avoided whenever possible, the
flashback thought can be immensely useful in enriching both a character and a
scene. In life our thoughts interrupt us all the time. Frequently the thoughts
are relevant to where we are, what we’re doing, what people are saying to us.
Thoughts give texture to life and also to novels.
The
first three pages of my novel Living Room show the heroine, Shirley
Hartman, locking the door of her apartment in a Manhattan high-rise, taking the
elevator to the top floor, and climbing the stairs to the roof. Then we get her
thoughts, which are interspersed with thoughts of the past. Without those
thoughts, of the past as well as the present, the scene would lose impact.
Let’s
join Shirley Hartman one page into the scene, listen to her thoughts, and then
examine them closely to see how the effect is achieved:
Through
gaps in the clouds drifting across the charcoal sky, she made out the moon. As
a child, she could always decipher its face; now it seemed to have only a
scarred surface, crags and mottled ground where instruments had been implanted,
sending messages, even now.
A few rectangles of light in the higher building
across the street betrayed their occupants’ sleeplessness. Shirley leaned over
the waist-high parapet, her feet on tiptoe, and dizzyingly saw in the street
below a taxi disgorging its passengers. Suddenly she thought of the unwashed
dish with the remains of the cottage cheese and fruit. She should have rinsed
it off, stuck it in the dishwasher, left things neat. And the diary she kept in
her desk drawer, the leather flaking with age, the broken lock, the coded
recordings of long ago, the first time she had taken pleasure with herself, the
crazy evening with Harry, she should have dropped it into the incinerator! And
Al’s one letter, she should have flushed it away. Al, that intolerably
independent man who could live without anyone, who she thought loved her but
didn’t need her, how would he react when he heard, would it surprise him, the
stoic who pretended never to be surprised by anything?
Its tires screeching, the
taxi accelerated away in the streets below.
In the Times, she
thought, her obituary would rate a picture. In the News it might even make
the upfront pages, given her occasional notoriety and the scandalous nature of
what she was determined to do.
Her father would think what?
He’d say something like, Death can’t teach you anything you can use! In
her mind, she touched fingers to Philip Hartman’s eyes, closing them so that he
could not see.
Pulling herself up onto the
ledge she scratched her right knee. She remembered the midtown traffic accident
she had come upon and the badly injured woman lying in the street, her dress
up, her pubic hair visible to the gaping onlookers; Shirley was glad she was
wearing pantyhose, as if it mattered. Why was she still holding her
handbag? She dropped it to the roof behind her, heard the glass of her mirror
break.
What if her hurtling self
hit that pedestrian late-walking his dog, or another one unseen, she was not a
murderer, the only crime she wanted to commit was against herself. If there
were a crowd below yelling Jump! Jump! Jump! would she leap into their
midst?
It seemed funny to be afraid
to stand up on the ledge. She swung her legs around to let them dangle over the
side.
Would her limbs flail?
Might her head turn down as
she fell? The thought of it striking the pavement first was terrible.
She stood up on the parapet,
swaying slightly.
Al said she looked better
naked than she did with clothes on, as if that were the ultimate compliment. Al
had nothing to do with her decision. It was her life. She wanted out. Shirley
held her breath.
Mingled in Shirley’s thoughts are the following flashback thoughts:
Why the flashback thoughts? If in the first chapter the
reader saw an unknown woman trying to commit suicide, the reader’s emotions
would not be engaged in any important way. You have to know the people in the
car before you see the car crash. Shirley’s flashback thoughts, added to her
thoughts in the present, are how the reader gets to know Shirley and begins to
want her not to jump.
Note
that the flashback thoughts are part of a visual scene in the present, a young
woman up on a parapet, ready to jump. If the flashback element is to consist of
more than quick thoughts in an ongoing scene, the writer must be certain to
create a flashback scene that stands on its own to avoid the flashback becoming
a narrative of something that happened elsewhere. To move from what is
happening in the present to a scene from the past without breaking the reader’s
experience requires segueing to a scene in the past as inconspicuously as
possible.
The
term segue is derived from music. It means to glide unobtrusively into
something new. I prefer the segue into a flashback to the more direct method,
moving from the present scene to a scene in the past inconspicuously.
Flashbacks
normally decrease suspense, but they can be fashioned to increase suspense. For
instance, in The Best Revenge there is a single scene that runs for
three chapters. It is the fierce facing-off of the protagonist, Ben Riller, and
the antagonist, Nick Manucci. To heighten the suspense of that confrontation, I
inserted three flashbacks into the scene, remembered by Nick, designed to
increase the suspense by postponing the outcome of the confrontation. Each of
the flashbacks illuminates the long scene and adds to its meaning. And each is
segued into and out of as surreptitiously as possible.
In the
course of the same novel one learns a great deal more about the antagonist in
flashbacks from his wife’s point of view. We find out what kind of lover Nick
is, why she married him, and what happened to that marriage. An antagonist,
characterized in depth, has come to life as a credible human being, a person
who holds the reader’s interest, however inhumane his methods. Saul Bellow said
that Nick Manucci, the villain, was the best character in the book. I believe
Nick’s flashbacks and those of his wife contributed to that view.
If the
ghost of Sinclair Lewis is within earshot, I say flashbacks done correctly can
provide richness and depth to a novel as long as they don’t read like
flashbacks, if they are active scenes slipped into and out of simply and
quickly.
If you have
a flashback in your manuscript or are contemplating writing one, ask yourself,
does the flashback reinforce the story in an important way? Is it absolutely
essential? If it’s not, you may not really need it.
Can the
reader see what’s happening in your flashback? Can you give it the immediacy of
a scene that takes place before the eye? If your flashback is not a scene, can
you make it into an active scene as if it were in the present?
Take a
close look at the opening of your flashback. Is it immediately interesting or
compelling?
Is the
reader’s experience of your story enhanced by the flashback or—however well
written—does it still intrude?
Has the
flashback helped characterize in depth, has it helped the reader feel what the
character feels?
Is
there any way of getting background information across without resorting
to a flashback?
We now come to an ideal solution: moving flashback
material into the foreground and eliminating the need for a flashback.
The
example I’ll use brings forward childhood material since that is the most
common occasion for writing a flashback:
“You were a lousy kid,
Tommy, a brat from the word go.”
“Hey, man, if you got
punished as often as I got punished—”
“Your old man was teaching
you discipline.”
“By yanking my plate away before
I’d had a mouthful?”
“He got through to you,
didn’t he?”
“He starved me. What he got
through to me was I was hungry and he wouldn’t let me eat. I hated him. I
wished he’d die.”
“You got your wish, didn’t
you?”
In this brief exchange in the present the reader gets the following information:
Note that all five points were conveyed in short order without
a flashback. You’ve just seen how information can be conveyed in present
dialogue in such a way that the reader is witnessing a dramatic scene that takes
place in the present, thus eliminating the need for a flashback.
The
example above is entirely in dialogue. Thoughts can accomplish the same
purpose, as in the following example in which only one of the characters is
speaking, yet all the points are made:
“What’s bothering you?” Al
asked. “You’re not eating.”
Tommy poked his fork at the
pork chop. He cut pieces off. He raised one toward his mouth, then suddenly put
the fork down and shoved his plate away from him.
“Hey, kid, tell me what’s
the matter,” Al said.
The matter, Tommy thought,
was you didn’t have my father, I did. You didn’t have him yanking the plate
away as punishment. You didn’t go to bed with pain in your gut.
“Hey,” Al said, “is it your
old man’s death? Is that what’s bothering you?”
Tommy has said absolutely nothing. We’ve been privy to his
thoughts. And we’ve got the background we need right in the foreground.
In conclusion, I don’t want to minimize the
skill that’s needed to make flashbacks as involving for the reader’s experience
as everything that happens in the present, However, I’ve never seen essential
background material that couldn’t be made to work as scenes. And more of that
background can become foreground than you may suspect. The time it takes to do
it right is an investment in the reader’s experience.
The Keys to Credibility
Credibility is central to much of what the writer does. He
creates a world in which the invented characters must seem as real as the
people who surround us in life. What happens to them, however extraordinary—and
it should be extraordinary—must be believable. The motivations of the
characters should be credible. And that provides the occasion for the writer to
meet his biggest enemy, himself.
The
writer has a natural tendency to act as we all do in life—that is, we question
the motivations of others more often than we do our own. When creating fiction,
those characters are our selves and we cover for them. This leads to a variety
of problems.
I have
watched as a bestselling action novelist once again has a character throwing
another character over the railing of a ship. Think a moment, how many people
do you know who would be capable of lifting a hundred and fifty pounds or more
up from the ground high enough to toss that entire weight over a railing? In
action fiction, the willing reader suspends disbelief. If one guy throws
another over the railing, the reader goes with it. If a writer’s concerned
about the quality of his writing and needs to say that “Tiny picked him up
bodily and threw him over the railing,” he will have planted earlier that Tiny
is six foot three and a weightlifter.
In
fiction, plays, and film, planting means preparing the ground for
something that comes later, usually to make the later action credible. Planting
is necessary when a later action might seem unconvincing to the reader. Not all
actions require planting. For instance, if Todd trips Andrew and Andrew then
punches Todd, Todd’s action does need planting, Andrew’s punch does not.
In
fiction that has a higher aim, the credibility of every important action in the
story is at risk unless the writer is confident that the motivation or ability
of the character makes the action credible.
Some
inadequate motivation is easy enough to fix. For instance, if a character
suddenly gets up to go shopping for the convenience of the author because
something is going to happen in a shopping mall, the events in the mall may not
be credible unless the motivation for the character going to the mall is
planted ahead of time. The planting can be simple enough through a touch of
humor:
“I’m not going to go on a shopping spree ever again.
After today.”
Or you simply need to get a character out of the house.
Instead of an unmotivated walk, he could say.
“These new shoes are not going to get broken in if I sit
around the house.”
Some actions are so bizarre that it may seem next to
impossible to motivate them:
We had been married for three years when, one Sunday, Tom
dressed, as usual, in a shirt and tie, slipped into his handsome jacket, put on
his best cordovan shoes, and left the house without his pants.
What conclusion can the reader come to, that Tom suddenly
went crazy? Or is this going to be a wacky comedy about an eccentric? Could Tom
be so concerned abut something else that he forgot to put on his pants?
Readers
are seldom interested in truly crazy people. It is hard to be moved by their
actions because some seem so unmotivated. It is not credible that someone,
otherwise all dressed up, would forget to put on pants before leaving the house.
We are left with the possibility that this is going to be a farce in which
actions are not required to meet any tests of credibility. If this were a story
about an eccentric who behaves unpredictably, Tom’s strange conduct would
require planting. If Thomas’s action is not to seem ludicrous, he would have
had to have been characterized as someone who could do something as zany as
going out dressed up without his pants. Readers will not readily accept the
unlikely. Can this character’s action in going out without his pants be made to
seem credible? Can Thomas’s aberrant act be prepared for so that it will seem
credible when it happens?
Think
of “planting” as preparing the ground in a garden:
Tom
and I had been married for three years when, one Sunday, he dressed, as usual,
in a shirt and tie, put on a handsome suit and his best cordovan shoes, but
forgot to put on his socks.
I decided not to say
anything, but the next Sunday he dressed in the same handsome suit, put on his
socks before he put on his cordovan shoes, then tied his tie over his
undershirt and left the house before I could catch him.
I said nothing. But the
third Sunday, he remembered to put on a shirt before putting on his tie, then
put on a handsome jacket, and left the house without his pants. I thought I’d
better speak to him.
This revision is funnier, and more credible despite the
zaniness of the action. Thomas’s forgetfulness was planted.
The
worst mistake that a story writer can make is to have unconvincing motivation
for actions that are central to the story. A married engineer with a
well-paying job notices a momentarily unattended carriage in a supermarket and
kidnaps the baby. What is the reader to think?
The
reader has to guess. Is the engineer childless and desperate? Does his wife refuse
to have a child? Still, kidnapping is a contemptible act for which the
punishment is severe. What in the engineer’s background would have made it
possible for him to pick a stranger’s child out of a carriage and take it away?
How does the man’s wife react when she learns of the kidnapping? When he is
apprehended, what excuse does he give? There are too many unanswered questions,
which makes the reader feel that this comes across as a “made-up” story that
the events described didn’t happen. Clearly, the kidnapping of a child is a
major action that must seem motivated at the time that it takes place.
Coincidence is enchanting when it happens in life. A
friend we haven’t seen for years walks out of the same darkened movie house as
we do, we go for a coffee together, and have a gabby reunion. If this happened
in a story, the skeptical reader would say that the author is responsible for
the coincidence and that it isn’t believable.
Here is
an example of how to diminish the appearance of coincidence:
Problem: Sally and Howie are ex-lovers who have
not entirely gotten over each other. The author has arranged for Sally to run
into Howie in the shopping mall. The reader smells coincidence.
Solution: The reader learns that Sally has been
avoiding a particular store she and Howie used to shop in because she’s afraid
of meeting Howie there. But Sally wants
something at that store—and no other store in the neighborhood—carries. Before
entering the store’s revolving door, Sally peers through the window to make
sure Howie isn’t in there. She goes in, finds what she wants, and hurries to
the revolving door, a smile on her face, only to see Howie in the other
compartment of the revolving door on his way in. They both register surprise,
then laugh.
A coincidence still? Yes, but the way the author arranged
it with detail—the special store, Sally peering in to avoid Howie, the
revolving door—all help to make their coincidental meeting a true surprise.
There
are many other ways of diminishing coincidence. For instance, a third character
can arrange for Sally and Howie to meet “accidentally” at an event staged by
the third character.
The
most dangerous place for a coincidence to occur is at the climax of a story.
The protagonist has his head on the chopping block. Suddenly the deus ex
machina, the god in the machine, comes down for the rescue. Those devices
fool no one. They exist for the author’s convenience because he can’t figure
out a credible way of rescuing the protagonist.
It is
so difficult for a writer to gain objectivity about his own work, and in no
area more so than in judging coincidental matters. I’d like to offer a peculiar
strategy that seems to work. You can sometimes get objectivity artificially by
making a new title page and replacing your name as author with the name of an
author whose work you admire especially. Then read your manuscript with that
author’s eyes to see if you can catch any action that is insufficiently
motivated or that smacks of coincidence.
If that
doesn’t work for you, try preparing a new title page and replacing your name
with the name of an author whose work you dislike. Go at the manuscript with a
vengeance to root out unmotivated acts and coincidence. It’s astonishing what a
change of perspective will do.
Above
all, remember that the main actions of your work are like great flowering
plants. Put the seed down well earlier and admire the harvest. Leave
coincidence to the hacks and the god in his machine.
The Secret Snapshot Technique: Reaching for Hidden Treasure
The secret
snapshot technique is designed to help writers whose fiction doesn’t touch the
emotion of readers, who write from the outside looking in, whose stories are
uninteresting to experience because they seem “made up.”
The
characters and themes that lie hidden within each author are the source of work
that strikes readers as original and real. How do we jog the author to write
from the inside, in touch with subject matter and feelings that will enable him
to brush the reader’s emotions?
I’ve
used the secret snapshot method in individual conferences with writers and in
seminars. In the latter, the author whose work is being discussed comes up
front and sits in the “hot seat.” The two of us talk. Everyone else is
eavesdropping.
I ask
the author to think of a snapshot of something so private he wouldn’t carry it
in his wallet because if he were in an accident, he wouldn’t want a paramedic
to find it. The snapshot we’re looking for is one the writer wouldn’t want his
neighbor or closest friend to see. Not even a family member. Especially not a
family member.
I call
them snapshots because I prefer that the writer start with something visual.
Some people jump to the conclusion that a secret snapshot is of something
sexual. Wrong. In practice many are not. In one that worked for its author, her
snapshot was of a rose in a one-flower vase that was put on her office desk by
someone whose identity she never learned. In another, the author’s snapshot was
of an audience he addressed years ago. The image remained like grit in his memory
because all the while he talked his undershorts kept slipping down. Later in
this chapter I convey in detail how a writer of detective stories turned her
book around successfully by a snapshot of her two-year-old sleeping in his bed.
Some
writers squirm through the process, shifting uncomfortably in their seats.
That’s a good sign.
If your
reaction to this exercise is “my secrets are nobody’s business,” that’s
understandable. But if you want to write something that will move other people,
you have to come to terms with the fact that the writer is by profession a
squealer. He learns by starting to squeal on himself.
If
you’re thinking that you may not have the courage to be a writer, I can tell
you that’s what most writers think when confronted with this assignment for the
first time. Few people have the natural ability to open themselves up to
strangers. The writer learns how. One of the ways is to write down what you see
in your most secret snapshot. If you’re tempted to fudge, don’t. If you’ve
decided to give us a made-up snapshot, you’ll serve your writing better by
changing it to the snapshot you’re hiding.
Nobody’s
going to see it. Not yet. Perhaps not ever. What they will see is the result
of your finding the right snapshot.
Is your
snapshot such that any of your friends or neighbors might have one just like
it? If so, change it to one that only you have. Your writing is going to be
yours, not writing that could come out of anyone else’s closet.
Do you
think other people would want to see what’s in your snapshot if they heard
what’s in it? If not, you’d better try another.
Please
answer truthfully: would you carry that snapshot in your wallet or purse? If
your answer is “yes,” perhaps it’s not so secret. The snapshots that work best
are embarrassing, revelatory, or involve a strong and continuing stimulus to
memory.
If
you’re feeling, “Hey, I didn’t bargain for this, all I wanted to do was write
stories,” I remind you that the best fiction reveals the hidden things we
usually don’t talk about.
The
stories and novels that get turned down are full of the things we talk about
freely—the snapshots in your photo album that you show to friends, family, and
neighbors. Readers don’t want to see your photo album. They have their own.
They want to see what’s in the picture you’re reluctant to show.
You
say, “Why can’t I start with other people’s secret snapshots?”
You
can. It’s a longer route to success, but it gives you a chance to build your
courage. A writer needs the courage to say what other people sometimes think
but don’t say. Or don’t allow themselves to think.
If you
elect to conjure up someone else’s secret snapshot, it has to be one that you
wouldn’t be allowed to see under any circumstance. Can you describe that
snapshot? What interests you in that picture? Would your interest be shared by lots of other
people if the person involved were a character in your novel? If not, you’d
better change the snapshot. Or improve it.
If
you’re stuck, try this. Everyone except liars has at least one person he truly
dislikes, maybe even hates. What kind of snapshot would he carry that he
wouldn’t want you to see? Don’t tell me the first thing that comes to
mind. Maybe the second.
Would
your enemy pay to keep you from seeing that snapshot? If not, try another
that’s really private.
How
much would you pay to see a snapshot from your actual enemy? Nothing? Not much?
Then it’s not a good snapshot. If you’d pay to see it, maybe people will pay to
buy your book.
Here’s
a snapshot you probably know. It’s your best friend’s secret snapshot. He or
she may have confided in you about it. Or you may have guessed what it might be
from a bit of evidence here and there. Or because of your insight.
While
you’re collecting other people’s snapshots, how about one of someone you knew
who is now dead? Does it make you feel safer?
This
method may seem a bit offputting or uncomfortable at first, but experienced
writers will tell you they love this exercise because they know how rewarding
it can be. Probing secrets is a key to writing memorable fiction.
A
writer submitted for my consideration the early part of what she hoped would be
a thriller about the hazardous work of a policewoman who works as a decoy,
pretending to be a hooker in order to trap a killer.
The
students in the seminar liked the plot, but the story had not involved them
emotionally. The author moved into the hot seat at the head of the table. The
others all listened while I asked questions and she talked.
It
became evident that the writer had been on a police force but no longer was
because of something that had happened in her line of work. Interesting. But
not as interesting as her revelation of what she felt was the worst moment of
each day. It wasn’t her hazardous work. It was when she tiptoed into the
bedroom of her sleeping two-year-old son to pat his hair before going off into
the night to work. That was her secret snapshot.
Hazardous
conditions frighten us all. The possibility of premature death haunts our
lives. The thought of not seeing a loved one again causes pain. And what love
is as binding to a woman as her child, asleep in his innocence, his mother
going off to a night’s work from which she might not return?
In that
snapshot lay the emotional root of her book. After our session, the writer
started her novel with a scene in which the decoy was patting the sleeping head
of her child before going off to her hazardous work. As a result, the tone of
the book changed from an ordinary though suspenseful story told from the
outside, to one readers could feel strongly. From that first scene, the reader
wanted to say to the woman, “Watch out! Be careful, come back to your child.”
With every danger the decoy faced, the reader thought of the sleeping child.
The reader, full of emotion now, read the novel not as an interesting plot but
as a moving experience.
Soldiers have to be brave. So do policemen, firemen,
miners, and construction workers who walk on the skeletons of high-rise
buildings. Test pilots have to be especially brave because they are flying
equipment that hasn’t been flown before. Perhaps the bravest test pilots are
the men and women who fly into outer space. They see the earth differently than
we do, as if they were people from another planet.
Writers
who do good work learn to see things with the innocence of visitors from outer
space. Their bravest journeys take place when they fly into inner space, the
unexplored recesses in which the secret snapshots of their friends and
enemies—and their own—are stored.
To
provide your readers with insight, you become an explorer. That’s what we’ve
been doing here, exploring territory in your memory that has been—and continues
to be—hidden from public view, but that can make your stories sing.
How to Use All Six of Your Senses
What a
waste! In our daily work and play, our senses of sight, sound, touch, taste,
and smell define the world for us. Then, as writers, we let three of our senses
atrophy, as if our characters had lost part of their humanity and didn’t need
to touch, taste, and smell.
Never
mind that laymen neglect their senses. We writers have an obligation to use all
five senses in our work if we are to enrich the laymen’s experience.[4] And we cannot neglect the sixth that haunts
our lives and our literature.
I
caution you. Even the sense of sight, the one we use the most in our life and
work, needs to be honed beyond the everyday needs of the laymen for whom we
write. We need to see more acutely so that we can record what is fresh.
We take
our senses for granted. When we let their use atrophy, it often takes conscious
effort and exercise to restore our awareness of the ways in which we take in
the world around us. If you were to shut your eyes and remove your keys from a
pocket or purse this moment, could you describe what a key feels like in a way
that would be understood by a person who came from a country in which keys were
not used?
What
have you observed or felt about your keys? If I handed keys to you, by what
signs would you know that they were yours and not someone else’s? Not knowing
our keys from keys that are similar is symbolic of our neglect of our senses.
We deprive ourselves and our readers. Most writers use sight and some
conventional sounds, and little else. This chapter, then, is a course in enrichment of your sensory awareness, and
through that awareness an enrichment of your writing.
Is the
sound a cat makes meow or mrkneow! James Joyce, who had an acute
ear, used mrkneow. Some people contend that the vocabulary of cats is
extensive. There’s no point to your using Joyce’s sound or the cliché meow. Listen
to your cat and see if you can’t come up with something that your readers will
recognize but perhaps will never have seen in print before.
Do we
listen closely? Is the sound made by a baseball being hit thwack or crack!
Or some other?
There
are clichés for most common sounds. I hope to persuade you to describe sounds
not in clichés but as you hear them after careful listening. Some of my
students have come up with wonderfully original sounds that enhance their work.
A young child at the piano: bonk, bonk, bonk. Or the whump of two
automobiles coming together.
Sound,
of course, is not continuous. It is interrupted by pauses, by momentary
silences, the absence of sound that makes music possible. Let’s look at an
extreme instance of the use of sound in Jerzy Kosinski’s The Painted Bird. In
it, you may recall, a ten-year-old boy who is abandoned by his parents in
Europe during World War II wanders through a nightmare of savagery and love in
which he loses the ability to speak because in speaking he might give himself
away. After the war, at the end of the book, a skiing accident lands the
protagonist in the hospital, where something wonderful happens to his long
silence:
[I]
was about to lie down when the phone rang. The nurse had already gone, but the
phone rang insistently again and again.
I pulled myself out of bed
and walked to the table. I lifted up the receiver and heard a man’s voice.
I held the receiver to my
ear, listening to his impatient words, somewhere at the other end of the wire
there was someone, perhaps a man like myself, who wanted to talk with me. ... I
had an overpowering desire to speak. Blood flooded my brain and my eyeballs
swelled for a moment, as though trying to pop out onto the floor.
I opened my mouth and strained. Sounds crawled up my
throat. Tense and concentrated I started to arrange them into syllables and
words. I distinctly heard them jumping out of me one after another, like peas
from a split pod. I put the receiver aside, hardly believing it possible. I
began to recite to myself words and sentences, snatches of Mitka’s songs. The voice
lost in a faraway village church had found me again and filled the whole room.
I spoke loudly and incessantly like the peasants and then like the city folk,
as fast as I could, enraptured by the sounds that were heavy with meaning, as
wet snow is heavy with water, confirming to myself again and again and again
that speech was now mine and that it did not intend to escape through the door
which opened onto the balcony.
The universe of sound available to the writer extends from
a simple bonk, bonk, bonk to Kosinski’s protagonist rediscovering his
ability to speak.
Humans
see the world. Other animals smell it. Watch a cat investigating anything new,
a surrounding, a possible food. It leads with its nose, just as its larger
sisters in the jungle do. Cats and other animals define the world first by
smell. In some human cultures, the sense of smell is treated as if it were an
unwelcome adjunct to the “good” senses, fit only to be deodorized or perfumed.
For the
writer, the sense of smell provides opportunity. It is important not only to be
aware of and use smells, but to be accurate in rendering them. Rubber bands
have a marked odor. An old book smells musty. Unseen wind has a smell. If you
don’t smell anything, what might you smell? A single flower in an imagined vase
on your desk?
What he first noticed about Detroit and therefore America
was the smell.
That’s the first sentence of a short story by Charles
Baxter called “The Disappeared” from the Michigan Quarterly Review.
A
writer can use the sense of smell to good effect in many ways, for instance, to
help a reader experience a setting:
I could tell we were coming to the kitchen. The odor of
fresh-baked bread drifted into the hallway like an invitation to follow where
it led.
Smell can be used to establish a relationship:
Malcolm came through the back door, the football in the
crook of his arm, his sweatshirt emblazoned with a dark butterfly of sweat. He
put the football down, and positioned his arms around me. I closed my eyes and
could smell the earth of the playing field and what I had come to think of as
the aroma of his presence.
Characterization can benefit from the use of smell:
Sally fluttered in, enveloped in her newest perfume.
This tells us that Sally habitually uses too much perfume.
Smell can also be used to establish atmosphere:
Down and down we went. I stopped counting the stairs. The
dank smell told me we were well below ground.
Or this:
Terry glanced skyward and sampled a lungful of the
chilled air. The universe smelled fresh, as if everything could now start over.
The absence of smell is also useful to a writer:
“They’ve bred the smell out of roses,” Gloria said. “Don
Juans are my favorite climbers because their touch is velvet and the rose
breeders haven’t robbed them of their smell. Yet.”
A gifted young woman named Ketti McCormick was briefly a
student of mine some time after she had lost her sight. She still continued to
see colors, not those in her field of vision but those refractions of colors
previously seen that remained inside her head. Her contact with the external
world, like that of other blind people, was now mainly through the sense of
touch, which most of us neglect. Ketti once had trusted her eyes to keep her out
of danger. She had to develop a greater sense of trust in others that they
would not leave things in her path that she might trip over. She was angry at
males who left the toilet seat up.
A blind
person surmises how I might look by feeling my face. Try that some time.
Blindfold yourself and have someone brought into the room whom you haven’t met
before and who wouldn’t mind if you found out what they looked like by touching
his or her face. You might describe each feature—nose, cheeks, forehead, ears,
chin, hair—and have someone write your descriptions down. Then, with the
blindfold off, look closely at the person and at your description, and offer an
apology for your probable inaccuracy. You are in all likelihood deficient in
your use of the sense of touch, as we all are. It would benefit our writing
greatly to improve how we see with the ends of our fingers.
There’s
a way to do it. And you won’t need a cooperative new acquaintance, just the
blindfold, though it might help to have a friend or family member around to
empty the contents of your purse or pocket on a table after you are
blindfolded. Feel each object with your fingertips, describing it as best you
can as if to someone from another planet who wouldn’t know what those strange
objects are that you carry everywhere you go. You can’t say a credit card feels
like plastic. You have to particularize. That exercise alone can work wonders
in letting you experience your sense of touch:
As soon as they came in from the cold, Eric reached into
his pocket for a slim metal tube and brought it to his lips. He realized that
he hadn’t uncapped it even before he heard Sheila laugh. He pulled the cap off
the tube, turned its base to bring the waxy plug up higher, and rubbed it first
across his top lip, and then his bottom lip.
In the example, the sense of touch fortifies the
characterization of Eric as absent-minded, an improvement over the author
intruding to tell the reader that.
Does
the handshake of an athlete feel the same as the handshake of a wimp? Does the
hand of a child feel the same as the hand of a seventy-year-old? Does the
surface of every wooden chair feel the same? What does water feel like when it
is too hot? What does your favorite cat or dog feel like when you are petting
it? Would you dare write a love scene omitting the sense of touch?
Your
writing can only gain if you attempt to use the sense of touch at least once in
every scene.
That imaginary guest from another planet can also be
useful to you in cultivating your ability to describe what you taste. Your
guest has never experienced the kind of food you are eating. See if, from
memory, you can describe in detail the foods that you tasted in the last meal
you ate. Your guest has never heard of bran flakes or strawberries. You’ll have
to invent similes and metaphors to tell your guest what they taste like. It’s
not an easy exercise, but it will accelerate your skill as a sensuous writer.
You wouldn’t feed cardboard meals to guests. Don’t feed cardboard meals to your
characters. Make your reader’s taste buds pop, even if he’s from outer space.
* * *
We speak of a “sixth sense” as a sensation we cannot
identify with seeing, hearing, touching, smelling, or tasting, but which we
know is there. “It” can be anything imagined or real, a person or a higher power.
Some people refer to the phenomenon as extrasensory perception, or ESP. A
writer can make excellent use of a “sixth sense” in mainline fiction as well as
in mystery and suspense fiction. You are alone in the house, and you hear a
door close. Is it the wind? But there is no wind inside the house.
An
exercise to develop your sixth sense is worth trying. Close your eyes. Imagine
who is in the room with you. Turn all the lights on. There’s no one here. Good.
You can relax. Is your watch ticking louder than usual, or are you imagining
it? Why is today different from other days, what is supposed to happen? Why
isn’t the phone ringing? If it does ring, who will it be? Close your eyes
again. Are you sure someone isn’t in the room with you? What if you’re wrong?
What if it’s ... ?
It
doesn’t take much for you to feed your hungry imagination. Through practice,
you can establish a link between your imagination and the so-called sixth
sense.
I’ve left the most important sense, sight, for last
because it is the one least neglected by writers. Yet improving your eyesight,
sharpening your ability to describe the visual, can be productive.
The
first thing you see is usually a cliché. We see the tall man, the attractive
woman, the room full of people, the clean-cut lawn. These are the easy images
that leap to mind. The writer’s job is to look for distinguishing detail, the
particularity, in visualizing what his reader is to see: the man whose wavy
hair wouldn’t stay under his cap; the woman who looked ready to shout at just
about anyone, the partygoers jammed together as if they were on a crowded
subway train; the virgin lawn that looked as if it had never been walked upon.
Ideally,
the writer sees something that everybody will recognize but that no one has
seen quite that way before.
A technique used too seldom involves changing the sense:
Zalatnick led me into the shop not as if I was a fellow
looking for a job but as if I was a friend of a friend. I was sure the men in
the shop could smell the difference.
“Smell” isn’t meant to be taken literally. Switching the
sense from seeing to smelling creates a metaphor that gets the point across to
the reader quickly.
Here’s how one might use each of the six senses to
characterize players in a story:
Gloria kept wrinkling her nose as if she were trying to
sniff the truth of what everyone was saying to her. (smell)
Greg knew that his handshake hurt people. (touch)
On the phone Mary’s voice was like music. I couldn’t hear
the words, but I knew what she meant. (hearing)
Lucille shielded her eyes like a make-believe Indian
examining the horizon. (sight)
Barry savored each spoonful of melon as if it were
ambrosia he would never be allowed to taste again. (taste)
Garret could swear someone had come in behind him, yet
hesitated to turn around for fear he would be right. (sixth sense)
If you look at those examples again, you’ll note that each
of the characterizations is an action. Somebody is doing something. There’s no
need to stop a story to characterize or to use the senses.
Love Scene
The main
concern of this chapter is the most common kind of love scene in literature,
between a man and a woman. But there are other kinds of love that provide
writers and readers with appealing stories: love between an adult and a child;
same-sex love affairs; love between a human and an animal; love between
children, and love in odd combinations.
To
begin with the last, we already know that a major source for writers of fiction
involves bringing together people from different social or ethnic backgrounds
who meet and fall in love. D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover and
L. P. Hartley’s The Go-Between are outstanding examples. In theater, the
vitality of Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire is
attributable in large measure to the clash of backgrounds. Sometimes the
differences are bizarre—for instance the love of a monstrously deformed person
for a normal-appearing human (or vice versa). It is useful to study the
classics such as Beauty and the Beast and The Hunchback of Notre Dame
with an eye toward understanding how emotions are generated in the reader.
The interplay in the audience’s emotions may arise from the conflict of
repugnance slowly overcome by affection. Young people are much more interested
in and accepting of the grotesque in such fantasies. If you enter this
difficult but rewarding territory, be mindful that your story to be acceptable
must be sufficiently different from the well-known classics.
Love
stories of great poignancy can be fashioned out of the love between an adult
and a child because once upon a time everyone was a child. A child can be
desperate for love. Adults are sometimes too busy with the mechanics of living
(job, homemaking, the behavior of other adults) to respond to a child’s need.
The denial of a child’s craving for affection touches many readers. Love
between a parent and child, or unrequited
love between a parent and a child (in either direction), or the belated
recognition of parental love or love of a parent, or a child or parent who rejects
affection—all are possibilities. However, any sexual conduct involving a child
raises the issue of child molestation, a difficult subject for fiction and one
involving psychopathology rather than love.
Affection
between people and their pets or other animals is frequently the subject of
children’s books, and has long been important in such adult books as the Tarzan
stories and Jack London’s The Call of the Wild. It takes skill to make
an animal believable as a character, and the best method is to give it a
particularity just as you would a human character, a distinctive characteristic
and preferably one that relates to the story—for instance a cat that jumps up
into the lap of everyone but the person who loves it.
A
mistake made easily in stories that involve animals is to neglect
particularizing the human character. Also, it is important that the animal have
a clear want of its own and not be merely the passive recipient of human wants.
The
writer who wants to write about the relationship of a human to an animal has to
cross two tripwires. There seems to be a greater limit on imaginative story
possibilities than in the relationships between humans. So much has been done
with human/animal material that innovation becomes difficult.
Also,
the trap of sentimentality is present and ready to snap. It may amuse you to
know that George Stevens, a long-time editor of J. B. Lippincott, once a
venerable American publishing firm, actually wrote a book that contained the
three most common ingredients in the bestsellers of his time. He called his
book Lincoln’s Doctor’s Dog.
Same-sex
love affairs have been the subject of fiction for a long time, though some
books, like Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness were often banned,
and E. M. Forster’s Maurice was not published until after the author
died. During recent decades, homosexual love stories and homoerotic fiction
have come out of the closet. A special market has developed for these stories,
and homosexual attraction has made an occasional appearance in mainstream fiction.
Infantile
and child sexuality raises profound discomfort and disbelief in many readers,
requiring great skill in the writing. However, a child showing immature
affection for another child (sometimes called “puppy love”) is widely
acceptable. This is not a frequent subject of fiction and is difficult to do
well.
Which
leads us to the principal topic of this chapter, romantic and sexual love
between adults. I have some bad news.
Editors
will tell you that love scenes are often among the worst-written scenes not
only in rejected work but in published work. Such scenes are often mechanical,
overly physiological, hackneyed, or sentimental. However, editors know that
trying to discuss the flaws in love scenes with their authors is like walking
across a mine field. One never knows when a flaw in the writing of a love scene
derives from a buried discomfort in the author’s life.
In
recent decades we have had both a sexual revolution and a counterrevolution.
Along about 1960, a prominent publishing attorney named Harriet Pilpel asked me
if I was willing to go to jail for Henry Miller. I was then heading an upscale
book club whose judges were interested in distributing a forthcoming Henry
Miller title that dealt with sexual matters explicitly, and Ms. Pilpel, well
known as a civil libertarian, seemed quite certain there was then a real risk
of allegedly criminal conduct in distributing works by Henry Miller that are
today found in bookshops throughout the world.
A few
years later the floodgates opened not only to books that treated sexual conduct
openly and with some degree of seriousness, but also to transient novels that
mocked adult lovemaking as much as misnamed “adult” movies did.
Adults
are in general knowledgeable about the physical apparatus and actions involved
in lovemaking, and concentration on these can quickly become repetitive and
boring. Some people, and consequently some writers, have never learned that
mechanical description of sexual activity does not usually arouse readers who
are no longer adolescents. Moreover, female readers, who account for the
purchase of most hardcover fiction, often lose patience with male writers who
continue to fabricate love scenes solely from a male point of view. Men who
write love scenes as if they are dealing with the mechanical parts of an engine
should know that such scenes have zero erotic effect and do not accomplish
their primary mission of evoking a loving experience between people.
Readers
remain interested in passion, if not in the mechanical details. Moreover, any
novel accrues an advantage by including a love story. It is one of the easiest
relationships to plot, a fact that is most obvious in the field of musical
comedy. A handsome young man appears at one side of the stage. A beautiful
young woman appears on the other side. The audience immediately wants them to
get together. It is the author’s job to keep them apart as long as possible.
The
gestation of love can be the central dramatic event in the lives of characters.
The loss of love is one of the most devastating things that can happen to a
human being. Both possibilities can generate enormous emotion in life and, if
skillfully handled, in fiction.
The
gain of love and the loss of love are powerful combustibles. It is doubly
powerful to have both gain and loss of love in the same story. Suspense,
tension, and conflict inhere in love stories. An endless cornucopia of
relationships is available to the writer.
Of
course, disadvantages offset this. The prevalence of love in so much fiction
requires the writer to exercise his imagination in order to come up with scenes
that will seem fresh. Love stories also carry the danger of sentimentality.
The
writer invokes sentimentality when he elicits superficial emotions that are
exaggerated, excessive, or affected, obviously designed to elicit the reader’s
sympathy. Sentimentality in fiction usually comes across as patently insincere,
mawkish, or maudlin, and should be avoided. A writer’s sensibility should be
directed toward evoking a depth of feeling in the reader, not to fabricating
superficial excesses of emotion on the page.
The
main flaw in most love scenes is similar to that of the main flaws in all other
scenes: the reader’s emotions have been insufficiently considered by the
writer. The primary erogenous zone is in the head, and that’s where the reader
experiences writing.
The
reader wants to identify with a character. Love scenes can be especially
effective when the reader is identifying with both characters—that is,
with the hoped-for success of the relationship—experiencing more than each of
the characters individually. This can be accomplished if the writer considers
the love scene from the point of view of each of the characters even when
writing from the disciplined point of view of one of them. The reader needs to
understand the relationship between the lovers better than either of the lovers
do.
The two
most essential ingredients in love scenes are tension and tenderness. A crisis
in the relationship or postponing lovemaking, keeping the lovers apart as long
as credibility permits, generates tension. It’s a mistake to let the reader
know early the likely outcome of the scene.
No love
scene should be the repetition of a familiar ritual. To sustain the reader’s
interest in the outcome, the attraction should seem new even in a longstanding
relationship.
Interruptions
in a love scene can be useful. Not the grocery boy ringing the doorbell, but
the lovers themselves noticing a picture, listening to some special music,
talking about memories that arouse—all the while postponing the consummation to
increase the tension of the scene. Literary foreplay does not necessarily
involve physical contact. If the possibility of contact is in the air, nuances
in actions and dialogue can affect the reader’s emotions. A woman brushing her
hair can have a powerful aphrodisiac effect. Less produces more in the reader.
In the following example a couple stand in front of the door of his house. The
reader senses that once inside the house, they are going to make love. The
writer’s first temptation might be to let them in the house, to get on with it.
But delay builds anticipation. It can be accomplished by minutiae:
I
was waiting for him to say something. Instead he reached into his pocket and
removed a key ring with three keys on it. Holding the first key, he said, “The
garage.” Then he held the second key, dangling the others, and said, “The back
door.”
He must have seen me smile.
He took the third key
between his thumb and forefinger and said, “The front door.” Then he handed the
key ring with all three keys to me and said, “Welcome.”
Among the many advantages of a love scene is that it
provides excellent opportunities for characterizing both partners and for
creating sympathy or antipathy toward one of the characters.
Love stories exist about each of the seven ages of man.
Three of those ages are most useful to the writer.
The
youngest lovers may be inexperienced, tentative, nervous, worried about
pregnancy, disease, getting caught. Any or all of these can become a writer’s
Petri dish for brewing conflict and drama. External obstacles loom in
abundance. The young lovers may be separated by distance because of school,
work, and family. They may have to overcome class differences, family
incompatibilities, peer pressure, or rivalry from another young person, or from
an older, more experienced individual. Keep in mind that you don’t want to tell
the reader what they are feeling, but to evoke feelings in the reader as a
result of what the young lovers say to each other and what they do. It helps to
make each of them vulnerable in a different way.
With
adult lovers in the child-bearing age group, one of the most powerful forces of
nature is at work, the drive toward procreation, often unknown to or
unacknowledged by lovers. The human race is perpetuated by drives that are endocrinal in origin.
Romantic love, as it is experienced by most (but not all) people, is a cultural
invention. While these are things that the average reader doesn’t want to hear
about, it is important that the writer know them.[5] Love scenes deal with the consequences of
these physiological drives and cultural customs. Writers need to be
knowledgeable about the nuances of human relationships and the origins of
feelings; hence, it helps for writers to know and understand as much as
possible about the psychology and physiology underlying love—what the pulls
are, whether or not the participants are aware of them.
An
obstacle commonly faced by adult lovers is the threat of a competing person and
the consequent loss of security in a relationship. An adult wandering from a
relationship can get involved with persons of questionable character and can
blunder into acts of violence. The consequences of infidelity have inspired
hundreds of plots. Some obstacles encountered by adult lovers are internal,
such as guilt over conduct disapproved of by the person or by society. Also
casting a shadow over both old and new relationships is the fear of passing age
boundaries, of getting older.
In
plotting a love story, a writer must remind himself that plot grows out of
character. What happens in a love scene should come out of the writer’s
understanding of his characters and their motivation, and the clash between
such characteristics or motivation in different characters. Some basic
questions to ask yourself about your prospective love story:
Does
each of your lovers have one thing that distinguishes his or her physical
appearance from that of other people? Is there something distinctive in the way
your lovers dress?
Keep in
mind that the most boring kind of relationship is one in which there are never
any problems. He loved her and she loved him, they never quarreled, is the
ultimate turnoff. In devising a love story, search for the root conflicts based
on character and upbringing, but also ferret out surface conflict by asking
yourself if you have depicted your adult lovers at a moment of crisis. If not,
can you add a crisis that will increase the tension of the relationship? Does
the woman want something reasonable that is refused by the man, perhaps for
reasons that he keeps secret and that arouse her suspicions? Does the man want
something that is refused by the woman because she is afraid of the result?
Whatever your plan, remember that if there is no friction between the lovers,
there is no interest on the part of the reader. And if there is massive
friction, will the reader be convinced that they are nevertheless in love? If
they are not, you don’t have a love story.
One
exercise writers in my classes have found to be exceptionally beneficial is
writing an exchange of ten lines of dialogue, alternating between two lovers.
The object is to have the reader experience two things from the ten lines: that
the characters are quarreling and that they are lovers (not ex-lovers). You
might want to try your hand at the exercise yourself. You may use more than one
line for each turn, but keep the exchanges short:
Lovers’ Quarrel in Ten Brief Exchanges
He:
She:
He:
She:
He:
She:
He:
She:
He:
She:
The “Lovers’ Quarrel” exercise is not easy. Some writers,
in their early attempts, find it as difficult as rubbing the belly with one
hand while patting the top of the head with the other. But that is precisely
the kind of thing a writer must do in the best of scenes, have more than one
thing going on at a time. Students have been known to revise and rerevise
drafts of this short exercise week after week until they achieve the objective:
having the reader feel that the characters are in love and are
quarreling. Let’s look at a bad example:
He: Where are you off to now?
She: None of your business.
He: You step out of this door, we’re finished.
She: I’m glad you noticed.
He: Noticed what?
She: That we’re finished, stupid.
He: You’re not taking my car.
She: It’s half mine. Community property. Now
get out of my way.
He:
I’ll report the car stolen.
She:
I’m sure the cops will love finding out you reported your car stolen by your
wife.
What’s wrong? We have a quarrel but no indication that,
though married, they are still lovers. Let’s look at another example:
He: You
touched me.
She:
I’ve got a license to touch.
He: I
just got home, hon.
She: I
know.
He:
Hey, I haven’t even had a chance to wash up.
She: I
know.
He:
I’ll fall walking backwards.
She: I
know.
He: The
couch is in the way. Hey!
She:
Gotcha!
It’s clear that they’re lovers. There is tension in the
scene, but they are not really quarreling. The wife’s repetition of “I know” is
a nice touch, and the exchange has a coherence, but it is not a lovers’ quarrel.
The point of this exercise is to learn how to do two things at the same
time. When students develop their skill, I encourage them to add some narrative
to the dialogue and even to increase the number of lines, if necessary, to
complete the scene. The following miniscene is what one of my male students
came up with after some revision:
“I never wanted to see you
again.”
“Then why did you come
back?”
“The roses,” he said.
She turned in the archway,
gilded by rays, back to him, walled, protected, and stared into the tangle of
exploded flowers. They had opened and fallen back upon themselves like silent
film stars, dried leaves, brittle branches.
“You came to see a dying
garden, Ryan.”
“We planted it together.”
“I didn’t know you were
coming.”
“Meg, I didn’t know you
would be here.”
She felt his eyes on her
back. The Bukhara sucked in his footfalls as he crossed the room. He edged
beside her.
“It needs water, care ...”
“Maybe it will rain,” she
said.
“Can’t count on rain. It
needs ... some care.”
“You were always too busy,”
Meg said and turned slowly toward him. “It was beautiful once. Wasn’t it?”
“Like a meteor shower,” Ryan
said. “I’m sorry.”
“So am I.”
We know they are still lovers. At the outset they are
having a strong difference of opinion. The reader can’t help feeling some
emotion when reading this short scene. I encourage you to try this exercise
from time to time as your skill develops. You may find a story or even an
entire novel blossoming from it.
Another age group to consider is older lovers, perhaps
from the age of fifty to the so-called golden years celebrated in the film On
Golden Pond. The underlying drive toward procreation is at rest.
Companionship increases in importance. Shared experience in the past becomes a
vital part of the present. Security, both economic and emotional, becomes more
important. And there is the omnipresent fear or acceptance of inevitable death.
But one should consider certain liabilities of this fertile ground for the
writer.
In
Western countries, sadly, there is far less respect for the wisdom that comes
with age than in Eastern countries. As a result, among the young there is
little interest in the aged. When love relationships among older persons are
handled expertly, the results are felt by audiences of all ages, but the
marketing of such material is encumbered with difficulty. As the population in
developed countries lives longer, however, there may be a shift in interest
that will make love stories involving older characters easier to market.
Questions
to ask yourself if you are considering a story with older lovers:
In
developing your love scene, is there a hovering notion that the lovers do not
have all the time in the world?
Have
you included the need for companionship, often the most urgent need of older
people?
Have
you included touching or some other physical relationship that will enhance the
poignancy?
The key to writing an effective love scene is to imagine
it from the perspective of each of the partners. If the writer is a woman, she
should give special thought to the
perspective of the man in the scene. If the writer is a man, he should give
special thought to the perspective of the woman. Then the scene can be written
from the third-person point of view, or from the first-person point of view of
either of the characters, but the writer will have imagined the thoughts and
feelings of both partners, which should enable the scene to be written as
richly as possible.
A scene
can also be enriched if either of the participants gains an insight about the
other person.
What
are some of the things a writer can do to enhance a love scene?
You can
place an object in the room that is meaningful to one or both lovers. If
possible, plant the object before the love scene. Don’t let either of the
lovers notice it until an important juncture in that scene, when one of them
sees the object, turns off, and the other lover has to rekindle the
relationship. This is really a modified version of what happens in most
stories, with obstacles in the way of the protagonist getting what he wants.
Another
obstacle can be the weather. If the lovers are preparing for an outing in the
countryside, a sudden storm will interfere with their plans. They seek refuge
in what looks like an unoccupied building. But is it unoccupied? Or will a
sudden snowstorm keep illicit lovers housebound in a house to which the spouse
of one of them will be returning soon? These suggestions, and those that
follow, are not meant to be specific plot points for you to pursue. They are
examples of the kinds of obstacle one might use to prolong a love scene that
can become a love sequence.
A tack
you might consider is to have something unexpected happen that causes a
misunderstanding. The more one of the lovers tries to clear up the
misunderstanding, the deeper it gets. Make it seem that the impasse is
unsurmountable. Then introduce a third character, who can make the impasse
worse, or who can provide a way of clearing up the misunderstanding.
Another
tack would be to have the third character not know that the two are lovers, and
the lovers have a reason for not wanting the third character to find out about
their relationship. That involves unrehearsed play-acting by the lovers, ripe
for mischief.
Conversely,
a couple can pretend they are together, when in fact they are not. Then if a
third character were to say or do something that makes it absolutely necessary
for both the lovers to continue the pretense, you have an interesting
development. The moment the third character leaves is a moment of high tension.
Will the couple drop their pretense? Or will the pretense have started
something they didn’t expect?
The
intrusion in a love scene doesn’t have to be from a third person related to
either or both parties. It doesn’t even need to be a person that is intruding.
We’ve just discussed the weather intruding. An earthquake, a firestorm, or any
other catastrophe can be a mighty intrusion provided it is handled
realistically rather than as melodrama. But note this. Though an action is the
ideal interruption, a thought can also interrupt, particularly a significant
thought or memory, and it can be a lot more effective than the local volcano
blowing its top.
A love scene and a sex scene are not the same. A poignant
love scene can be written with the lovers not coming close enough to touch. As
an instance, consider the prisoner, unjustly tried and accused, who has to
communicate with his beloved on visitors’ day through a glass shield, speaking
on phones, though they are only inches apart physically.
Conversely,
a sex scene need have nothing to do with love, as in a scene of casual sex between
strangers, or a rape.
If it
is your plan to make your love scene erotic, a few points are worth
considering. As I noted earlier, the most important erogenous zone is in the
head, which means that if a man’s head isn’t turned on, he won’t be able to
function. If a woman’s head isn’t turned on, her failure to experience may lead
to faking.
The
“rabbit” approach to sex has little to do with the relations between the sexes
that can be experienced by readers. The same is true for mechanical recitations
of sexual play without regard to what is happening to the emotions of the
people involved.
Many
years ago I met Maurice Girodias, the French publisher who became notorious as
the publisher of sexually explicit novels in English. Those green-covered
paperbacks infiltrated into America in the luggage of tourists long before the
liberation of sexuality in literature in the late fifties and early sixties.
Quite a few of Girodias’s pseudonymous authors later made their reputations
under their real names.
Girodias
was a master at teaching his authors how to handle erotic material. One
Girodias-sponsored title had what I remember as the ultimate seduction scene:
it held the reader for about a hundred pages before the relationship was
consummated. This is not something to strive to imitate. It demonstrates a
principle. The point to grasp is that the mere description of multiple sexual
acts does little or nothing for the reader. A single act, kept at bay, warmed
to, stretched out, can have a marked erotic effect.
In preparing
to write an erotic scene, the writer has to be clear about the relationship
between the couple, and has to know what he is trying to accomplish in his story through the sexual
intimacy. The most common possibilities include an assignation, colloquially a
“quickie.” Though it has nothing to do with love, this kind of scene can be
erotic. But even a so-called quickie can’t be quick on the page and have an
effect on the reader. It must move the story forward by having an effect on one
or the other character. Even a meaningless assignation has to have a meaning
for at least one of the characters or it doesn’t belong in the story.
More
common in fiction is the one-night stand. A brief, not-to-be-repeated encounter
has greater potential for a story than a meaningless copulation, but to have an
important effect on the reader it, too, has to convey something about each
character. Why is each of the participants doing this, and how does each of
them react to the experience while it’s happening and afterward?
More
interesting is the sexual encounter that is the budding of a love affair.
Because it is a beginning, the scene can be full of nuances, problems,
thoughts, actions. Think of it as a back-and-forth experience and not a
straight line. Each digression—if it doesn’t take the reader away from the
fundamental goal of the scene—can heighten and extend the experience.
My novel Other People contains a number of scenes
between George Thomassy, a forty-four-year-old lawyer, and Francine Widmer, a
twenty-seven-year-old client who becomes his lover. The scene I will refer to
runs about six pages. It’s not about continuous lovemaking. Other things
happen. The interruptions—planned by the author—stretch the tension between the
beginning and its consummation. But the interruptions are all part of the
story.
Thomassy
and Francine were brought together as a result of Francine being raped. Her
father, a corporate lawyer, persuaded Thomassy, a criminal lawyer, to help his
daughter, who was seeking to get the rapist put in jail. Francine had not had
sex since the rape until the scene I am about to describe. An important choice
was to write the scene from the woman’s point of view.
The
scene starts with a detailed description of a meal that Thomassy is preparing
for both himself and Francine in his home. The fact that she is in his house in
itself sets the stage for the possibility of an erotic scene. That possibility
hangs in the air, as it were, over the scene that follows, when they talk and
think about other things. Note that what they talk about is specific, for
instance a painting that is prominent on Thornassy’s wall. From a few words about the artist,
Francine’s thoughts wander to the idea that good art lingers into posterity,
while the work of most people in the professions is forgotten, except perhaps
for the rare work of an innovating genius. Francine is surprised that artists
aren’t hated more by those whose work is by its nature transient. Thomassy, a
successful criminal lawyer, responds:
“I’m a salesman. I sell cases to juries. Or to punk
D.A.’s.”
When Thomassy puts himself down, he is actually raising
himself in the reader’s eyes. The reader knows how tough and successful he is
as a lawyer. The reader’s emotional reaction to Thomassy’s self-description is
something like, “Hey, Thomassy, don’t knock yourself. I’ve seen what you can
do.”
This
technique of elevating by seeming to do its opposite sets Thomassy up as a
potentially interesting lover because he has insight into himself, an that
usually means insight into others. In the scene, the conversation momentarily
turns back to the dinner they are finishing. As to sex, nothing is happening,
except in the reader’s head. In fact, by this time the reader is liking them as
a couple and wants one of them to make a move. The author is not quite ready to
oblige.
Thomassy
snaps on the TV set for the ten o’clock news, which tells us the evening is
getting late. Francine runs water to do the dishes. Thomassy says he’ll do
them, and comes up behind her at the sink. The entire scene is from her point
of view:
The
front of his body was touching the back of mine. I felt his lips on the lobe of
my right ear, just for a second.
“It’s all right,” I said. “A
woman doesn’t want to be admired just for her mind.”
He put his arms around me
and took the dish I was rinsing carefully out of my hands and put it aside.
“I’ll do those later,” he
said.
“I should be going soon.”
He turned me toward him.
“My hands are wet,” I said.
He took my head in both his
hands and touched his lips to mine, a skim for a split second.
I kept my wet hands wide apart as he kissed me again,
this time mouth to mouth.
I broke away. “My hands are
wet,” I said, breathless.
“I don’t care.”
And then I put my wet hands
around him as our mouths met. I could feel his body’s warmth and my own heart
pound. And suddenly he was kissing the side of my neck, then below and behind
my ear, I could feel his tongue flicker, and then our mouths were together
again until, to breathe, I pulled away, feeling the blood in my face, and I was
quickly drying my hands on the dish towel when he pulled me into his arms again
and I knew we both knew it was no use fighting it any more and we were holding
each other tightly and desperately, and then we were moving each other to the
couch, not wanting to let go, but we had to, to open the couch, and then it was
kissing again and clothes coming off, his and mine, and we were lying clasped,
kissing lips, faces, shoulders, then holding on, sealed against each other,
until he raised his head and realized there were tears in my eyes and his
bewildered look was begging for an explanation.
I could hear the thud of my
heart.
“What’s the matter?” he
whispered.
I couldn’t find my voice.
“Tell me,” he said.
It was like the anxiety
attacks I would get in the middle of the night when insomnia stole my sleeping
hours, a fear that my heart would burst from the thudding.
“It’s like driving the first
time after an accident,” I said.
We lay side by side for a
while.
At this point, Francine lies there thinking about an incident
in high school. The reader is feeling Get on with it. Then:
He got up, naked and
unashamed, and went somewhere, returning with two elegant glasses filled
halfway with something I didn’t recognize.
“Madeira,” he said.
“Rainwater.” He took a sip. “Magic,” he said, and handed me my glass. “It’s a
one-drink drink. Safe.”
I looked at the glass
skeptically.
“It’s okay,” he said. “Try
it.”
I took a sip.
“Lovely,” I said, licking it
from my lips.
“Don’t do that,” he said.
“What?” I took another sip.
He leaned over and licked my lower lip. No one had ever done that. He slid onto
the bed, holding his glass upright as if it were a gyroscope. Then he tipped it
slightly and let a few drops splash onto my breast.
“Don’t move,” he said, and
gave me his glass to hold. There I was, helplessly holding one glass in each
hand, unable to move, and he licked the Madeira from each breast and from the
valley between.
He borrowed his glass back,
tipped it lower down, then handed it back, my handcuff. I looked at the two
glasses, at the ceiling, then at the soft hair of his head as he licked the
drops of Madeira. ...
I’ll stop the scene a couple of pages before the end
because I’m certain that by this time you will see how I’ve stretched the
scene, concerned with the reader’s wanting Thomassy and Francine to get
together, and knowing that my job was to keep them apart. The scene is a
literary form of foreplay.
Note
that the scene consists of many short sentences. Then, the paragraph in which
they move to the couch is long, almost all of it one extended sentence. The
tension of arousal is handled with snippets. The breakthrough is written as
breathless continuum.
At that
point, the specter of Francine’s rape arises. The sex is stalled, but not the
scene. Thomassy brings her a special drink, to intoxicate her not with alcohol
but with what he precedes to do with the drink. The sex act itself is handled
the same way. This is a love story, and their first sexual encounter is related
to the things that bring them together. We experience love blooming, not just
passing fornication.
Lovemaking
between a couple that has made love before can be a more difficult task for the
writer. Art imitates life. If the likely outcome is known to the participants,
it removes an element of suspense. For the experienced writer it may mean
creating a delay, or even an event or action that stops the inevitable. A scene
between lovers experienced with each other can be helped by a surprise, the
opposite of the expected, or an intrusion.
In
writing a particular scene in The Magician, my design was to portray the
sixteen-year-old villain Urek’s vulnerability, to create a touch of sympathy
for him, and at the same time to give the reader some clues as to the possible
origins of his violent nature. His involvement is with a girl called the Kraut,
who has been having sex with Urek’s gang, usually serially in full view of the others. This
time Urek, in trouble, has come to the Kraut’s home by himself. The Kraut is
surprised when Urek shows up at her place. Urek has committed a crime that has
excited him, but he is not an articulate boy and tries to shrug off her
questions. She says, “What are you so worked up about?” and he exclaims,
“Jesus, I gotta talk to somebody.” She puts him down by saying, “How about your
mother.” Finally, she agrees to listen to him and locks the door of her room.
She sits down at her vanity mirror and starts combing her hair. You may recall
that in the chapter on characterization I referred to the supposition of some
psychologists that a woman’s hair conveys a strong sexual force (most men find
it disquieting or repulsive to imagine a woman bald or losing her hair). Recall
that after World War II, when the French wanted to dehumanize women who
collaborated by having sex with the enemy, they shaved their heads.
Urek
wants the Kraut to turn around to face him. She says she can’t comb her hair if
she turns around. That’s when he touches her hair. She is sarcastic. “Well,
you’re getting real romantic.” She doesn’t expect romance from him.
The
author provides a delaying action. The Kraut asks Urek if he’s ever talked to a
priest. And Urek rants about why that doesn’t work for him in a way that draws
a touch of sympathy from her. She says, “Come here.”
In that
context, those two words start the erotic engine. She, still sitting, puts her
hands around Urek’s waist, then lays her cheek against him and listens to his
heartbeat:
“Hey, you’re alive,” she
said, letting her hand drop and just brush the front of his pants.
“Whadya do that for?”
She laughed.
“Say,” he said, “are you
really a nympho? Some of the guys say ...”
He thought she was going to
make him get out. Instead she said, “Your mother and father, they don’t like it
when they do it, do they?”
“I never thought about it.”
“You had to. Everybody does.
You think any of the old people like to do it?”
“How would I know?”
“You ever watch them?”
“What do you think I am?”
“I do. I got a way. It’s
what gave me the idea before.”
“Before what?”
“Before I ever did anything
with anybody.”
Urek wants her to stop talking. She goes on talking, but
unhooks her bra, and says:
“You never once kissed me.”
He says, “You mean on them?”
“On the mouth, stupid.”
We learn that Urek has never kissed any girl on the mouth.
She teaches him:
His
head was in a roar. He could feel the needling in his groin, the signal, but
couldn’t connect the idea of kissing lips and a feeling half his body away.
“Do it to me,” she said.
He looked blank.
“What I’m doing to you.”
Their mouths met, and
despite the slaver and terrified thoughts in his head, he felt himself
stiffening with an urgency, the need to rush.
She slipped off her shoes,
unwrapped her skirt, let it drop, and stepped out of it. She took her half-slip
off.
“You don’t have to take
everything off,” said Urek.
She took her socks off, and
then stepped out of her white panties; the hair where her legs met was dark,
not blonde like her long hair.
“Arencha going to turn the
light off?” he said.
“She shrugged her shoulders
and turned the switch. It merely dimmed the light, one of those three-way bulbs
now at its lowest setting. Then, completely naked, she sat down in front of her
dressing table again, and again combed her hair. He could have killed her.
“You afraid of catching
cold?” she said turning. “Take your clothes off.”
He got down to his shorts
and socks, then stood adamant.
“Take your socks off.”
He took off first one, then the other.
“The rest, too,” she said.
“Want some help?”
He wasn’t going to have any
girl undressing him. He let his shorts drop to the floor, the hairiness of his
body now wholly exposed to her view.
“Well,” she said at his
preparedness.
He gestured toward the bed.
“What’s your hurry?”
She came closer to him, and
he gestured toward the bed again.
Her hands were on him,
stroking, and he tried now with force at her shoulders, to push her to the bed,
but it was suddenly too late, and like an idiot he stood there, coming in
spasms.
The Kraut was frightened at
his anger. He didn’t say anything. She put her arms around him, it seemed to
him tenderly, and sat him down on the edge of the bed. She kissed the side of
his neck, then his cheek, and then his closed mouth.
He motioned for her to turn
the light completely off, which she did, so that she wouldn’t see him, but when
he lay down, his face in the pillow, she could hear him smothering the shame of
his sobs.
In some ways that scene is akin to the classic scene of a
boy being initiated by a prostitute. However, this boy has had sex with this
girl before in the company of his cronies. This time a special circumstance has
arisen, he has come to her after trying to kill the protagonist. The intent of
the scene is to enlarge the characterization of both Urek and the girl by
showing his vulnerability as well as his anger. Though the girl disdains him,
when he fails she shows compassion.
Note
how the action in the scene is delayed time and again. For the reader, this
continues the tension.
In
writing any sexual episode, you have to guard against fashioning a scene of
continuous lovemaking. It needs to be broken up by thoughts, actions,
digressions, delays that are pertinent to the story. Toward that end, you may
find it useful to make a list of each character’s concerns during the scene. To
maximize tension, those concerns should be different. Keep the Actors Studio
technique in mind by giving each of your characters a different script for
their love scene. When you revise, test each part of the scene for what you
believe the reader is feeling at that moment.
You
need to remind yourself until it becomes second nature that you are playing the
emotions of an audience. In writing love scenes, you need to let the reader’s
imagination do a lot of the work.
I want
to conclude with a caution. The violence that accompanies sex in some novels,
film, and TV is not only offensive in principle but also counterproductive.
Small actions, or a few well-chosen words, can move the reader much more than
an act of violence. While you are learning to master love scenes, I urge you to
find subtleties that will enable readers to fill the envelope you have created,
which is the subject of the next chapter.
Creating the Envelope
This
chapter is short, which is only appropriate to its point: less is more.
Writing
fiction is a delicate balance. On the one hand, so much inexperienced writing
suffers from generalities. The writer is urged to be specific, particular,
concrete. At the same time, when the inexperienced writer gives the reader
detail on character, clothing, settings, and actions, he tends to give us a
surfeit, robbing the reader of one of the great pleasures of reading,
exercising the imagination. My advice on achieving a balance is to choose the
most effective detail and to err on the side of too little rather than too
much. For the reader’s imagination, less is more.
You
can’t have come this far without knowing that my most urgent message to writers
is that you are providing stimuli for the reader’s experience. I remember
Shelly Lowenkopf, a remarkable teacher of writers, admonishing the author of
what was intended as a love scene that her mention of every article of clothing
that was being removed read like a laundry list rather than a scene between two
people. A more common error is detailing the clothing worn by a character as if
preparing a missing persons bulletin, when one distinguishing item would
suffice and allow the reader to imagine the rest.
Examine
the following sentence from Nanci Kincaid’s novel Crossing Blood, a
trove of good writing. In this scene, children are playing in the yard:
Their old grandmother looks out the window all the time,
her face pressed against the glass.
Does the author tell us what the grandmother is thinking?
Or seeing? Not a bit. The reader, given the context, can imagine whatever he
likes that fits the story. The more the
reader’s imagination can be substituted for detail from the writer, the greater
the reader’s experience will be. The mistake we make frequently is telling the
reader what the old grandmother is seeing. The point is that’s where the
grandmother is spending her time. At the window. Looking.
You can
give the reader’s imagination room with a few common words in context:
Most grandmothers prattled on about their grandchildren,
but when Bettina was asked about hers she would pause as if reflecting on each
of them in turn and then state for the record, “They are fine.”
I have sometimes described the reader’s experience to
students as an “envelope.” It is a mistake to fill the envelope with so much
detail that little or nothing is left to the reader’s imagination. The writer’s
job is to fill the envelope with just enough to trigger the reader’s
imagination. For a nonfiction example, let’s look at George Orwell’s first
paragraph in The Road to Wigan Pier.
The
first sound in the mornings was the clumping of the mill-girls’ clogs down the
cobbled street. Earlier than that, I suppose, there were factory whistles which
I was never awake to hear.
There were generally four of
us in the bedroom. ...
Orwell creates an envelope for an industrial town in two
sentences, the sound of clogs on the cobbled street and the factory whistles he
didn’t hear. The reader’s imagination fills in the rest. That taken care of,
Orwell immediately takes the reader inside one of the houses.
Let’s
look at some examples of the use of an envelope in contemporary fiction. First,
the beginning of Canadian author Michael Ondaatje’s Booker Prize-winning novel,
The English Patient:
She stands up in the garden where she has been working
and looks into the distance. She has sensed a shift in the weather. There is
another gust of wind, a buckle of noise in the air, and the tall cypresses
sway. She turns and moves uphill towards the house, climbing over a low wall,
feeling the first drops of rain on her bare arms. She crosses the loggia and
quickly enters the house.
The woman, nameless, is looking into the distance. The
reader, who is not told what she is looking at, has to imagine what she might
be seeing. Her first impression that it
might rain comes from a sixth sense, then wind, noise, and, finally, raindrops.
The author supplies only a minimum amount of information. Inside, the nameless
woman enters a room:
The man lies on the bed, his body exposed to the breeze,
and he turns his head slowly toward her as she enters.
We don’t know who the man is, but we find out quickly that
he is badly burned. How did he get burned? We learn she has been nursing him
for months. Who is she? Ondaatje’s writing is full of particularities that the
reader can see and at the same time allows ample room for the play of the
reader’s imagination.
The grand
master of giving the reader’s imagination room to play is Franz Kafka. Here’s
how The Trial begins:
Someone must have been telling lies about Joseph K., for
without having done anything wrong he was arrested one fine morning. His
landlady’s cook, who always brought him his breakfast at eight o’clock, failed
to appear on this occasion. That had never happened before. K. waited for a
little while longer, watching from his pillow the old lady opposite, who seemed
to be peering at him with a curiosity unusual even for her, but then, feeling
both put out and hungry, he rang the bell. At once there was a knock at the
door and a man entered whom he had never seen before in the house.
Even at the beginning of the first paragraph we begin to
feel Joseph K’s anxiety. As you read The Trial there is no letup. The
reader’s anxiety can verge on terror, not the make-believe kind but a terror
that the reader associates with things in his own experience. Kafka, master of
the envelope, creates the atmosphere of a nightmare that seems real, in which
his character is beset by the impersonal forces of authority, the police, and
the bureaucracy that will not tell him what he is guilty of.
Less is
more when it comes to stimulating strong emotions in the reader. One of the mistakes
made by some of the popular thriller writers is that they describe the terror
of characters instead of letting the reader feel the terror as Kafka does.
I have
been visited a number of times by Joe Vitarelli, a successful motion picture
actor who is writing his first novel. The little I’ve read of it shows a
remarkable talent. Some of the things he learned about writing may have come
from instruction he received from his father. When he was young, Vitarelli’s father said to him,
“Nobody can terrorize you as effectively as you can terrorize yourself.”
Vitarelli
had a character saying, “You have two choices, I can kill you or something else
can happen. Why don’t you wait and see.” End of chapter. The envelope is made.
The reader can terrorize himself by waiting, or he can go on reading.
Fiction and Nonfiction
Amphetamines for Speeding Up Pace
The success
of a book is measured by the satisfaction of readers. The measure of a reading
experience is often expressed as “This really moves fast” or “This book is slow
going.” Each describes the pace, or tempo, of a book in which fast is
good and slow is bad.
I’ve
heard editors, authors, and readers describe books as “a cannon-ball” or “a
zipper,” assuming speed to be a virtue. Yet the best of good books have
purposeful slowdowns in pace from time to time because the authors know that
readers, like athletes, must catch their breath.
Why
then the obsession with pace? Because a laggardly pace is characteristic of a
majority of novels that get turned down by publishers, and, alas, of some that
find their way into print but not into the hearts and recommendations of
readers. Most rejected manuscripts move too slowly, encouraging their readers
to put them down.
I was
tempted to call this chapter “teaching the unteachable” because of an event
that happened many years ago. Five editors from New York publishing houses,
myself among them, were on a panel at a meeting of the American Society of
Authors and Journalists. Amid the many faces staring up at us were quite a few
belonging to professional nonfiction writers who wanted to try their hands at
fiction. When one questioned the panel about “pace,” my four colleagues
suggested in turn that pace was a matter of ear or instinct, and hence
unteachable. I answered last and said in as inoffensive a tone as I could
muster, “Here’s how it’s done.” There was an immediate rustle of writers
reaching into their briefcases for pen and paper.
There
are quite a few techniques for stepping up the pace of fiction, ranging from
the simple to the quite complex. Most of these techniques are adaptable for
nonfiction also.
Journalists
know that short sentences step up pace. They also know that frequent
paragraphing accelerates the pace. Short sentences plus frequent
paragraphing step up pace even more.
Those
are simple observations that come to fiction writers only belatedly. And when
nonfiction writers turn to fiction, they often forget these simple rules.
In
fiction, a quick exchange of adversarial dialogue often proves to be an ideal
way of picking up pace by the use of short sentences and paragraphing. Here’s
an example.
Ben
Riller, Broadway play producer, has been ducking phone calls from a reporter
named Robertson. When Robertson calls again, Riller decides to take the call.
Note how the brief exchange starts with a relaxed paragraph and how the pace
picks up as the sentences get clipped. Also, note that there are twelve
paragraphs in this brief conversation:
“Hi,
Mr. Riller. I’ve been trying to reach you about a little item we’re running in
tomorrow’s paper about the show. I’d just like to get your comment to the story
around town that The Best Revenge may never open.”
“Mr. Robertson?”
“Yes?”
“If I tell you you’re wrong,
your story will say ‘Producer denies show folding,’ right?”
“Unless you’d care to
confirm that it is folding or make some other comment.”
“I do,” I said.
“Slowly, please,” he said,
“so I can take it down.”
“Mr. Robertson,” I said,
“does your wife have syphilis?”
Robertson’s voice shrilled,
“What the hell kind of question is that?”
“I’ll tell you,” I said.
“I’ve got an AP wire service reporter here finishing up an interview and he’d
like to run a story saying ‘Post reporter denies wife has syphilis.’ Well, has
she or hasn’t she?”
I could hear Robertson
breathing. Then he said, “You win, Mr. Riller,” and hung up.
It isn’t necessary to use dialogue to pick up the pace;
short sentences and frequent paragraphing alone can do the job. Here’s a rather
extreme example:
The
alley was dark. I could see a rectangle of light at the other end.
I had no choice. Joad was gaining.
The clop-clop of my shoes
echoed as I ran. Damn these high heels.
Suddenly a figure filled the
rectangle of light up ahead.
Was it Leach?
Or a cop?
I stopped. The silence was
awful.
Over my shoulder I saw Joad
enter the alley, boxing me in.
There were no doors. I
couldn’t climb the brick walls.
I dug in my purse for the
police whistle.
A deep breath, I told
myself.
The whistle was ice cold
against my lips. I blew, again and again till my ears hurt.
Joad’s laugh echoed down the
alley.
The figure at the other end
laughed, too.
Note that in addition to stepping up the pace, the clipped
sentences and frequent paragraphing increase the tension.
Skipping
steps can also increase the reader’s sense of pace. The following example
provides information in what might be described as a normal pace:
In the morning he would shower, brush his teeth, shave,
dress in a suitable business suit with shirt and tie, get down to the kitchen
in time to have his coffee and then rush off to the station, but he’d
frequently miss his train anyway.
Here’s how my friend and neighbor John Cheever did it in
his celebrated story “The Country Husband”:
He washed his body, shaved his jaws, drank his coffee,
and missed the seven-thirty-one.
Eliminating about two thirds of the words steps up the
pace brilliantly. I call this “skipping for effect.”
A
technique for stepping up pace in fiction that isn’t used enough is flipping
forward past a scene that never appears in the book.
Not too
many decades ago, when a door closed on a couple getting into bed, the chapter
would end. When the next chapter started, the coupling was long gone. The
bedroom scene existed only in the reader’s imagination. The effect on the
reader was that of the pace quickening. Here’s how the same effect can be
achieved in today’s less prudish environment.
In my
novel The Magician, there is one scene in which four rough teenagers
meet with an older girl for beer and sex. That chapter ends with the girl
saying, “Okay, who’s first?” The next chapter goes to a different location with
other characters. The scene that the reader anticipates never happens. I
was not being prudish. I did it to step up the pace. Though the book had
several million readers, none ever complained about the missing scene. The
point, of course, is that the more that happens in the reader’s imagination,
the greater his appreciation of your story. This applies to any kind of scene.
There’s
an extra benefit to picking up pace by skipping a scene. In revising your
manuscript, you may find some scene that doesn’t work as well as you had hoped.
Consider skipping that scene and turning a liability into an asset if removing
the scene propels the pace of your story.
In the
chapter on suspense, I showed how suspense can be prolonged throughout an
entire book by following each cliffhanging chapter ending with a chapter that
moves to a different location or has different characters. While that technique
of scene-switching is designed primarily to sustain more than one line of
suspense throughout, it also has the effect of increasing the pace of a story.
I
mentioned earlier a technique widely used in film called “jump-cutting.” It
works just as well in novels as it does in movies. With this technique, a story
moves from one scene to the next without the in-between matter that would be
part of getting from one place to the next. In life, you might leave your
apartment, go down the stairs and out into the street, get into your car, drive
to your destination, and enter a restaurant. Showing all of that in a movie, or
including it in fiction, would be a drag and boring.
In
jump-cutting, the viewer of a film might see a character close the door of a
house and immediately appear in a restaurant, perhaps even at a table in the
middle of a meal. Viewers have no trouble with jump-cutting. And it makes the
film seem to move fast. In a novel, a character might close a door. This would
be followed by a line space. The next scene is in a restaurant.
Jump-cutting
is also available to the nonfiction writer. Skipping in-between matter
increases the reader’s sense of an agreeable pace, and keeps him turning the
pages.
There
are three more techniques for stepping up pace that are inherent in the process
of deleting the flab in a manuscript. That is the subject of the next chapter.
Liposuctioning Flab
It was a
reviewer for Publishers Weekly named Jeffrey Zaleski who first suggested
in print that a forthcoming book needed liposuctioning. It’s a perfect
description of an important part of the editorial process. Flab is not only the
enemy of anyone with excessive flesh, it is the enemy of every writer.
Superfluous words and phrases soften prose. Fortunately, there is an antidote.
Flab-cutting
is one of the best means for improving the pace of both fiction and nonfiction.
When eliminated, the loss of fat has the welcome side effect of strengthening
the body of remaining text.
Flab,
if not removed, can have a deleterious effect on the impatient reader, who will
pay less attention to each word and begin to skip. Skimming—trying to pick out
the best parts of text while reading—is as unsatisfactory as trying to pick out
the seeds of raspberry jam.
The
quickest way of increasing the pace of a manuscript and strengthening it at the
same time is to remove all adjectives and adverbs and then readmit the
necessary few after careful testing. One of the students in my seminar who had
an adjective habit found that after eliminating all unnecessary adjectives and
adverbs from his book-length manuscript, it was seventy-three pages shorter and
considerably stronger!
Mark
Twain said, “If you catch an adjective, kill it!” Take his incitement to murder
as a measure of his conviction. The depth of his feelings about adjectives is
understandable. He was attempting to pierce the resistance of writers. Most
writers erect a Great Wall against the process of eliminating all but a minimal
number of adjectives and adverbs. I will guide you through the process of
examining them knowing that Twain is dragging you by one arm as I am by the
other.
Most
adjectives and adverbs are dispensable. The easiest ones to dispense with are
“very” and “quite.” Word processing programs make the process simple. Find and delete all the verys,
and quites that crept into your first draft.
Waste
adjectives are entirely unneeded. Here’s an example of a waste adjective that
needs dumping:
The conspicuous bulge in his jacket had to be a weapon.
You don’t need the word “conspicuous,” and the sentence is
stronger without it.
Adjective
surgery can be painful until you practice it rigorously and examine the
results. Let’s try some less painful preoperative procedures first.
Go
through your text and find any place where you have used two adjectives with a
single noun, such as “He was a feisty, combative reporter.” Eliminate one of
the adjectives, keeping the stronger one. In the example, I’d keep “feisty”
since it’s more evocative than “combative.” Experience proves that when two
adjectives are used, eliminating either strengthens the text. The more concrete
adjective is the one to keep. Or the one that makes the image more visual.
Let’s
think together about the following sentence:
He was a strong, resourceful warrior.
If we delete “resourceful,” we have a strong warrior. If
we delete “strong,” we have a resourceful warrior. Each would give us a
different meaning. A strong warrior is commonplace. A resourceful warrior might
be a more interesting choice, but the meaning we are striving for would dictate
our choice. The point is that the elimination of either adjective would lend
strength to the sentence. And in context, the cut would help improve the pace.
Quite apart from eliminating one out of six words, the comma goes too, and
commas tend to slow the reading process. Here’s another example of the use of
two adjectives with a noun:
He was a very strong, very powerful tennis player.
The first step, of course, is to take out those “very”s. What’s left is:
He was a strong, powerful tennis player.
Still too much. Which adjective do you eliminate to
strengthen the text? You have a choice:
He was a strong tennis player.
He was a powerful tennis player.
Each is better than the original. “Powerful”
has a special meaning in tennis—someone who hits the ball hard and has a hard
serve. A “strong” tennis player would be one who plays well tactically, and
delivers excellent strokes. Few players are both. The choice should not be
arbitrary.
In
addition to eliminating unnecessary words, I am focusing on using words for
their precise meaning, which is the mark of a good writer.
Here’s
a more difficult choice. What would you remove from the following sentence?
As he walked away, he seemed to be rocking, swaying from
side to side like Charlie Chaplin.
Your choices are several. You could remove “rocking” or
“swaying” or “swaying from side to side.” In this case, whether you remove
“rocking” or “swaying,” it might be advisable to keep “from side to side”
because it is visual, even though it is implied by either “rocking” or
“swaying.” In cutting excess verbiage, keep words that help the reader
visualize the precise image you are trying to fashion.
Here’s
a two-adjective sentence that needs improvement:
What a lovely, colorful garden!
Which of those two adjectives, “lovely” and “colorful,”
would you eliminate?
You
would be better off with the elimination of either adjective. However,
if you take out “colorful” and keep “lovely,” you would not be making the best
choice because “lovely” is vague and “colorful” is specific and therefore gives
the reader a more concrete image to visualize.
Examining
your adjectives provides an opportunity to see if you could possibly invoke the
reader’s curiosity with an adjective that is better than either one you now
have. What adjective could you use instead of both “lovely” and “colorful”?
There
are several curiosity-provoking adjectives you might have chosen:
What a curious garden!
What a strange garden!
What an eerie
garden!
What a remarkable
garden!
What a bizarre
garden!
“Lovely” and “colorful” don’t draw us in
because we expect a garden to be lovely or colorful. If we hear that a garden
is curious, strange, eerie, remarkable, or bizarre, we want to know why. An
adjective that piques the reader’s curiosity helps move a story along.
Of
course it needn’t be an adjective that provokes the reader’s interest. For
instance, consider:
She’d never seen a garden quite like this one.
Any word or group of words that makes the reader ask
“Why?” or “How?” also serves as an inducement for the reader to go on.
Like
any good rule, using one adjective in place of two has exceptions. Sometimes
two adjectives or an adverb modifying the adjective are necessary to create a
specific image:
Meryl Streep stood the way a heavily pregnant woman will,
in two motions, out of the chair and then up.
“Pregnant” alone wouldn’t give you the same image.
There
are several rules for determining which adjectives to keep:
An adjective, of course, modifies a noun. An adverb
modifies a verb. Most adverbs require the same tough surgery as adjectives:
Leona wished he would call soon.
The meaning of “soon” is implied. The adverb is
unnecessary. The sentence is stronger without it.
A
frequent error is the use of two adverbs. Which of the two adverbs in the
following sentence would you eliminate?
She really, truly cared for him.
Would you eliminate “really” or “truly”? You could take
out either. “She really cared for him” is okay. “She truly cared for him” is
okay too. But best of all is “She cared for him.” It is direct, and picks up
the pace.
Small
as these changes seem, cumulatively they have a powerful effect on prose.
Using
more than one adverb is a common fault. Here’s an example from a current
bestselling author:
John got up quickly and walked restlessly to the window.
He turned suddenly, smiling confidently. Then he sat down slowly, heavily.
That makes six adverbs in two sentences! Watch what
happens when you eliminate five of them:
John got up and walked to the window. He turned suddenly,
smiling. Then he sat down.
The pace is improved not only by eliminating five adverbs,
but also by shortening the sentences.
Before
you begin eliminating all adverbs by rote, keep in mind that sometimes adverbs
can be helpful. There are two adverbs in the following short sentence. Each
conveys something different:
He ate heartily, happily.
“Heartily” connotes eating a lot, “happily” connotes
taking pleasure. If it is the author’s intention to convey both meanings, the
adverbs should be retained. “He ate” without either adverb tells us little.
I hurriedly scribbled the number down on the pad.
Why get rid of “hurriedly”? Because scribbling connotes
hurry.
If not
all adverbs should be cut, what is the purpose of this exercise? It’s to get
you to pay close attention to whether each word is helping or hurting your
intention. Most of the time two adverbs slow down the pace and weaken the
sentence they’re in. But changes should not be made mechanically.
I have
two rules for testing adverbs to see if they are worth keeping:
Don’t let these exceptions make you lose sight of the fact
that most adverbs can be eliminated.
Verbs
can also get in the way of pace. Here’s one example:
He was huffing and puffing as he climbed the steep
street.
The one adjective in the sentence, “steep,” shouldn’t be
removed because if the street isn’t steep, why the huffing and puffing? It’s
the “huffing and puffing” that spoils the sentence because that phrase is a
cliché, a tired, overused, familiar conjunction of words. It would be perfectly
acceptable to say:
He was puffing as he climbed the steep street.
Can you detect the flab in the following sentence? Two of
the six words are unnecessary:
This idea is an interesting one.
Do you find the following sentence stronger?
This idea is interesting.
The flab words are “an” and “one.”
Removing
flab may seem a simple procedure, and in fact it is once a writer gets the
habit of looking for the waste words as if he were an editor. Which words would you remove from
the following sentence?
There is nothing I would like better than to meet an
interesting person who could become a new friend.
Here’s a clue. To quicken the pace, delete ten of the
nineteen words. Don’t go on until you’ve found all ten words. Be as tough on
yourself in eliminating unnecessary words as you think I might be if I were
editing your manuscript. The best writers of the hundreds I’ve dealt with over
the years were also the toughest on themselves. If you don’t find all ten
dispensable words, try again until you do.
I’ve
bracketed the words that could be deleted:
[There is nothing] I would like [better than] to meet an
interesting [person who could become a] new friend.
More than half the words have been eliminated!
Certain
words frequently constitute flab and can be eliminated: “however,” “almost,”
“entire,” “successive,” “respective,” “perhaps,” “always,” “there is.” Each
writer can compile a list of his own, words he uses from time to time that
contribute nothing but flab to a text. Your own made-to-order list will serve
as the best guide.
You’ve
undoubtedly heard it said that the best writers make every word count. Not
always. They, like us, sometimes slip up. Here’s an example from Pete Dexter’s
excellent novel Paris Trout, which won the 1988 National Book Award for
fiction:
In the moment of illumination, though, he saw him. Buster
Devonne was counting his money.
Check those two sentences. Can you detect three bits of
flab? Try to find those words before you go on.
Perhaps
you found the same words I did. They are in bold face:
In the moment of illumination, though, he saw him.
Buster Devonne was counting his money.
This leaves us with a shorter version that seems stronger
than the original:
In the moment of illumination, he saw Buster Devonne
counting his money.
Note how much faster that sentence seems to read than the
two-sentence version that contained the flab. And that’s from a prize-winning
book, the author making a slip that you will not make when you’ve mastered the
advice in this chapter.
Let’s
take a look at some sentences from which we want to eliminate flab. The
protagonist in this story is proud of his house, where he has had meetings with
important people. He is also a do-it-yourselfer. Here’s the first draft of his
thoughts as he comes home one day:
The best scenes of my private and public life have been
enacted here. Over the last fifteen years every room has been improved by my
labor.
What excess words would you remove? Try to find them
before going on.
The best scenes of my [private and public] life have been
enacted here. [Over the last fifteen years] Every room has been improved by my
labor.
Note how much the pace increased after the author took out
the bracketed words:
The best scenes of my life have been enacted here. Every
room has been improved by my labor.
The word “life” encompasses private and public. “Over the
last fifteen years” provided unnecessary information that weakened the
sentence.
The
next sentences come from the same novel. A successful loan shark is intent on
hiring a lawyer named Bert Rivers:
I went there to kind of smell out what he was like. That
was the last time I was in Bert Rivers’ office. From then on Bert Rivers came
to my office.
What I did in revising was quite simple. I cut the entire
middle sentence, which didn’t add anything. The deletion strengthened what was
left and stepped up the pace:
I went there to kind of smell out what he was like. From
then on Bert Rivers came to my office.
At chapter endings, cutting can be especially important.
The following is from the point of view of a mother who has learned that her
sixteen-year-old son has been killed in a fight. Here’s the original:
I looked up at the ceiling, knowing above the ceiling was
the roof, and above the roof was the sky, and somewhere in the sky there was a
power who knew your secrets, a power who emptied out the days and gave your kid
to the maggots. What does a mother do with her love? It wasn’t fair. Why did
God do nothing?
In revising, I thought the sentence “What does a mother do
with her love?” excessively sentimental. And “Why did God do nothing?” was too
abstract to leave the reader with a suitable emotion at the end of the chapter.
I cut both sentences. Here’s how the chapter now ends:
I looked up at the ceiling, knowing above the ceiling was
the roof, and above the roof was the sky, and somewhere in the sky there was a
power who knew your secrets, a power who emptied out the days and gave your kid
to the maggots. It wasn’t fair.
The author I have spent more time editing than any other
is Elia Kazan, winner of two Academy Awards and director of five Pulitzer Prize
plays who turned to fiction and became a number-one bestselling novelist. In
his autobiography Kazan said, “I was now in a new profession. My publisher Sol
Stein was my producer, and my editor Sol Stein was my director. ... He saw
quickly ... that I delighted in saying the same thing over and over, thereby
minimizing its impact (“One plus one equals a half,” Sol would say).”
Eliminating
the redundance was an important factor in his novel The Arrangement remaining
number one on the bestseller charts for thirty-seven consecutive weeks.
I’ve
been teaching my strange formula “One plus one equals a half” for a long time.
It has been of value even to the most talented and successful of writers. The
formula gives beginners insight into one of the factors that hurts chances for
publication.
Catching
“one-plus-ones” is a function of what is called “line editing.” Shouldn’t
writers rely on editors to catch things like that? The hard fact is that editors do a lot less line
editing than they used to. If a novel requires a lot of line editing, it is
less likely to be taken on by a publisher, who has to consider the cost of
editing. Which is why is it incumbent upon writers to become, in effect, their
own editors. This also applies to nonfiction writers and to writers of
screenplays and TV dramas.
On
television, the program In the Heat of the Night had a glaring example
of one-plus-one when Virgil Tibbs’s wife said to him, “My parents, Mom and Dad
.. .”
Who
else might her parents be besides “Mom and Dad”? The script writer should have
kept one or the other, not both.
Most
often the one-plus-one has the repetition put in a slightly different way.
Here’s an example from an American classic:
He was dirty. Everything about him was unclean. Even the
whites of his eyes were soiled.
What did the author fail to eliminate? Before you go on,
why don’t you try your hand at being his editor and bracket what you’d leave
out.
You
could have eliminated either of the first two sentences. My preference would be
to eliminate the second sentence because the short first sentence sets up the
effective last sentence better:
He was dirty. Even the whites of his eyes were soiled.
That example of one-plus-one comes from Sherwood
Anderson’s classic, Winesburg, Ohio. Here’s another example:
It was a dreadful situation, a time of purest
humiliation.
Here the choice is clearer. The first clause is general
and familiar. “It was a time of purest humiliation” is more specific. All you
have to do is delete the words “a dreadful situation” and you have a more
specific sentence that doesn’t say the same thing twice.
The
following is an example of one-plus-one from a recent book by a much admired
and successful novelist:
He had time to think, time to become an old man in aspic,
in sculptured soap, quaint and white.
Now let’s think about that sentence. There are two images,
“an old man in aspic” and an old man “in sculptured soap.” What’s wrong?
Both
images convey the same thing. A person in aspic is immobilized. A person in
sculptured soap is immobilized. Two images that convey the same thing make the
reader conscious of the images instead of letting the reader experience the
effect. And by cutting one of the two, the pace speeds up. If the author chose
the second one, the old man “in sculptured soap,” he should have eliminated
“quaint and white.” We usually think of soap as white unless a color is
indicated. And “quaint” means “odd in a pleasing way” or “old-fashioned.”
Neither definition really helps the image in this context. “An old man in
sculptured soap” is strong. “An old man in sculptured soap, quaint and white,”
is weaker. If the author felt he had to elaborate on sculptured soap to make
the image work, perhaps he should have chosen “an old man in aspic” instead.
Sometimes
a one-plus-one is created by an unnecessary repetition:
I noticed the finesse with which Mr. Brethson held the
creases in his trousers as he sat down. I was always fascinated by what people
did to keep dress-up clothes in shape.
The first-person narrator notices how Brethson holds the
creases in his trousers. The narrator’s generalization of what he sees is
distracting. In the editing, the second sentence should come out.
Earlier
in this book I have several times expressed admiration for the work of a new
novelist, Nanci Kincaid, whose Crossing Blood was published in the
autumn of 1992. Her effective characterization, often accomplished in a stroke,
deserves high praise. But she’s evidently had no training in eliminating
one-plus-ones. In fact, here she demonstrates one-plus-one-plus-one equals one
third! Let’s look at what she does one sentence at a time:
Sometimes I wished I had run after Daddy, hugged his leg
like a boa constrictor.
Not bad, though perhaps the image of a boa constrictor is
more negative than the author intended, as the context would seem to indicate.
Sometimes I wished I had run after Daddy, stuck to him
like a Band-Aid.
A nice image.
Sometimes I wished I had run after Daddy, locked myself
around him like a ball on a chain, like I was the law and he was the prisoner.
Fine. The only problem is that Nanci Kincaid used all
three images, one after the other. The passage from her novel reads:
Sometimes I wished I had run after Daddy, hugged his leg
like a boa constrictor, stuck to him like a Band-Aid, locked myself around him
like a ball on a chain, like I was the law and he was the prisoner.
Any one of the three images would be stronger than all
three strung together. And the pace would, of course, quicken. The images don’t
reinforce each other. Once again we break our experience to become conscious of
words on paper.
It’s
time for a word of caution. The “one plus one” guideline does not apply to a
conscious piling-up of words for effect. Here is an example of a purposeful
piling-up first of verbs and then of adjectives, taken from a recent nonfiction
book:
Their object is to tear down the individual in the eyes
of the court, to deprecate, denounce, defame, condemn, and revile him, and to
besmirch whatever reputation he may have had. Their intent is to leave him
demoralized, disheartened, discouraged, depressed, and shaken.
Clearly, this intentional piling on of verbs or adjectives
is done consciously for effect, unlike the “one-plus-ones” that diminish the
effect rather than add to it.
In this chapter, we’ve learned to look closely at what we
write, to test each word and phrase both for accuracy and necessity. We’ve also
learned to eliminate most adjectives and adverbs as unnecessary flab. And we’ve
found out that even successful writers trip up and reduce the effect of their
work with unnecessary repetition.
Removing
all forms of flab, including one-plus-ones, increases pace, helping a reader to
feel that “this book moves fast.”
I trust
you’ve enjoyed improving the pace of classics and bestsellers and knowing that
you won’t be making the same mistakes.
Tapping Your Originality
One of the
most important things a writer of fiction or nonfiction can do over time is to
find his individual voice, style, and view of the world. The author’s “voice”
is made up of the many factors that distinguish an author from all other
authors. Recognizing an individual author’s voice is like recognizing a voice
on the telephone. Many authors first find their “voice” when they learn to examine
each word for its necessity, precision, and clarity, as we are doing here. The
originality of some of the writers I have worked with was immediately apparent:
James Baldwin and Bertram Wolfe come to mind. Among my recent students, a young
man named Steve Talsky began his work this way:
I am
the way, the answer and the light, through me all things are possible.
He had written this once as
a joke on the headboard of his bed.
No one else I know—published or unpublished—could have
written that beginning. More recently, when I saw the early pages of a
completed novel by Anne James Valadez, my spirits rose in the hope that she
could sustain the promise of those early pages, a thoroughly believable scene
of two trees who were once lovers and now, rooted in place, can only report
what goes on beneath their branches. Despite the rootedness of the trees, the
story is anything but static. It is a work of remarkable originality.
An
extremely small percentage of writers show signs of an original voice at the
outset. It usually develops over time, and has two components, the originality
of what is said and the originality of the way it is said.
Over
the years, I encountered writers who felt they didn’t make their mark because
what they wrote was not sufficiently different from what other writers write. I
developed a teaching strategy, a way for writers to discover what they alone
can do. It is a high-risk, high-gain experiment. Though it can be accomplished
in minutes, it takes hard thought and perseverance. If the exercise works for
you, it could tap your originality.
I ask
you to imagine yourself on a rooftop, the townspeople assembled below. You are
allowed to shout down one last sentence. It is the sentence that the world will
remember you by forever. If you say it loud enough, everyone in the world will
hear you, no matter where they are. Think of shouting the sentence, even if you
seldom shout. What one thing are you going to say? If you’d like to try that
exercise now, write down the sentence.
Is your
sentence one that could have been said by any person you know? If so, revise it
until you are convinced no one else could have said that sentence.
When
you’ve reworked your original sentence, consider these additional questions:
Is your
sentence outrageous? Could it be? Is your sentence a question? Would it be
stronger as a question?
Make
whatever changes you like. I have still more questions:
Would
the crowd below cheer your sentence? Can you revise it to give them something
they’d want to cheer?
As you
can see, I am asking question after question to help you strengthen and
individualize your sentence. I continue:
Suppose
the person you most love in all the world were to strongly disagree with your
sentence. Can you answer his or her disagreement in a second sentence? Please
add it.
Some
writers will try to get out of further work by saying that their loved one
would agree with the sentence. People have different scripts. If your sentence
is original, the chances of another person—even your closest loved one—agreeing
with it without the slightest exception is extremely unlikely.
Has
your second sentence weakened your first? It usually does. If so, make it
stronger than the first.
When
you’ve done that, you now have the option of choosing one or the other
sentence. There may be value in combining and condensing them.
Finished?
Now imagine that you look down and see that the crowd below you is gone. You
see only one person, your greatest enemy, who says, “I didn’t hear you. Would
you repeat that?”
It is a
fact that given one last sentence, addressing one’s enemy can light up the
imagination more than an anonymous crowd can. You don’t want to give your enemy
the last word or let him respond in a way that would demolish what you’ve said.
Can you alter your sentence so that your statement will be enemy-proof?
This,
of course, continues the exercise with one of its most difficult phases,
creating an original sentence that is strong and to the best of the writer’s
ability, seemingly incontrovertible.
Suppose
you found out that the only way to get your message across would be if you
whispered your sentence. How would you revise it so that it would be suitable
for whispering?
It
isn’t always easy to change a shouted sentence to one that can be whispered and
heard, but it sometimes produces intriguing results and shows how the intent to
whisper can produce words that are stronger than shouted words.
The
last thing I’ll ask is for you to look at all of the versions of your sentence.
Is there a prior version that is actually stronger than the last? Can the
virtues of one be embodied in another? And most important, which sentence now
strikes you as the most original, the one least likely to have been written by
someone else?
The
first attempt at this exercise may not produce your ideal original expression.
Save your results and try again. But my experience has been that often the
first run of this exercise will direct you to a theme or expression of a theme
that is uniquely yours. You have begun to tap your originality, to find your
voice. In the meantime, you’ve had another lesson in the value of shunning the
sentence that comes first, and honing, changing, polishing the words of a
single sentence to test all of its possibilities. That is, after all, the
writer’s work.
The Door to Your Book: Titles That Attract
One day in
1962 an elderly woman with a marked Greek accent came to see me in my apartment
in New York. Elia Kazan’s mother arrived holding in her hand an advance copy of
her son’s first book, America America, which I was about to publish. Her
voice betraying a slight quiver, she said that when the plays her son directed
won Pulitzer Prizes and his direction of films twice won Academy Awards, her
friends were not impressed because they, also Greek immigrants, did not go to the
movies or see Broadway plays. Now, she said, holding America America up
triumphantly, at long last she had something that she could show her friends!
The
book, which had a modest first printing, was selected by the Reader’s Digest
Condensed Book Club, reprinted in mass market paperback, translated into many
languages, made into a film, and widely reviewed as the best fiction ever on
the uniquely American theme of immigration. All of that might not have
happened. When the manuscript arrived, Kazan’s name for it was The Anatolian
Smile, which, I thought, closed the door against a wide readership. The
Anatolian Smile was not a title designed to attract readers, nor did it
resonate with the book’s grand theme, how a young man, beset by the hardships
of the old world, determined to emigrate to America, and stopped at
nothing—even murder—to get to the United States.
Given
Kazan’s considerable reputation as a director and his known ability to say no
in a voice designed to quash an opponent, others might have been tempted to go
with the original title. Kazan’s first book also happened to be the first book
that I would be publishing under the Stein and Day imprint; my idealistic
determination was to make every book a winner. That title, The Anatolian
Smile, would not help. I contributed one word twice, the title America
America.
I have
met many talented writers who insulate their books from the public with titles
that are not likely to arouse a reader’s interest or to promise a rich
experience. That stubbornness is persistent. Many years after Kazan’s book left
my care, he recycled his original title and had another publisher, perhaps less
willing to oppose his strong will, issue a novel with the title The
Anatolian. That was the first time one of his novels missed a run on the
bestseller list. The author was the same. The quality of writing was the same.
The title, an avoidable mistake, may have turned off the many millions who were
part of his longstanding audience. The novel quickly dropped from sight, its
door closed.
A
book’s life depends on reviewers, booksellers, and readers. Picture a reviewer
standing before shelves loaded with the many dozens of review copies that
arrive from publishers each week. He can review only one. Which does he pull
down from the shelf to see if he might be interested in reviewing it? Would he
pull down a book called Argghocker! And how will people know Argghocker
is wonderful if it doesn’t get reviewed?
Venture
into any bookstore and look at the titles of new novels on display. Take note of
your reactions to the titles of books by authors you don’t know. You’ll see how
many books don’t tempt you to pick them up because of their titles, and
which titles intrigue you enough to want to take them down off the shelf and
read the flaps.
Titles
are equally important in nonfiction. While the subject matter of an ordinary
nonfiction book is often enough to attract initial interest to it, a lively
title will help even a how-to book. As nonfiction ascends in ambition and
achievement, the title becomes as influential as for a novel. One of the
authors I worked with closely over many years was Bertram D. Wolfe, whose best
work became classics. Wolfe wanted to do a biography of Diego Rivera, one of
the great twentieth-century painters Wolfe had known well. The hitch was that
two decades earlier Wolfe had already written a biography of Diego Rivera that
was published by Alfred A. Knopf, one of the finest publishers in America. The
book was titled simply Diego Rivera. Though published in a beautiful
edition, it did not do well. Wolfe put forward that Rivera had lived another
eighteen years after the first biography was published, the events of those
years unrecorded. Moreover, Wolfe asserted, in the intervening years he had
acquired more insight into the artist and his work. And so he embarked on a new
biography, which he titled The Fabulous Life of Diego Rivera.
Consider
this: The author was the same. The subject was the same. But the title had a
power and a resonance that the earlier title lacked. The new book was selected by a book club,
nominated for a National Book Award, sold well, and became a standard work. I
attribute that success in large measure to the excellent title of the second
book. The Fabulous Life of Diego Rivera promised the reader much more
than the earlier title.
How do
you go about finding the right title for a book? Let’s look at a spectacular
example of a bad title and how it was changed. In the early eighties, one of my
editors brought in a manuscript by Cecil B. Currey, a graduate of the U.S. Army
Command and General Staff College, a professor of military history, and the
author of eight previous books. The book described, sometimes in harrowing
moment-by-moment detail, the destruction of an American infantry division in
World War II. The manuscript, based on previously classified documents and
firsthand testimony from both German and American survivors, demonstrated the
tragic consequences of inept commanders. Despite the book’s importance, I
thought the author’s straightforward title for it would kill sales. He called
it The Battle of Schmidt.
First,
nobody had heard of a place called Schmidt, much less of a battle fought there.
And Americans, including the members of our editorial board, couldn’t keep from
laughing at the sound of Schmidt, not an appropriate response to a
serious book. What we needed was an intriguing title with the right resonance.
Many
effective titles have come from poems and songs, and I thought of a song that
would likely be remembered by a prime audience for the book, the tens of
thousands of infantry officers of World War II. In Officers Training School at
Fort Benning, Georgia, young men sometimes kept their spirits up during the
“eighteen weeks of hell in Georgia” by singing a ditty someone anonymous had
composed to the tune of the Cornell University alma mater, “High Above Cayuga’s
Waters.” See if you can pick out the words that became the title of Cecil
Currey’s book:
High
above the Chattahoochee
Near
the Upatoy
Stands
an old abandoned shithouse
Benning
School for Boys.
Onward ever, backward never
Follow me and die
To the port of embarkation
Next of kin goodbye.
As you may have guessed, The Battle of Schmidt became
Follow Me and Die, with the subtitle The Destruction of an American
Division in World War II. “Follow me” was the motto of the Infantry School,
and the cynical use of it in the song had the perfect reverberation for the
book, which went on to be selected by the Military Book Club, and had a life in
hardcover and later in paperback, none of which would likely have happened with
the original title.
Nonfiction
titles are usually easier to come by because in the great majority of cases the
author can and does fall back on a short description of what the book is about.
If Henry Kissinger calls his book Diplomacy, that’s enough. But Diplomacy
by an author whose name is not widely known would be what book sales reps
call “a tough sell.”
What
many nonfiction writers neglect is the appeal more imaginative titles hold for
readers. Take the simple matter of making a book of shorter pieces of
previously published nonfiction. Saul Bellow, whose novel titles are admirable,
in 1994 published a collection called It All Adds Up. Some of the
content is vintage Bellow, but if you’re not familiar with Bellow’s shorter nonfiction,
would you hurry to look inside a book called It All Adds Up! (The
subtitle is no better: “From the Dim Past to the Uncertain Future.”) John
Updike published a collection that he called by the blah title Picked-Up
Pieces, which seems to minimize the content. Long ago I published a
collection of such pieces by Lionel Trilling, which he called by the charming
title A Gathering of Fugitives. There is no reason to give any book a
handicap in its title.
Titles
by academicians are sometimes intentionally dull in order to sound serious.
However, Allan Bloom, a professor at the University of Chicago, presumably knew
that a typical academic title might restrict his readership to other
academicians. When he wrote a book on “how higher education has failed democracy
and impoverished the souls of today’s students,” Professor Bloom called it The
Closing of the American Mind, which surely contributed to the book’s
becoming a bestseller.
Can an
imaginative title help a how-to book? Indeed it can. I recall several people
resisting the title of Jo Coudert’s first book, Advice from a Failure. “Who
wants to listen to advice from a failure?” is what they said as we deliberated
over the title. The author and I stuck with her provocative title. Advice
from a Failure turned into a long-lasting, popular success.
Even
better as a title was one that came with a child-care manuscript from a
pediatrician with sound advice and a sense of humor. He called his book How to Raise Children at Home in
Your Spare Time. It was taken by twenty-eight book clubs, and I’m certain
the title helped.
One of
the more influential nonfiction editors of our time, Alice Mayhew, has a
particular talent for devising resonant titles for major books. Witness All
the President’s Men, Den of Thieves, and Parting the Waters.
Good
article titles can help catch the attention of the reader browsing through a
periodical. An intriguing title is sometimes sufficient to promote an article
to the front cover of a magazine. James Thurber called one of his pieces “The Secret
Life of James Thurber.” Readers are attracted to secrets the way anteaters are
attracted to anthills. Edward Hoagland attracted attention to an article by
calling it “The Courage of Turtles.” Most readers would not think of courage in
the context of turtles. The title arouses curiosity. Long ago, William Hazlitt
entitled an essay “On the Pleasure of Hating.” Hatred as a pleasure? The
reader’s curiosity piqued, he wants to see what the author has to say.
A title
that people respond to can spur completion of the work. For years F d been
writing an autobiography called Passing for Normal, which I began
working on seriously only after the title became known to my friends and they
responded enthusiastically without having read a word.
I
recall asking participants in one of my Fiction Weekends for their titles, and
at least two of them were so good I hoped their novels-in-progress made it to
publication: Driving in Neutral and Scenes from a Life in the Making.
Good
titles are hard to come by, even for some writers of the first rank. Consider a
book once called The Parts Nobody Knows. Is it a medical text? The
talented author retitled the book, To Love and Write Well, which sounds
amateurish, though the author was by that time world famous. Still struggling
to find a title for the book, he tried again, this time calling it How
Different It Was, which might excite some curiosity about what “it” is, but
is a weak title nevertheless. The author, still searching, went from not so
good to much worse, coming up with yet another title, With Due Respect.
With
due respect, that title is simply awful. Then the author made his final
decision, and called the book The Eye and the Ear. That had to be his
final choice because Ernest Hemingway died before the book was published.
His
widow, Mary, had a better ear for titles. She took the book’s final title from
another manuscript. The book was published as A Moveable Feast.
Hemingway,
one of the great innovators of twentieth-century American fiction, was often
inept when it came to titling his work. One novel he at various times called As
Others Are, The World’s Room, They Who Get Shot, and The Carnal Education. Another
title for that book was An Italian Chronicle, later changed to The
Sentimental Education of Frederick Henry. By now you may have guessed that
the book’s final title was A Farewell to Arms, a resonant metaphor that
lingers in the mind. And there you have the first clue as to what many great
novel titles have in common, the use of metaphor.
Another
American author, winner of the Nobel Prize, had a novel that for a while he
called Twilight. Not exactly a grabber that invites you to open to the
first page. The author is William Faulkner. Does Twilight conjure up the
energy of The Sound and the Fury?
One way
of enticing a reader is to title a novel with the name of the leading character
plus an energizing factor. Saul Bellow’s The Adventures of Augie March promises
more than the name Augie March. His Henderson the Rain King resonates;
the name Henderson would not. D. H. Lawrence discarded an inadequate title, Tenderness,
before he called the book Lady Chatterley’s Lover. It’s hard to
imagine that Scott Fitzgerald used Hurrah for the Red White and Blue before
he hit on The Great Gatsby. What makes that title intriguing is the
adjective “Great.”
When an
author successfully builds a wide audience for his work, the “title” for his
next and future books is usually his name. After The Naked and the Dead, any
book of Norman Mailer’s was sold as “Norman Mailer’s new book” rather than
under its title.
New
York magazine once had a
competition for its readers to turn good titles into bad titles. Someone
suggested downgrading Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead to The
Nude and the Deceased. Though the words mean the same, the latter title for
the same novel might have quashed the book’s chances in the marketplace.
An author presumably controls the title of his book, but
he is subject to heavy influence from people on the publisher’s staff. They are
the money and the power. An author doesn’t always get to exercise his
prerogative when it comes to titles.
I lost
out once. I had a novel I called A Stopping Place. The jacket design
included a swastika as a prominent feature. The title, in the presence of a
swastika, had exactly the kind of low-key resonance I wanted for the book.
However, shortly before press time Publishers Weekly carried an
announcement of a novel by an author in India who called his book A Stopping Place. Titles can’t be copyrighted (only motion
picture titles can be protected by registration). I wanted to go ahead with my
title but the publisher was afraid there might be confusion in the marketplace.
Reluctantly, and because everyone was in a hurry for a title change, I okayed
the publisher’s suggestion of The Resort as a title, though I never
liked it. It had no resonance.
The
point to remember is that the primary function of a title is not to provide the
locus of a story, but to entice the reader. Would you believe The Heart Is a
Lonely Hunter was once called The Mute! Or that The Red Badge of
Courage was originally titled Private Fleming, His Various Battles! Or
that The Blackboard Jungle went by the name To Climb the Wall!
Is
there a factor that above all others contributes to making a title intriguing
and memorable? I’ve studied the titles that have captured the public
imagination during my lifetime. Add to The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, The Red
Badge of Courage, and The Blackboard Jungle the following titles
that almost everyone seems to like, and ask yourself what they have in common:
Tender Is the Night
A Moveable Feast
The Catcher in the Rye
The Grapes of Wrath
All seven of those titles are metaphors. They put
two things together that don’t ordinarily go together. They are intriguing,
resonant, and provide exercise for the reader’s imagination.
A
beginning writer might say, “Stein, those are all books by famous writers. What
can we do?”
A great
deal. A good title, as I’ve said, can inspire a writer’s work. One of the
students in my advanced fiction seminar had problems with his work until he
came up with an intriguing title, The Passionate Priest. He backed it up
with an excellent first chapter that fit the title. Then, after our discussion
about the metaphoric resonance of so many good titles, he came up with an even
better one that drew immediate approval from all of his colleagues: A Heart
Is Full of Empty Rooms.
Are
there questions you might ask yourself about the title of your work? Yes.
Does it
sound fresh and new?
Does
it, like a metaphor, bring together two things that haven’t been together
before? If not, is there a way of doing that with a variation of your present
title? Can you use the name of the principal character in an interesting
context?
The
point to remember is that the primary function of a title is not to convey
meaning as much as to sound enticing and if possible exude resonance.
Sometimes
one is tempted to wax cynical about titles. Raymond Chandler once said, “A good
title is the title of a successful book.” That is certainly borne out by the
book that won the 1993 National Book Award for Poetry. Its title was Garbage.
Occasionally, a book with an awkward or bad title will somehow make it in
the marketplace. Since my aim is to ease the reader’s path to publication, I’ll
fall back on my experience as a publisher: a good title is like coming to a
house you’ve never been in before and having the owner open the door and say
“Welcome.” A good title can make a tremendous difference in the early
acceptance of a book.
Nonfiction
Using the Techniques of Fiction to Enhance Nonfiction
It is
immensely valuable for the journalist, biographer, and other writers of
nonfiction to examine the techniques that novelists and short story writers
use. In editing many articles and hundreds of nonfiction books over the years,
I worked on almost every conceivable kind from child care to philosophy, from
books that with hindsight probably should not have been published to works that
zoomed high up on the bestseller lists or that became standard works. For our
purposes here, I will divide all nonfiction into just two categories: practical
and literary. There is some overlap, of course, but the basic distinctions are
as follows:
Practical
nonfiction is designed to communicate information in circumstances where the
quality of the writing is not considered as important as the content. Practical
nonfiction appears mainly in popular magazines, newspaper Sunday supplements,
feature articles, and in self-help and how-to books. The subjects tend to be
instruction, guides, tips, collections of facts, “inside” stories about a
particular industry or locale or celebrated personalities, so-called
inspirational material, popular psychology, medical and other self-help for the
layman. The vocabulary of practical nonfiction is usually as simple as is
permitted by the subject matter.
Literary
nonfiction puts emphasis on the precise and skilled use of words and tone, and
the assumption that the reader is as intelligent as the writer. While
information is included, insight about that information, presented with some
originality, may predominate. Sometimes the subject of literary nonfiction may
not at the outset be of great interest to the reader, but the character of the
writing may lure the reader into that subject.
Literary
nonfiction appears in books, in some general magazines such as the New
Yorker, Harper’s, the Atlantic, Commentary, the New York Review of Books, in many so-called little or small-circulation
magazines, in a few newspapers regularly and in some other newspapers from time
to time, occasionally in a Sunday supplement, and in book review media.
It
should be no secret to readers of this book that I favor work in which the
writer presents his best not his quickest, and where the language used comes
not from the top of the head but from a consideration of precision, clarity,
euphony, and alternatives.
Reporting
in nonfiction can be accurate, like a photograph taken merely to record. The
best of nonfiction, however, often sets what it sees in a framework, what has
happened elsewhere or in the past. As the recorded events march before the
reader, a scrim lifts to convey other dimensions, sight becomes insight,
reporting becomes art.
Like
fiction, nonfiction accomplishes its purpose better when it evokes emotion in
the reader. We might prefer everyone on earth to be rational, but the fact is
that people are moved more by what they feel than by what they understand.
Great orators as well as great nonfiction writers have always understood that.
Nonfiction
concerns itself with people, places, and ideas. Ideas seem to attract readers
when developed through anecdotes involving people. Some nonfiction writers say
they are jealous of novelists who create their characters; they are stuck with
life, the characters in the news, the people they have to interview. No matter,
the techniques for rounding the characters and making them come alive are
similar.
When
the nonfiction writer reports to the reader about a living person, the writer
has two options. He can characterize the person the way a layman would or he
can strive to give the person life on the page. In biography, the choice is
clear. If the characters do not breathe, the exercise of assembling the facts
of their lives may be of use to scholars but not to readers. When it comes to making
the people we write about in nonfiction spring to life on the page, the
techniques are useful for all nonfiction writers, not just biographers and
historians. Too often, though, what we get in newspapers and magazines is the
person’s name and title and little else, sometimes a photo or drawing. We may
know what the person looks like, but we don’t yet know the person.
Characterization matters. The reader’s attention to a story and the pleasure he
derives from it is often measured by how alive the participants seem, which
stems, of course, from the skill with which they are portrayed.
It
doesn’t take much to make people come alive on the page. Novelists learn to
provide vitality to minor characters in a sentence or two, usually by selecting one characteristic that
is unusual. You will recall the beginning of Budd Schulberg’s What Makes
Sammy Run?, in which the sixteen-year-old protagonist is described as “a
little ferret of a kid.” Our dictionaries are full of animals, fish, birds, and
insects that can be used in the characterization of people: the wolf as
predator, or someone who wolfs down food; the yearling as innocent; the toucan
as beak-nosed; falcons and hawks as high-fliers; the bat whose sonar for
staying out of trouble is more effective than the sonar of most politicians.
Plants, from the prickly cactus to the abrasive nettle, are also useful to help
characterize. Live-forevers, weeds, invasive clover, fast-growing fescue,
wild-flowers are among the suggestive names of plants that a writer can use for
brief and colorful characterizations.
The
best way to make a person come alive is by rendering the person’s appearance
with some specific detail. Here are some examples from articles, news stories,
and books. See if you can detect the key words or phrases that characterize the
person:
The garage attendant’s hat was parked perilously on an
excessive amount of hair.
This characterization has a touch of humor in that the
verb “parked” is used for the garage attendant’s hat. The visual image is of an
ill-fitting cap that might fall off at any moment. It’s enough to enliven this
passing character.
How do
you enliven an accountant?
His accountant is an owl of a man who keeps one eyelid
half shut not because of an affliction but because there is much in this world
he is not prepared to see.
Note the key words and phrases. “Owl” characterizes the
man physically, the rest of the sentence characterizes him psychologically.
John
Updike, who writes much nonfiction in addition to his celebrated novels, can
characterize in a sentence:
His face is so clean and rosy it looks skinned.
A layman might describe a man as being dressed all in
black. The image is vague, it gets the fact across, but not the feeling. It
could have been written by anybody. Here’s what Updike did, again in a
nonfiction work:
He sits by the little clubhouse, in a golf cart, wearing
black. He is Greek. Where, after all these years in America, does he buy black
clothes? His hat is black. His shirt is black. His eyes, though a bit rheumy
with age now, are black, as are his shoes and their laces. Small black points
exist in his face, like scattered punctuation.
Markers that signal a person’s background can be as useful
to writers of nonfiction as to novelists, though few think of markers as a matter
of course. Writers of articles, features, and books are more likely to use
markers than journalists preparing copy on the run. If reporters try to use
markers consciously a few times, it can become a rewarding habit.
As an
example of the use of markers in nonfiction, I’ve chosen excerpts from a
front-page story about the hapless treasurer of Orange County, California,
Robert L. Citron, from the New York Times of December 11, 1994:
He was the type to wear, along with patent leather shoes
and belts, red polyester pants and a green blazer at Christmas, pastels at
Easter, and orange and black on Halloween.
The license plate on Mr. Citron’s car is LOV USC; and,
until it broke, the horn was programmed to play the school’s fight song.
These markers—there are more—fit the main point of the
story, that the Orange County treasurer who managed and lost billions was not a
sophisticated Wall Street type, but a homespun local with unsophisticated
tastes. The story focuses on the Santa Ana Elks Club, where Citron came for
lunch routinely, arriving at ten past noon and leaving at ten minutes before
one. Even the dining room of the Elks Club is described with markers:
The decor is heavy on Formica, Naugahyde and Styrofoam.
On the tables, the only centerpieces are Keno coupons and bottles of Heinz
Ketchup and McIlhenny’s Tabasco sauce.
These markers of Mr. Citron’s private time contrast with
his role as “a sophisticated, aggressive and daring investor” whose “high
returns ... made him not only a legend in financial circles nationwide but a
hero to local politicians desperate to do more with less.” Quick bites of
television and the usual news stories told of Orange County’s financial
disaster but did not capture the human drama of the man behind the collapse.
The memorable account by reporter David Margolick that I am quoting ends with a
comment from a man by the name of Fred Prendergast, “a regular at Mr. Citron’s
table at the Elks”:
“To go to a man’s home Sunday afternoon, intrude in his
personal life, and practically force him to resign, is the most cowardly thing
a person could do,” he said bitterly. “All they had to do was wait for eight
o’clock in the morning, or seven in Bob’s case, and he’d have been right in his
office, where he’s supposed to be. They treated him like an animal.”
With the aid of markers and particularity, Margolick made
Robert L. Citron visible the way photographs of the man do not and gave a news
story a human face and the ring of tragedy. The nonfiction writer who becomes
aware of the emotions elicited by cultural differences can use this power in
representing people by well-chosen class markers.
Often
the writer’s job is to characterize public figures in depth. I’ve selected an
example from a work of history, a classic that has sold far more copies than
many bestsellers.
Most
people have at least an idea as to what Lenin, the founder of the Soviet Union,
looked like. Paintings, and sculpture, seen in books and on TV, have carried
the often romanticized image. Some photographs bring us closer to the truth.
But a skilled writer can give us not only exact images but a sense of
personality. In the following paragraph, both Lenin and his brother Alexander
are characterized:
Alexander’s face was long and brooding; his skin milky
white; his hair, thick, turbulent, frizzy, deeply rooted, stood up in all
directions from a line far down on his forehead. His eyes, set deep and on a
strange angle in a knobby, overhanging brow, seemed to turn their gaze inward.
It was the strongly chiseled face of a dreamer, a saint, a devotee, an ascetic.
But Vladimir’s head was shaped like an egg, and the thin fringe of reddish hair
began to recede from the forehead before he was twenty, leaving him bald, like
his father, in young manhood. His complexion was a blend of grayishness and
full-bloodedness; his eyes tiny, twinkling, Mongoloid. His whole aspect, except
in moments of intense thought or anger, was jovial, humorous, mischievous,
self-confident, aggressive. Not knowing him, one might have taken him in later
years for a hard-working kulak, a rising provincial official, a shrewd
businessman. There was nothing in his
build or appearance or temperament to suggest kinship with his brother
Alexander.
The
excerpt is from Bertram D. Wolfe’s Three Who Made a Revolution. One of
the strengths in the description of Lenin is the evocation of what he looked
like earlier and later. That’s a technique all writers can employ under
appropriate circumstances. Note the liberties taken by the author. Alexander’s
hair is turbulent. It is also deeply rooted (how could the author know?), which
conveys its permanence as contrasted with Lenin’s baldness. Lenin is compared
to three different types: a kulak (a well-off farmer), a provincial official, a
businessman.
Is
taking risks, as this author has, irresponsible in nonfiction? The dean of
American literary critics of this century, Edmund Wilson, referred to the book
from which this paragraph was taken as the “best book in its field in any
language.”
It’s
worth taking risks. If it doesn’t work, it will be apparent when you revise.
What if the subject of an article or a book is well known
to at least part of your audience, as would be the case with, say, Franklin D.
Roosevelt? What can a nonfiction writer do that is fresh and new in
characterization when dealing with someone whose history has been the object of
intensive research by many writers? One interview, with Betsey Whitney, is the
basis for the extraordinary first paragraph of Doris Kearns Goodwin’s book, No
Ordinary Time:
On nights filled with tension and concern, Franklin
Roosevelt performed a ritual that helped him to fall asleep. He would close his
eyes and imagine himself at Hyde Park as a boy, standing with his sled in the
snow atop the steep hill that stretched from the south porch of his home to the
wooded bluffs of the Hudson River far below. As he accelerated down the hill,
he maneuvered each familiar curve with perfect skill until he reached the
bottom, whereupon, pulling his sled behind him, he started slowly back up until
he reached the top, where he would once more begin his descent. Again and again
he replayed this remembered scene in his mind, obliterating his awareness of
the shrunken legs beneath the sheets, undoing the knowledge that he would never
climb a hill or even walk on his own power again. Thus liberating himself from
his paralysis through an act of imaginative will, the president of the United
States would fall asleep.
The evening of May 9, 1940,
was one of these nights. At 11 p.m., as Roosevelt sat in his comfortable study
on the second floor of the White House, the long-apprehended phone call had
come ...
That paragraph, like much of the book, is filled with
visual particularity and action. Goodwin’s book is worth studying for its
technique in using research, all of it documented, not only to characterize
historical persons but to provide the reader with a rich experience.
Here is a checklist of questions you can ask yourself when characterizing:
Setting a scene goes hand in hand with characterization.
Suppose someone described a scene from history this way:
Mary Stuart came into the great hall, followed by her
retinue. She climbed the steps to her chair, faced her audience, and smiled.
The reader gets the information, the facts, but not the
essence of the occasion, and it is the essence that conveys truth. There is no
reason why nonfiction writers cannot do as well as novelists in conveying a
scene. Witness what historian Garrett
Mattingly did in introducing Mary Stuart in The Armada:
She entered through a little door at the side, and before
they saw her was already in the great hall, walking towards the dais, six of
her own people, two by two, behind her, oblivious of the stir and rustle as her
audience craned forward, oblivious, apparently, of the officer on whose sleeve
her hand rested, walking as quietly, thought one pious soul, as if she were
going to her prayers. Only for a moment, as she mounted the steps and before
she sank back into the black-draped chair, did she seem to need the supporting
arm, and if her hands trembled before she locked them in her lap, no one saw.
Then, as if acknowledging the plaudits of a multitude, though the hall was very
still, she turned for the first time to face her audience and, some thought,
she smiled.
How much Mattingly gets into part of one paragraph, all of
it designed to make a scene he never saw real to the reader.
The
difference between ordinary nonfiction and extraordinary writing, as in
Mattingly, is often in the resonance:
Against the black velvet of the chair and dais her figure, clad in black
velvet, was almost lost. The gray winter daylight dulled the gleam of white
hands, the glint of yellow gold in her kerchief and of red gold in the piled
masses of auburn hair beneath. But the audience could see clearly enough the
delicate frill of white lace at her throat and above it, a white, heart-shaped
petal against the blackness, the face with its great dark eyes and tiny,
wistful mouth. This was she for whom Rizzio had died, and Darnley, the young
fool, and Huntly, and Norfolk, and Babington and a thousand nameless men on the
moors and gallows of the north. This was she whose legend had hung over England
like a sword ever since she had galloped across its borders with her subjects
in pursuit. This was the last captive princess of romance, the dowager queen of
France, the exiled queen of Scotland, the heir to the English throne and (there
must have been some among the silent witnesses who thought so, at this very
moment, if she had rights) England’s lawful queen. This was Mary Stuart, Queen
of Scots. For a moment she held all their eyes, then she sank back into the
darkness of her chair and turned her grave inattention to her judges. She was
satisfied that her audience would look at no one else.
Note how Mattingly conveys the strength of her presence in
the last lines of that paragraph. He is characterizing a strong queen for whom
many had died. Is he making things up? The writing—quite apart from Mattingly’s
considerable reputation as a historian—convinces us that the author has feasted
on every scrap of eyewitness testimony and on paintings to convey that scene.
Lest you conclude that resonance is available only to the
writer of history, here is a paragraph from James Baldwin’s essay about his
father from his first published nonfiction book, Notes of a Native Son. Note
how the drive to the graveyard blossoms into so much more:
A few hours after my father’s funeral, while he lay in
state in the undertaker’s chapel, a race riot broke out in Harlem. On the
morning of the third of August, we drove my father to the graveyard through a
wilderness of smashed plate glass.
The day of my father’s
funeral had also been my nineteenth birthday. As we drove him to the graveyard,
the spoils of injustice, anarchy, discontent, and hatred were all around us. It
seemed to me that God himself had devised, to mark my father’s end, the most
sustained and brutally dissonant of codas. And it seemed to me, too, that the
violence which rose all about us as my father left the world had been devised as
a corrective for the pride of his eldest son. I had declined to believe in that
apocalypse which had been central to my father’s vision; very well, life seemed
to be saying, here is something that will certainly pass for an apocalypse
until the real thing comes along. I had inclined to be contemptuous of my
father for the conditions of his life, for the conditions of our lives. When
his life had ended I began to wonder about that life and also, in a new way, to
be apprehensive about my own.
Conflict, Suspense, and Tension in Nonfiction
Are the
techniques of plotting any use to the nonfiction writer?
All
storytelling from the beginning of recorded time is based on somebody wanting
something, facing obstacles, not getting it, trying to get it, trying to
overcome obstacles, and finally getting or not getting what he wanted. What has
interested listeners, readers, and viewers for centuries is available in the
conscious use of desire in nonfiction.
In life
we prefer an absence of conflict. In what we read, an absence of conflict means
an absence of stimulation. Few things are as boring as listening to uncontested
testimony in a courtroom. Few things are as interesting as a courtroom clash.
If Marjorie and Richard lived happily ever after, the reader’s response is “So
what?” In articles, newspaper stories, and books, the reader’s interest often
flags because the writer did not keep in mind that dramatic conflict has been
the basis of stories from the beginning of time.
Conflict
does not have to involve violence. Conflict can be low key. It can exist by
innuendo. What it takes is a mind-set when examining the cast of a prospective
piece, whether it is to be an article or a scene in a book. Are there two
people, two parties, two organizations, or two entities of any kind that are in
conflict? If the conflict might not be immediately apparent to the reader, can
the writer provide some help by bringing the conflicting elements closer to
each other and by highlighting the conflict, actual or potential?
Conflict
can arise from a thwarted desire, but the desire must be planted. Here’s a
simple before-and-after example:
Terence McNiece, 14, was arraigned yesterday in Town
Court for allegedly stealing a bicycle belonging to a neighbor.
Watch what happens when desire is added:
According to the testimony of his mother, Terence McNiece
wanted a bicycle more than anything in the world, but she couldn’t afford to
buy him one. Terence, age 14, was arraigned yesterday in Town Court for
allegedly stealing a bicycle belonging to a neighbor.
In the first part of the example, the information that a
boy has been arrested for stealing a bicycle comes across as dispassionate
fact. It’s rather blah. The revised version, in which we learn that the boy
wanted a bicycle more than anything else in the world and that his mother
couldn’t afford to buy him one, tugs at the reader’s emotions. What has been
activated is the boy’s desire for the bike, which is more powerful than the act
of stealing. A news story or a nonfiction piece can move a reader more if the
writer remembers that desire, wanting something important badly, can be a
force.
The
more important the objective, the bigger the conflict will seem to the reader
if there are obstacles in the way of gratifying the want. The thing that’s
wanted may not be possible. Nevertheless, the reader can have his emotions
stimulated by that unrealistic and unattainable want.
When
the writer has his material and is ready to begin writing, that’s the time to
determine whether any of the people in the story he is about to write want
something badly. Bringing that material up to the beginning could help touch a
match to the reader’s emotions.
One of the best guides for planning nonfiction is the
Actors Studio method for developing drama in plots that I described in Chapter
7. It involves giving each character in a scene a different tack. That
technique can be adapted to nonfiction. In preparing to write any passage or
scene involving two people, if the writer focuses on their differing intentions
(or “scripts”), he will immediately see the dramatic advantages of positioning
their conflict in many kinds of adversarial situations in which conflict is
inherent in the circumstances.
Doris
Kearns Goodwin’s remarkable book No Ordinary Time focuses on the home
front in World War II and on Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt. All couples in a
relationship have differing scripts, but the Roosevelts are a dramatic example
of the point. Eleanor was motivated by humanitarian causes, Franklin by
politics. Their intentions clashed frequently, made more complex by their
extramarital friendships. Yet as a public couple, especially as Franklin became
governor and president, they were trapped in a crucible. (You will recall from Chapter 8 that crucible is an
emotional or physical environment that bonds two people and that characters
caught in a crucible won’t declare a truce. They’re in it till the end. Their
motivation to continue opposing each other is greater than their motivation to
run away.) The story of the Roosevelts, in expert hands, is as moving as the
exemplary novels whose characters are trapped in a crucible.
Though
the crucible is as applicable to confrontations of people as it is to fictional
characters, I have never known a nonfiction writer who employed the idea
consciously. Yet it has been used in countless histories and biographies, both
of which invite scenes in which two adversaries are locked in a situation that
holds them together more than anything that would drive them apart. Nonfiction
writing would be more dramatic and tap the reader’s emotions more if the
crucible were considered more often in the planning stage.
Suspense is a valuable technique for the writer who wants
to make his reader keep turning pages. It occurs when the reader expects
something to happen and it isn’t happening yet because the author is holding
off. For instance, if a person has been characterized in an interesting way and
the reader learns that the character is in danger, the reader wants to know how
the person gets out of danger. If that information is withheld for a while, the
reader will be left in suspense. If trouble is in the offing, the reader hopes
that the person will find out in time to prevent the bad event from occurring.
A variant occurs when the reader wants something to happen to a character and
it isn’t happening yet.
Nonfiction
writers do not think of suspense as a conscious method for enhancing reader
interest in their work, though some writers use suspense instinctively. Let’s
look at a simple example, from a newspaper story, of how suspense can be
implanted:
A bus carrying thirteen passengers to Mount St. Vincent
yesterday evening careened off the road into a gully. One of the passengers,
Henry Pazitocki, died before the ambulance reached the scene. Six other persons
were hospitalized, two critically.
There is no element of suspense in that first paragraph.
The story continues:
Three of the passengers with minor injuries told
patrolman George Francese investigating the accident that the driver may have
been drinking. A spokesperson for the
Tri-State Bus Company denied those allegations.
Accusation and denial rendered, no suspense. Here’s how a
writer conscious of the benefit of suspense might have written the same story:
A bus carrying thirteen passengers to Mount St. Vincent
yesterday evening careened off the road into a gully. One of those passengers
never made it to Mount St. Vincent.
A spokesperson for the
Tri-State Bus Company said, “The driver is a teetotaler. There is no evidence
that he was drinking despite what some of the passengers said. It was an
accident.”
The first sentence tells what happened to the bus. The
second sentence arouses curiosity as to who was the passenger who didn’t make
it. The purposeful repetition of “Mount St. Vincent” helps set up the suspense.
The second paragraph doesn’t tell us who the person is. The switch to a
different part of the story (the spokesperson for the bus company) heightens
the suspense. The reader wants to know more. Another element of suspense is
introduced: was the driver drunk or not? The last paragraph of the story reads:
Patrolman George Francese, investigating the accident,
said, “Three other passengers with minor injuries complained that the driver
appeared to have been drinking. Rosella Carew, who was sitting just behind
Henry Pazitocki, the man who was killed, said, ‘I had doubts about getting on
the bus when I saw the driver’s eyeglasses in his lap and he didn’t even seem
to know it.’ ”
This method of handling the story not only provides
conflict for reader interest, at the end it lets the reader draw his own
conclusion.
The following true story demonstrates how suspense can be
built and maintained in nonfiction through a consistent point of view in which
the reader learns only what the narrator knows, and learns it when the narrator
learns it:
A friend of ours let us have the use of her condo in
Florida during a period of icy weather in the east. It was a cozy place, fully equipped, with only one problem. The
dishwasher disgorged water all over the kitchen floor.
My wife went down to the
superintendent’s apartment—his name is Roger—and knocked on the door. He didn’t
answer. This was Friday, could it be his day off?
I met Roger the first day we
were there. He helped us with our luggage. I tried to tip him for helping us
with the bags, but he waved the bills away. I guessed Roger to be in his late
thirties, maybe a couple of years older. Later, from the window I watched him
washing the cars of residents, which seemed to give him a lot of pleasure. No car
wash in the world could do the job as meticulously as Roger did. I saw him
doing small repairs around the place. Whenever I passed him, I stopped to
exchange a sentence or two. I think Roger was slightly retarded, a nice man
with a personality a lot more pleasant than most of the people around him who
had all their marbles.
Come Saturday morning, my
wife went down to Roger’s apartment again. Still no answer. I thumbed through
the Yellow Pages, and after four tries got a plumber who was working on
Saturdays and who promised to show up in an hour. He showed up three hours
later, did a quick fix on the dishwasher, but cautioned us that a pipe leading
to the dishwasher needed replacing and urged us to tell the superintendent.
I didn’t see Roger around at
all on Saturday.
On Sunday I looked out of
our second-story window and saw several policemen clustered around the door of
Roger’s apartment. I hurried down and was intercepted by a neighbor.
“Roger’s dead,” he said.
“Where?”
“In his apartment.”
All I could think was, “He’s
so young!” He seemed strong and healthy the way he hoisted our bags.
The policemen weren’t saying
anything except that the body was still in the apartment and they were waiting
for the coroner.
Hours later, from my window
I saw the body bag being carried out. By the time I got downstairs, the police
were gone.
Two days later I was about
to drive out of the underground garage, when I saw Roger and a young girl
moving stuff out of his apartment. I thought he was dead! Who was in the body
bag?
I stopped the car and got
out to tell Roger how glad I was he was alive and to find out what happened.
The man had a stammer. I didn’t remember Roger stammering.
It turned out that the man
was Roger’s twin brother, who’d come a distance, and with his daughter’s help
was piling Roger’s belongings onto a pickup truck.
“Not the bed,” the brother
said, shaking his head.
From him I learned that
Roger had suffered a silent heart attack, probably on Thursday night since he
didn’t respond to my wife’s knock Friday morning. Because he must have felt
very cold, Roger put one electric blanket under himself and another on top. He
burned all day Friday, Saturday, and Sunday.
“The funeral,” the twin
brother said, “will be closed casket.”
If I had started to recount what had happened by saying,
“The superintendent of the building I was staying in burned to death last
weekend,” I would have spoiled the story by telegraphing the outcome. That’s
what we do in life. Our instinct is to give the conclusion first. As
storytellers, we have to hold back by telling the story from a consistent point
of view—in this case, mine—and showing what happened as I learned about it. I
didn’t refer to Roger as “the superintendent.” I called him by his name. I said
a couple of things to humanize him. I particularized as often as possible. But
most important, I stuck to one point of view. I didn’t say more than I found
out at any time. I conveyed what I learned in the same order that I learned it,
thus giving the entire story a consistent point of view.
In
considering suspense, you might want to refer to the following checklist:
In considering the creation of tension in nonfiction,
let’s keep the difference between tension and suspense in mind. Suspense
arouses a feeling of anxious uncertainty in the reader about what might happen,
or a hope that something bad won’t happen. Tension usually involves the sudden
onset of a feeling of stress, strain, or pressure. As I’ve pointed out earlier,
we deplore suspense and tension in life and enjoy them in writing.
Tension
can be created by the simple mention of a time or date. “It was four o’clock
in the morning” creates tension because it’s an hour when most people are
asleep. Therefore, anything that happens at four in the morning is in itself
tension producing or could be. It’s the “could be” factor that creates tension
in the reader because he expects tension as part of his experience.
Two
authors whose books I edited, Gordon Thomas and Max Morgan-Witts, collaborated
on a number of nonfiction “disaster” books that were hugely successful. They
specialized in moment-by-moment reconstructions of cataclysmic events in such
books as The Day the World Ended, The San Francisco Earthquake, Shipwreck, and
Voyage of the Damned. Voyage was the story of the luxury liner St.
Louis, one of the last ships to leave Nazi Germany before World War II
erupted. We know at the outset that the 937 passengers, all Jews fleeing Nazi
Germany, are in danger. If Cuba does not let them in, the ship will return its
human cargo to the Nazis and many will die. The first chapter is headed Wednesday,
May 3, 1939. That prewar date in itself is enough to put tension to work.
The second chapter is headed Thursday, May 4, 1939. The tension
increases. Therefore, each time a date appears, the reader’s pulse quickens.
That’s tension at work.
Let’s
examine how tension can be induced in a simple sequence. Here’s the way it was
originally written:
The suspect refused to obey the policeman’s order to come
out of his automobile.
No tension. Now the same event as edited:
The policeman ordered the suspect to come out of his
automobile. The suspect didn’t move.
What creates the tension is separating the two parts of
the action. The separation in the example is momentary. The continuation of
tension over paragraphs and pages comes from stretching out a tense situation,
often a confrontation between persons or groups. Let’s look at the cop and the
suspect again:
The policeman ordered the
suspect to come out of his automobile. The suspect didn’t move.
Bystanders reported that the
officer then drew his gun and in a loud voice said, “Get out, now!”
The suspect shook his head
and stayed put.
You can see how stretching out a sequence of acts produces
tension that the reader finds pleasurable. Short sentences and short paragraphs
help increase tension. A common error is the writer’s temptation to rush to a
conclusion. In life we savor good experiences and long for them to continue.
The rush to end a good experience is counterproductive. The writer must
discipline himself to hold back.
Quoting What They Say
Dialogue is
an area in which the interests of fiction writers and nonfiction writers
diverge. For the novelist, dialogue provides immediacy to a scene and is a
major contributor to the experience of fiction. For the writer of articles and
books as well as journalism, dialogue is a danger unless one uses direct quotes
that sound real and can be substantiated. Those are two quite different
matters.
Recording
what people actually say does not read well. It is frequently hesitant, wordy,
repetitive, and ultimately boring as court transcripts prove. The nonfiction
writer has remedies.
If you
quote anyone for more than three sentences, that’s a speech. Break it up with
something visual. It needn’t be elaborate:
Craig Marshall was the first to speak. “The issues—count on it—are threefold,” he said. “In two sections of the village, tap water is the color of, call it mud. Been that way for thirty years and the incumbents have done nothing about it.” Marshall coughed against his closed fist.
“Item two,” he continued, “is the traffic nightmare
from the sports complex. Anybody in this village has a heart attack when the
traffic’s letting out can count on the ambulance getting to him in two or three
hours.” He looked pointedly at the mayor. “That’s a death sentence for somebody
because as far as I can tell the Almighty hasn’t given this community an
exemption from heart attacks.”
The writer has broken up the quote with seemingly
inconsequential things like a cough and looking at somebody. The first
interruption humanizes the speaker and adds to the reality. The second—a glance
at the mayor—invokes a suspicion of conflict by seeming to blame the mayor for
the problems the speaker is talking about.
I saw
the first draft, in which the speaker had two windy sentences that contributed
absolutely nothing of importance and made the speaker sound like Dwight
Eisenhower searching for the end of a sentence. The reporter left them out not
to protect the reputation of Mr. Marshall but to prevent his copy from being
boring. In reporting spoken words, it is not a writer’s obligation to reproduce
all of the words as long as the speaker’s meaning is preserved.
Few
people speak in complete and grammatical sentences. Moreover, perfectly formed
sentences often come across to the reader as made up. In this instance, the
reporter did a good job of catching the flavor of what was said. In quoting,
the writer has to beware of cleaning up a speaker’s sentences.
In
1975, just thirty days before Jimmy Hoffa, icon of the Teamsters Union,
disappeared from the face of the earth, he came to lunch, bringing along, at my
suggestion, the man who was ghosting his autobiography. Hoffa’s material had
been recorded on tape. The material as spoken by Hoffa was fascinating and
colorful. That same material, with Hoffa’s rough language cleaned up and
sentences straightened out, was unreal and boring. The purpose of the meeting
was to insist that the writer restore Hoffa’s words, including the expletives
and grammatical howlers. I wasn’t arguing for a verbatim transcript of the
tapes but for a retention of their color, which I succeeded in getting,
and which all writers who deal with the spoken words of others should strive
for.
When
you’re reporting the results of an interview, you will likely end up with too
much quotation. You want to keep those parts that reveal the character of the
speaker or that define subject matter. You want to preserve comments that are
confrontational, colorful, or especially appropriate, and ditch the rest.
That
brings us to the second matter. Never intentionally misquote. And never invent
dialogue.
Invented
dialogue is usually a highly visible sign of untrustworthy writing. A few
writers of nonfiction commit the same errors as some historical novelists. They
provide dialogue that would have been impossible for anyone to record. I know
of cases in which books were rejected by editors because some piece of
attributed dialogue was so apparently contrived that it cast doubt on the
reliability of the author for facts that could not easily be confirmed.
Don’t
tempt rejection by an editor or a lawsuit from a person quoted inaccurately. If
you find yourself inventing dialogue, write a play, novel, or movie.
Guts: The Decisive Ingredient
A long time
ago I took an oath never to write anything inoffensive.
In
working with literally hundreds of authors over a period of many years I
concluded that the single characteristic that most makes a difference in the
success of an article or nonfiction book is the author’s courage in revealing
normally unspoken things about himself or his society. It takes guts to be a
writer. A writer’s job is to tell the truth in an interesting way. The truth is
that adultery, theft, hypocrisy, envy, and boredom are all sins practiced
everywhere that human nature thrives.
What
people who are not writers say to each other in everyday conversation is the
speakable. What makes writing at its best interesting is the writer’s
willingness to broach the unspeakable, to say things that people don’t
ordinarily say. In fact, the best writers, those whose originality shines, tend
to be those who are most outspoken.
Do shy
men and women ever become superb writers? Yes, after overcoming their natural
reluctance to say the things they think. Fig leaves have no place on either the
bodies or the minds of the best writers. I like the way Red Smith put it:
“There’s nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a
vein.”
On the
issue of candor, is there something nonfiction writers can learn from
novelists? Yes, there is hardly anything about the secret, sometimes
mischievous, cruel, evil, outrageous, defiant, and glorious acts and thoughts
of human beings that has not appeared in the novels of the last few decades.
And there is little about the private acts of people that has escaped
reporting—and not only in the sensational press. The novelist has it easier. He
hides a little—just a little—under the presumption that he is making things up.
We all know that the most truth-bearing parts of superior fiction aren’t “made
up.” They come from the novelist’s observation and understanding of human nature. The nonfiction writer who
dares to dare is more exposed. The assumption of his readers is that he is
writing fact. He may have to prove his assertions to an editor, or worse, to a
court. He needs the courage of a soldier or firefighter because often the more
he reveals that is interesting to his readers, the more exposed he is. Readers
are curious about the inmost secrets of others. The subjects of factual
writing—if they are not publicity seekers—don’t want anything embarrassing on
public display. It is no accident that some of the best nonfiction writing of
the century has come from writers who are also experienced novelists.
Mary
McCarthy, whose novels brought her fame, early on earned a reputation for keen
observation and a sharp tongue for her critical writings. George Orwell’s
nonfiction is far superior to his fiction and exceptionally outspoken. Critics
have called him the best nonfiction writer of this century. V. S. Naipaul’s nonfiction,
once sampled, will lead you quickly to conclude that he has the courage to see
and say what, for instance, politicians almost never say. His nonfiction makes
waves by being sharply observant and truthful in territory that frightens off
lesser writers. Rebecca West, whom Time magazine called “indisputably
the world’s No. 1 woman writer,” started out as a novelist and six decades
later was still writing fiction. However, her great reputation rests largely on
her shrewd, brave, and intelligent factual writing. Most writers know Scott
Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby but haven’t read his gutsy nonfiction in The
Crack-Up.
Writers
read writers, and if being outspoken is a problem for you, I suggest you
immerse yourself in the work of the writers I’ve mentioned, and also try the
work of contemporaries like Gore Vidal and Joan Didion, even if it’s just to
sample how they deal with candor.
Vidal,
who has never wanted for vitriol much less candor, begins one piece about
Tennessee Williams by passing the candor chalice to Williams, whom he quotes
saying, “I particularly like New York on hot summer nights when all the ... uh,
superfluous people are off the streets.” Borrowing the candor of another has
been useful to Joan Didion also. I quote from Goodbye to All That, a
memoir of her pilgrimage to New York when she was twenty-three:
I remember once, one cold bright December evening in New
York, suggesting to a friend who complained of having been around too long that
he come with me to a party where there could be, I assured him with the bright
resourcefulness of twenty-three, “new faces.” He laughed literally until he
choked, and I had to roll down the taxi window and hit him on the back. “New
faces,” he said finally, “don’t tell me about new faces.” It seemed that the last time he
had gone to a party where he had been promised “new faces,” there had been
fifteen people in the room, and he had already slept with five of the women and
owed money to all but two of the men.
Next let’s sample someone not as well known. Gayle
Pemberton, a black writer with a Ph.D. from Harvard, wrote about the time she
was going broke in Los Angeles on a temporary typist’s revenue, and signed up
to work for a caterer on three successive weekends. What she later wrote about
it made the experience worthwhile:
Our caterer was one of a new breed of gourmet cooks who
do all preparation and cooking at the client’s home—none of your cold-cut or
warming-tray catering. As a result, her clients had a tendency to have loads of
money and even more kitchen space.
Usually her staff was not
expected to serve the meal, but on this occasion we did. I was directed to wear
stockings and black shoes and I was given a blue-patterned apron dress, with
frills here and there, to wear. Clearly, my academic lady-banker pumps were out
of the question, so I invested in a pair of trendy black sneakers—which cost me
five dollars less than what I earned the entire time I worked for the caterer.
Buying the sneakers was plainly excessive but I told myself they were a necessary
expense. I was not looking forward to wearing the little French serving-girl
uniform, though. Everything about it and me were wrong, but I had signed on and
it would have been unseemly and downright hostile to jump ship.
One thing I liked about the
caterer was her insistence that her crew not be treated as servants—that is, we
worked for her and took orders from her, not from the clients, who might find
ordering us around an emboldening and socially one-upping experience. She also
preferred to use crystal and china she rented, keeping her employees and
herself safe from a client’s rage in case a family heirloom should get broken.
But on this occasion, her client insisted that we use his Baccarat crystal. We
were all made particularly nervous by his tone. It was the same tone I heard
from a mucky-muck at my studio typing job: cold, arrogant, a matter-of-fact
“you are shit” attitude that is well known to nurses and secretaries.
As Pemberton was drying one of the Baccarat glasses, it
shattered in her hand, a happy accident in that she used it as the fulcrum of
her piece.
Characteristic
of another kind of nonfiction gutsiness is that of Seymour Krim, who wanted, as
many writers do, to be a major novelist and instead made exemplary nonfiction
his calling. “One life was never quite enough for what I had in mind,” he says
and means it, as he lays his life bare. Listen to the individual sound of his
voice:
You may sometimes think everyone lives in the crotch of
the pleasure principle these days except you, but you have company, friend. I
live under the same pressures you do. It is still your work or role that
finally gives you your definition in our society, and the thousands upon
thousands of people who I believe are like me are those who have never found
the professional skin to fit the riot in their souls. Many never will. I think
what I have to say here will speak for some of their secret life and for that
other sad America you don’t hear too much about. This isn’t presumption so much
as a voice of scars and stars talking. I’ve lived it and will probably go on
living it until they take away my hotdog.
The voice picks up speed:
America was my carnival at an earlier age than most and I
wanted to be everything in it that turned me on, like a youth bouncing around
crazed on a boardwalk. I mean literally everything. I was as unanchored a kid
as you can conceive of, an open fuse-box of blind yearning, and out of what I
now assume was unimaginable loneliness and human hunger I greedily tried on the
personalities of every type on the national scene as picked up through
newspapers, magazines, movies, radio, and just nosing around.
It should be evident by now that forthrightness doesn’t
involve sensationalism suitable for the exploitation tabloids. What it requires
is honesty of a kind that gets self-suppressed by the public. Doctors are part
of that public, but not doctors who are good writers. Witness Richard Selzer’s
chapter, “The Knife,” in his book Mortal Lessons: Notes on the Art of
Surgery. He does what no surgeon has done before, with precision, clarity,
grace, imagination, and candor:
One holds the knife as one holds the bow of a cello or a
tulip—by the stem. Not palmed nor gripped nor grasped, but lightly, with the tips of the fingers. The knife is not for
pressing. It is for drawing across the field of skin. Like a slender fish, it
waits, at the ready, then, go! It darts, followed by a fine wake of red. The
flesh parts, falling away to yellow globules of fat. Even now, after so many
times, I still marvel at its power—cold, gleaming, silent. More, I am still
struck with a kind of dread that it is I in whose hand the blade travels, that
my hand is its vehicle, that yet again this terrible steel-bellied thing and I
have conspired for a most unnatural purpose, the laying open of the body of a
human being.
Are readers ready for this kind of candor? In 1994 another
physician who writes well, Sherwin B. Nuland, published a book called How We
Die. It was selected by a book club, became a bestseller, and won the
National Book Award for nonfiction.
Did I
have to search through my library to find the examples of frankness quoted in
this chapter? They are all from one section of a single anthology I recommend
to you, The Art of the Personal Essay, edited by Phillip Lopate. That
book starts with the forerunners, Seneca and Plutarch, picks up Montaigne and
Samuel Johnson and Hazlitt en route to the Americans of the present century,
and that journey reveals an evolution toward the candor with which our writers
tell us like it is.
The
audience is ready. The question is “Are you?”
Literary Values in Fiction and Nonfiction
Commercial? Popular? Literary?
The
commercial novelist is a storyteller who is most concerned with plot and plot
gimmicks, with maintaining a high level of suspense and physical action. The
success of commercial novelists is usually derived from tapping an area of
adventure, romance, espionage, or whatever may be popular at the time, creating
characters with sufficient skill that the reader is willing to suspend
disbelief and follow the hero as he triumphs over unambiguous antagonists. John
Grisham’s bestseller The Firm, for instance, is an adolescent fantasy,
the story of a young lawyer straight out of law school who is offered a job
with too much pay, an expensive car, a house, and finds himself working—of
course—for the Mob, who won’t let him quit. The rest is a chase scene. The
market for adolescent fantasies is demonstrably huge. And it cares little about
the quality of the writing. Mitch is the beleaguered hero of this fantasy:
Mitch almost felt sorry for her, but he kept his eyes on the table.
In a box? What he kept on the table was presumably his
gaze.
He stared at Royce McKnight and exposed a mammoth chip on
his shoulder.
That’s not a log, it’s an attitude.
Mitch ripped two ribs apart, slinging sauce into his
eyebrows.
Did his wife, Abby, sitting across the table from him in
the restaurant, notice? She says:
“We just moved in this morning.”
A fact he already knows, so Mitch says:
“I know.”
On a business trip, Mitch, happily married to Abby, is the
object of seduction by a woman named Julia in words like these:
Julia drooled at him and moved closer.
She rubbed her breasts on his biceps and gave her best
seductive smile, only inches away.
When a private school is mentioned, we learn:
Affluent parents signed the waiting list shortly after
birth.
Precocious as well as affluent? According to Grisham, the
people Mitch meets have interesting though repetitive characteristics:
He frowned sincerely, as if this would be painful.
He was stocky with a slight belly, thick shoulders and
chest and a huge, perfectly round head that smiled with great reluctance.
When he talked the water dripped from his nose and
interfered with his enunciation.
Tammy arrived from trip three out of breath and with
sweat dripping from her nose.
In this kind of commercial writing, lack of precision is
not the only carelessness:
Coffee? Yes, he said, black. She disappeared and returned
with a cup and saucer.
The coffee itself was presumably forgotten by the author.
And so it goes. The public was forgiving. Or, more likely, didn’t notice as The
Firm topped the bestseller lists.
The
most distinguishing difference between “commercial” writers like Grisham and
literary writers is the attention paid to the individual meanings and resonance
of words and the respect shown for the reader’s intelligence. In this chapter
my concern is with the craft of the writer who aspires to permanence, who has
not an occupation but a calling.
Publishing,
the work of bringing words to the marketplace, is, alas, sloppy in its attempts
to distinguish books of a certain quality from everyday product that is
designed to sell. The latter are called “popular” and “commercial,” though
books of high quality are sometimes popular, and when they endure, prove their
commercial viability by continuing to sell long after their commercial
contemporaries are out of print. Both kinds of books can entertain and
instruct, though they appeal to different audiences.
A
prevalent way of describing the difference is calling the successful commercial
book “a good read,” whereas the other is likely to be referred to as “a good
book.” The implication is that one confers a transient experience on the
reader, whereas the other may be durable, deserving the permanence of a
hardcover binding and a place on a bookshelf, to remind one of the experience,
or be reread.
I
wanted to clarify the distinction for a practical reason. In the end, you write
what you read. If you read literary fiction with pleasure, that’s what you will
attempt to write. If you read thrillers or romances, you will in all likelihood
end up writing for the audience of which you are a part. The same is true for
nonfiction—not merely the field of interest, but the quality of language and
insight you require of your books, read or written.
The literary novelist is concerned primarily with
character understood in depth and engaged in activities that are resonant with
the ambiguities and stresses of life. The richness of the best literary fiction
is derived primarily from the creation of characters who will persist in the
reader’s mind after the reading experience is over. Those novelists and
nonfiction writers who strive to produce durable work share an interest in
precision and freshness in the use of words, in insights into human nature and
the physical world, and in resonance. These writers usually develop a “voice”
or style that is distinctive.
The
writer of commercial nonfiction is often an expert craftsman in a hurry to meet
a deadline who measures the effort put in against the monetary reward. He is
writing not for the ages but to put bread on the table. Perfecting a piece beyond the requirements of the editor to him
means more work for the same amount of money, work that could well go into
another piece for another publication. Beyond a certain point, quality is not
cost-effective for him.
Fiction
writers who don’t improve their work beyond the requirements of their editors
or the public do not have an interest in perfection because they are deaf to
the sound of words and have no instinct or training to hunt precise nuances.
They are what they read.
I have
edited and published both kinds of writers and both kinds of books. I have
worked closely with writers of each kind who have made millions from a single
work. What I have never witnessed is a writer’s work succeeding notably in a
field he doesn’t habitually read for pleasure.
Diction is a word laymen associate with clear
pronunciation. Its other meaning is the one that is important for writers.
Diction involves the choice of words for their precise meaning and sound, the
arrangement of those words, and their selection for effect. Excellence in
diction is the most important characteristic of fine writing.
The
precise meaning of words matters, a notion in disuse by the majority of people,
including their presumptive leaders. The inattention to diction is pervasive,
endemic, and has reached into surprising places.
On the
morning that this chapter was written, the New York Times published a
review of a biography of General H. Norman Schwarzkopf, the leader of Desert
Storm. The coauthors were both journalists. The review tells us that the
authors, in their introduction, say they “will paint a picture of a man who is
‘human, blunt, clear, idealistic and swiftly effective.’ ”
I was
stopped by the first adjective: human. I hadn’t thought of the general as
vegetable, mineral, or other species of animal. What did these two journalists
intend by leading with the word “human”?
We’d
have to guess. Surely they didn’t confuse it with the word “humane,” which
means something quite different. Did they mean Schwarzkopf was what in
colloquial parlance we call “a regular guy”? And if so, what is meant by “a
regular guy”? It’s a verbal trunk into which a hundred readers would pile many
meanings relating to their own experience.
In the
best of newspapers the best of journalists are usually forced to write
quickly—“off the top of the head” is the convenient expression—and that’s where
an imprecise use of “human” comes from: speed and a minimum of thought, for surely both
experienced authors of the Schwarzkopf biography know better.
Poetry and fiction share certain characteristics. In
fashioning poetry, a common beginner’s mistake is to emote instead of to evoke,
to convey the writer’s emotion rather than to stimulate an emotion from the
reader. One way to a reader’s emotion is to bring two words together that have
not been together before. Therefore precision is achieved in poetry by the
creation of a new grouping of words rather than by using each word for its
exact meaning. Precision in poetry is abetted by the sound of words, which is
why poetry is sometimes so difficult to translate. The work of Dylan Thomas,
possibly the best poet in the English language of this century, is full of
newness, words juxtaposed for the first time to create a new meaning. In one,
“Fern Hill,” he speaks of “the lilting house.” Lilt means a tune having a
pleasant rhythm. A poor poet might have written “happy house,” which is direct
and obvious. The “lilting house” evokes the happiness. If it’s hard to judge
out of context, treat yourself to some time with Dylan Thomas’s poems.
Poetry
usually involves austere compression. The most famous poem of Delmore Schwartz,
“In the Naked Bed, in Plato’s Cave,” mixes ordinary description (“A fleet of
trucks strained uphill, grinding”) with fresh metaphor (“The street-lamp’s
vigil”). The street-lamp is given a human characteristic—vigilance—with a
single word. In fiction, the group of words that evoke an emotion in the reader
can range from a few words, as in poetry, to paragraphs or sections.
In
commercial fiction, the sound of words is rarely considered except for the
occasional—and inaccurate—“splat” or “rat-a-tat-tat.” In literary fiction, the
sound of words can contribute to the effect, though that is rarely noticed by
readers. Literary fiction thrives on subtlety and particularity.
“Particularity”
is a word my students hear often. Once the word from editors was “be concrete.”
But to be specific is not as precise as to be particular, which is much more
advantageous to the creative writer. Particularity deserves its own chapter,
which comes next.
Particularity
In his book
On Becoming a Novelist, John Gardner said, “Detail is the lifeblood of
fiction.” My only quarrel with that statement is that detail is also the
lifeblood of nonfiction. And I want to go a step further. It is not just detail
that distinguishes good writing, it is detail that individualizes. I
call it “particularity.” Once you’re used to spotting it—and spotting its
absence—you will have one of the best possible means of improving your writing
markedly.
During
the decades that I served as an editor and publisher, what drew my attention to
a piece of work more than any other factor was the use of apt particularities,
the detail that differentiates one person from another, one act from another,
one place from any others like it.
Let’s
look at some examples of particularization in sketching characters, actions,
and places. To characterize, particularity is used to show how an individual
looks, dresses, or speaks without resort to clichés or generalizations.
Early
in The Touch of Treason, the lawyer Thomassy is confronted by Roberts,
the patrician district attorney. Watch for the words that particularize:
Thomassy could see Roberts’s handshake coming at him all the way down the aisle, above it that freckled face proclaiming I can be friendly to everybody, I was born rich.
Roberts’s smile, Thomassy thought, is an implant.
The cop-out would have been to say that Roberts had a fake
smile. That is a tired expression and a generalization that doesn’t
particularize. The particularization is achieved in two steps. First, his freckled
face proclaiming I can be friendly to everybody, I was born rich. Then Thomassy’s thought, that the smile is an
implant. Note the use of metaphor to particularize. It doesn’t say
Roberts’s smile is like an implant, Thomassy thinks it is an
implant. Of course, Thomassy doesn’t believe that literally. In just a few
sentences, we know that in Thomassy’s view, Roberts is a pretentious prig. The
particularization, though brief, is enough to convince the reader. That helps
set up the adversarial exchange that follows. Let’s observe an action that
particularizes:
Thomassy moved his gaze from Roberts’s confident eyes to
Roberts’s blond hair, then Roberts’s chin, then Roberts’s left ear, then
Roberts’s right ear. The four points of the cross. It was what made witnesses
nervous. They couldn’t figure out what you were doing. You weren’t doing
anything except making them nervous.
The reader quickly understands that Thomassy disconcerts
his opponents. Roberts must loathe Thomassy, the arrogant son of an Armenian
immigrant. When they encounter each other in the courtroom, the reader is
prepared for a battle that is motivated by more than the case.
Now
let’s examine the use of particularization in describing a place:
The renting agent said it was their last best chance of
finding an apartment in the neighborhood that wasn’t as cramped as the place
they had now. Elizabeth and Joe hurried up the stone steps to the parlor floor.
The agent stepped aside to let them in. Their first impression was a vast
emptiness in which the echo of the agent’s voice reverberated.
“It’s fourteen feet high.”
They followed the agent’s
gaze to the ceiling, with its tiny plaster angels around the perimeter.
Joe said, “There’s room for
astronauts. How do you change the light bulbs?”
Elizabeth said, “With a
ladder, dummy.”
The agent, glad to see the
wonder on their faces, said, “Wait till you see the bedroom.”
“Is it in the same town?”
Joe said, squeezing Elizabeth’s hand.
A lazy author might have said, “The apartment was bigger
than they ever expected.” The reader would not have been able to experience the
wonder of its size. By stretching out the particulars (the echo of the agent’s
voice, the height of the ceiling, the carved plaster angels), the reader
experiences the place along with the characters. In addition, the dialogue also
particularizes one of the characters.
Joe, for instance, has a sense of humor.
If an
ordinary object is important to a story, particularization will help call
attention to it. Let’s look at a before-and-after example:
“You have an envelope?”
He put one down in front of
her.
This exchange is void of particularity. Here’s how that
transaction was described by John le Carré:
“You have a suitable
envelope? Of course you have.”
Envelopes were in the third
drawer of his desk, left side. He selected a yellow one, A4 size, and guided it
across the desk, but she let it lie there.
Those particularities, ordinary as they seem, help make what she is going to put into the envelope important. The details do not consist of waste words; they have a purpose in making the transaction credible.
It should be clear by now that particularizing
sometimes takes more words than a quick generalization. For several decades
there has been pressure in nonfiction to clip language short, to simplify
sentences. The movement seems to have started back in 1946 with Rudolf Flesch’s
book The Art of Plain Talk. Simplification is useful and can be a great
aid to those business persons and academicians who tend to inflate their
sentences with excess verbiage and pompous jargon. However, simplification is
not necessarily appropriate if one’s aim is to provide an experience for the
reader. “The apartment was large” doesn’t do it. Nor does putting an envelope
in front of somebody. The extra words are not wasted because they make the experience
of the action possible and credible.
Excellence
in particularity tells the editor that he is in the hands of a writer. I’ve
seen the use of particularity make an article on a mundane subject sing on the
page. The nonfiction books I edited that became classics all had the quality of
particularity. And for fiction, particularity is not an option because even
transient fiction requires some particularity to succeed with readers.
Perhaps
my favorite example of particularization is the first sentence of one of Graham
Greene’s masterpieces, The Heart of the Matter. It has three words every
writer would do well to remember:
Wilson sat on the balcony of the Bedord Hotel with his
bald pink knees thrust against the ironwork.
The crucial words, of course, are “bald pink knees,” a
particularization that makes the character and the place instantly visible and
in the reader’s experience unique. If we were to eliminate the words “bald” and
“pink” how diminished that opening sentence would be:
Wilson sat on the balcony of the Bedford Hotel with his
knees thrust against the ironwork.
By removing the two most particular words, the sentence
becomes ordinary. Moreover, though the image is still visual, there’s nothing
especially memorable about it. The balcony and the Bedford Hotel are also
particulars, as is the ironwork, but “bald pink knees” is fresh, original, and
immediately makes Wilson visible. Those knees against the ironwork make the
hotel visible, too. All of that is accomplished in a single sentence.
Particularizing
is also useful if you have occasion to repeat something—like a character
laughing—and don’t want to bore the reader by repeating a phrase like “She
laughed” several times within the same few pages:
She looked like she was enjoying herself mightily.
If he laughed behind you suddenly in a darkened room,
you’d be frightened.
His face beamed like Santa Claus. His barrel chest moved
up and down, but I couldn’t hear him laughing.
She seemed about to giggle like a schoolgirl, but
controlled it. She’d been out of school a long time.
His response was a sound somewhere between a guffaw and a
chortle. Later I learned it was a kind of trademark with him. Nobody else in
the world laughed like that.
The temptation is always to use either a cliché or a generalization,
what I call “top-of-the-head writing.” In this chapter we are trying to fashion
sentences that are writerly, that particularize in an interesting way. Here’s a
top-of-the-head description that doesn’t tell us much:
Cecilia wore short skirts.
It doesn’t take much to turn that ordinariness into a
sentence that characterizes and particularizes:
Cecilia’s skirts were three inches shorter than her age allowed.
Here’s another ordinary—I’m tempted to say lazy—sentence:
Vernon was a heavy smoker.
And now several ways to convey the same point with
particularity:
Vernon coughed from the ground up.
When a waitress heard Vernon’s voice she always guided
him to the smoking section without asking.
Vernon looked like those fellows that have one rectangular
breast where he kept his pack of Marlboros tucked into his shirt.
Here’s a sentence that doesn’t give the reader anything to
see. It’s too much of a generalization:
He didn’t know what to do with his hands.
If you’re going to deal with a character’s hands, give
them something to do, as this author did:
Every few minutes his right hand checked to see that his
reproductive organs were still in place.
A useful technique for particularizing a character in
fiction, a person in nonfiction, or a setting in either is seeing the
individual or locale first at a distance and then closer. For the reader the
experience is similar to seeing a full-length view of a person and then a
close-up in which more detail is noted:
Corrigan’s bulk filled the
doorway.
I said, “Hi,” and got up
from behind my desk quickly to shake his hand.
I stopped. His right arm was
in a sling. He wiggled the fingers at me.
“Break it?” I asked.
His lips, trying to smile,
quivered.
“What happened?” I said,
motioning him to a chair.
He turned his face toward
the window. I saw the freshly stitched cut that ran from his right cheek
straight down into the collar of his shirt.
When a person comes into view, the writer’s temptation is
to describe him all at once. It’s more effective to delay part of the
description. Start at a distance, then notice more. It enhances the tension.
The same technique of particularizing in stages works for places as well as
people.
Elmore Leonard, best known for his dialogue, is also a
master of particularity:
Robbie Daniels was also forty-one. He had changed clothes
before the police arrived and at six o’clock in the morning wore a lightweight
navy blue cashmere sweater over bare skin, the sleeves pushed up to his elbows,
colorless cotton trousers that clung to his hips but were not tight around the
waist. Standing outside the house talking to the squad-car officer, the wind
coming off the ocean out of misty dawn, he would slip a hand beneath the
sweater and move it over his skin, idly, remembering, pointing with the other
hand toward the swimming pool and patio where there were yellow flowers and
tables with yellow umbrellas.
My favorite particularity in the passage we just read is
“he would slip a hand beneath the sweater and move it over his skin, idly,
remembering, pointing with the other hand toward the swimming pool and patio
where there were yellow flowers and tables with yellow umbrellas.” I suppose
Rudolf Flesch of The Art of Plain Talk would have had Elmore Leonard say
something like “He scratched his skin under his sweater,” but the quality of
the writing would have flown with the rest of the words.
In writing, the word “diction” refers to the choice of
words, which is the activity of the writer as he is particularizing. The
requirement is precision of meaning, le mot juste, exactly the right
word. Here’s an example from a recent newspaper story:
Pickpockets board trains, wait until the exquisitely
perfect last second and then step off. If anybody else does it, he’s a cop.
The lazy writer’s cliché would have been “Pickpockets wait
until the last second.” Instead, the journalist avoided the cliché and
sharpened the meaning by calling it “the exquisitely perfect last second.” His
diction has brought a freshness to the piece.
Books of quality that make the nonfiction bestseller list
and earn considerable sums for their authors almost always employ as much
particularity as possible. They deserve study. An hour spent in the library
just looking at opening pages of memorable recent nonfiction can be instructive.
Here is the opening of the book that fared better than the other D-Day books
commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of that event in 1994, D-Day June 6,
1944: The Climactic Battle of World War II by Stephen E. Ambrose:
At 0016 hours, June 6 1944, the Horsa glider crash-landed
alongside the Caen Canal, some fifty meters from the swing bridge crossing the
canal. Lt. Den Brotheridge, leading the twenty-eight men of the first platoon,
D Company, the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry Regiment, British
6th Airborne Division, worked his way out of the glider. He grabbed Sgt. Jack
“Bill” Bailey, a section leader, and whispered in his ear, “Get your chaps
moving.” Bailey set off with his group to pitch grenades into the machine-gun
pillbox known to be beside the bridge. Lieutenant Brotheridge gathered the
remainder of his platoon, whispered “Come on, lads,” and began running for the
bridge. The German defenders of the bridge, about fifty strong, were not aware
that the long-awaited invasion had just begun.
Note the particularity with which Ambrose engages the
reader. Particularity is not only the essence of fine writing, it is sometimes
rewarded by the gratitude of reviewers and readers, who can make bestsellers
and classics of books whose authors pay attention to detail and the precise
meaning of words.
A book can be said to be an accumulation of paragraphs.
You work on one paragraph at a time. If you perfect a single paragraph, you
have a model for a book. Such is the paragraph I’d like you to look at next.
It’s not by a famous author, it’s by a student of mine, Linda Katmarian, who
has yet to publish her first work. Observe how she uses particularity:
Weeds and the low-hanging branches of unpruned trees
swooshed and thumped against the car while gravel popped loudly under the car’s
tires. As the car bumped along, a flock of startled blackbirds exploded out of
the brush. For a moment they fluttered and swirled about like pieces of charred
paper in the draft of a flame and then they were gone. Elizabeth blinked. The
mind could play such tricks.
What’s going on here? She’s breaking rules. Adjectives and
adverbs, which normally should be cut, are all over the place. They are used to
wonderful effect because she uses the particular sound of words. The low-hanging
branches swooshed and thumped against the car. Gravel popped. Startled
blackbirds exploded out of the brush. They fluttered and swirled.
We experience the road the car is on because the car bumped along. What
a wonderful image—the birds fluttered and swirled about like pieces of
charred paper in the draft of a flame. And it all comes together in the
perception of the character: Elizabeth blinked. The mind could play such
tricks.
Many
published writers would like to have written a paragraph that good. That nearly
perfect paragraph was achieved with a small amount of editing and revision. The
value of writing that paragraph lay, first, in giving her proof that she could
do it, and, second, in giving her a benchmark for rethinking and revising the
rest of her book.
A good
place to practice particularizing is in letters to friends. Once upon a time,
letters were an art form. Today, many people write top-of-the-head letters,
full of generalizations and clichés. Many of us think of clichés as something
we learned all about in school. The fact is that some of the best-educated
writers fall back on clichés both in their speech and work much more often than
they realize. For a fiction writer, learning to avoid them and finding those
that slip in are important steps toward learning one of the most important
aspects of original creative work: examining each word for its precise meaning
and the likely effect of every group of words on the emotions of the reader.
For a
writer, top-of-the-head writing, even letter writing, is dangerous because the
habit could carry over into your work. If you work at particularizing in all of
your personal correspondence, the recipients will enjoy what you write much
more—and you will be practicing what you need to perfect to get your books
published and to build an audience for your writings.
* * *
You’ll remember my saying that commercial fiction, too,
can benefit from particularity. If you’d like to have some fun putting your
knowledge of particularity to the test, you’ll need pen and paper or have your
word processor turned on. Here are the first two paragraphs of a novel I will
ask you to improve:
At half-past six on a Friday evening in January, Lincoln
International Airport, Illinois, was functioning, though with difficulty.
The airport was reeling—as
was the entire midwestern United States—from the meanest, roughest winter storm
in half a dozen years. The storm had lasted three days. Now, like pustules on a
battered, weakened body, trouble spots were erupting steadily.
That opening lacks particularity. “Meanest, roughest,” and
“trouble spots” are generalizations. The simile “like pustules on a battered,
weakened body” is an inaccurate analogy, and is off-putting in the opening
paragraphs of a book. Given the generality of a long-lasting snowstorm and your
likely experience of airports, how would you revise those two paragraphs to
give the opening of the novel particularity? Feel free to change or discard as
much as you like. Your revision can be shorter or longer. Remember what John
Gardner said: “Detail is the lifeblood of fiction.” Use actions if possible. If
people are in your opening, have them talk or think in particulars. Make
locale, objects, and people distinctive and visible. Use other senses if
appropriate. And make it ominous if you can. Stop when you’re pretty sure
you’ve improved the opening.
If you like your version better than the author’s
original, I have a surprise for you. You have just revised the opening of one
of the biggest bestsellers of our time, Airport by Arthur Hailey.
I tried
my hand at a more particularized version of Arthur Hailey’s opening based on
the author’s own facts, scattered in the first three pages of the book. Note
how particularizing and introducing a character help increase the tension of
that opening paragraph:
Runway three zero at Lincoln International was out of
service, blocked by an Aereo-Mexican 707, its wheels mired in waterlogged
ground near the runway’s edge. Incoming traffic from Minneapolis, Cleveland,
Kansas City, Indianapolis, and Denver was
stacked up overhead, some low on gas. On the ground, the wings of forty planes
chafing to take off were icing up.
At the Snow Control Desk
high in the glass-walled control tower, Mel Bakersfield, the airport’s general
manager, drummed his fingers on the glass and peered into the darkness, as if
he could will United’s Flight 111 from Los Angeles to appear. The plane was due
at half-past four. It was now half-past six.
Similes and Metaphors
Similes and
metaphors are the wonders of writing, and like all wonderful things carry a
price. If figures of speech are overdone, they backfire. For instance, here’s
Martin Cruz Smith in his bestseller Polar Star straining to get a
metaphor and a simile into two successive sentences:
In the glare of the lamp, Volovoi’s crew cut was a crown
of radiant spikes. Of course, Karp, who was doing all the heavy labor,
perspired like Vulcan at the forge.
What we see is not Volovoi’s crew cut or Karp’s
perspiration but the author laboring to provide comparisons unsuccessfully. At
one point, he stages a fight, and hero Arkady gets shoved into a bookcase,
which inspires this simile:
Paperbacks fluttered out like birds.
I’ll bet. The simile is imprecise. Smith can’t restrain
himself. Here he goes again:
Her black eyes balanced anxiously on enormous cheekbones.
When read aloud, the vision of black eyes balancing on
cheekbones always draws a laugh. That’s not a simile or metaphor, just plain
overwriting. Which leads me to the principal advice I have for writers striving
for color. Try, fly, experiment, but if it shows strain, if it isn’t accurate,
cut it.
Inaccurate
similes and metaphors have the effect of deflecting the reader’s attention from
the story to the words on the page. Yet when carried off, especially when a
simile is original and a metaphor sings, there is no greater glory in the
practice of words.
In
school we learned that a simile is a comparison of two unlike things, usually
joined by the words “like” or “as.” Perhaps the “unlike” throws off writers.
What is meant is that the writer shows by simile the similarity of two things
that were previously not connected:
Simile: She sprang up like a jack-in-the-box when
the doorbell rang.
We identify a jack-in-the-box popping up with suddenness,
but if it said “She sprang up suddenly,” we’d lose the savor of the comparison.
In a
metaphor, a word or phrase is applied to something that is figuratively rather
than literally similar. This figure of speech results when words or phrases are
brought together that do not ordinarily belong together, yet by their proximity
convey a fresh meaning:
Metaphor: His bicycle had wings.
The bicycle was going so fast it seemed like a bird in
flight or it was pedaled with élan as if it were airborne.
As
we’ve seen earlier, some of the best novel titles are metaphors. The Heart
Is a Lonely Hunter. We easily recognize the truth of such analogies.
In
commercial fiction, the author often uses top-of-the-head similes and
metaphors:
Simile: He felt like a million dollars.
Metaphor: It was food for thought.
Those examples are clichés, tired from overuse. Most good
writing is characterized by a careful use of precise and sometimes original
similes and metaphors:
Simile: He felt as if he were a teenager for whom
illness and death were abstractions.
Metaphor: The thought hovered over him, waiting
for his permission to descend.
One of the hazards is, of course, the mixed metaphor, in
which two or more unrelated metaphors are unsuccessfully combined:
He was dog tired but still feeling his oats.
Nanci Kincaid knows how to pick the right metaphor for her
barefoot youngsters:
“Melvina’s wild boys were all just barefoot as the day is
long. Not wearing shirts, most of them. Just raggedy shorts and bulletproof feet
...”
“Bulletproof feet” is a striking metaphor, the boys
walking around in bare feet as if nothing on the ground could harm them.
My
students know that I am fond of quoting similes and metaphors from one of John
Cheever’s best stories, “The Country Husband.” The first is an extravagant
simile:
The living room was spacious and divided like Gaul into three parts.
The next simile is both accurate and original:
Francis limited herself to two week-night parties,
putting a flexible interpretation on Friday, and rode through the weekend like
a dory in a gale.
Cheever uses metaphor to set a mood:
The sky was overcast, and poured down onto the dirt
crossroads a very discouraging light.
Metaphors can enhance nonfiction also. Witness:
In some cases, generally around public buildings like the
White House and State Department, the protective cordon was Saran-Wrap tight.
One of my favorite metaphors was spoken by Clive James in
his television series Fame.
Hirohito was a 15 watt bulb.
That metaphor is worth examining. It’s a long stretch from
the Emperor of Japan to a light bulb, but it sure makes its point instantly.
I’ve
suggested that you check your manuscript for similes and metaphors that strain
too much. I’ll add to that. In examining your work, can you find spots of “bare
bones” writing that could be improved by a simile or metaphor that you hadn’t
thought of when you were getting your early draft onto paper?
Increasing the Effect on the Reader Through Resonance
Resonance is a term borrowed from
the world of music, where it means a prolonged response attributable to
vibration. In writing it has come to mean an aura of significance beyond the
components of a story. Resonance can come from biblical associations. “Call me
Ishmael” instantly reverberates at the opening of Moby Dick. In this
chapter I show the many ways in which resonance can be produced—by names, by
reference to religious sources, by invoking life and death, by a bold
conclusion, by hyperbole, by naming the parts of a book, by the use of
aphorisms and epigraphs, and ideally from the writing itself, by the writer’s
skillful use of similes and metaphors. Examples are drawn from important
twentieth-century writers of both nonfiction and fiction.
Writers
who recognize resonance when they encounter it sometimes still have difficulty
in providing reverberations in their own work. Help is on the way. Let’s
examine the ways of producing resonance through their sources.
We have
seen how the opening words of Moby Dick, “Call me Ishmael,” have instant
resonance because of the biblical associations of Ishmael. The same would be
true of other memorable names from the Bible, whether used for characters or in
appropriate phrases.
Some
commercial fiction has derived resonance from the use of public or historical
characters. Put an Eisenhower or a Kennedy into a story, and it resonates,
especially if he appears fleetingly. I say “fleetingly” because most writers
who try to reproduce historical characters at length, including their dialogue,
usually fail. It’s an area where a near miss is like taking just one misstep
off a cliff’s edge. Jack Higgins’s career zoomed when he began using historical
characters briefly in his thrillers.
By
Referring to other religious sources. Evan Hunter, who writes also under the name of Ed McBain, is a superb
craftsman. His novel Vespers draws some resonance from its title, but I
would urge you to read at least the first four and a half pages of that book to
see how liturgy lends stunning resonance to a scene that involves a killing.
By
Invoking death. In T.
Correghessan Boyle’s 1987 novel World’s End the author lends importance
to a day by the use of a metaphor drawing on the possibility of the death of
the earth:
The day was typical of April in the vale of the
Hudson—raw and drizzling, the earth exhaling vapor as if it were breathing its
last.
In the last of his Rabbit Angstrom books, Rabbit at
Rest, John Updike invokes his protagonist’s death at the outset:
Standing amid the tan, excited post-Christmas crowd at
the Southwest Florida Regional Airport, Rabbit Angstrom has a funny sudden
feeling that what he has come to meet, what’s floating in unseen about to land,
is not his son Nelson and daughter-in-law Pru and their two children but
something more ominous and intimately his: his own death, shaped vaguely like
an airplane.
By a bold conclusion. To see how V. S. Naipaul, one
of the outstanding writers in the English language in our time, uses a bold
philosophical statement to lend resonance to the opening of his novel A Bend
in the River, let us look at the second sentence first:
Nazruddin, who had sold me the shop cheap, didn’t think I
would have it easy when I took over.
No resonance. But that sentence is preceded by this one:
The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow
themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.
That first sentence lends resonance to the sentence and
paragraphs that follow, perhaps to the book as a whole.
By
Invoking a setting that has greatly influenced the life of a person. Some writers of biography will describe the
subject’s birthplace in detail, but miss an opportunity for resonance. Bertram
Wolfe begins his biography The
Fabulous Life of Diego Rivera with a setting that goes a long way toward
explaining a source of Rivera’s work:
Guanajuato is flooded with light. The sun beats down with
brilliant intensity upon its flat-roofed houses, fills with purple darkness
their windows and doorways, gives bulk to solid forms, draws clean the line
that separates surrounding hills from light-drenched sky. The valley in which
the city dozes is seven thousand feet above the sea. Narrow cobblestone streets
circle through the old center, then begin to climb into the hills. At the
outskirts trees become discouraged; ridges rise bare and brown into a sky deep,
remote, free from haze, standing out sharp against the light-filled emptiness
of space.
He whose eyes have been
nourished on these clear forms, solid volumes, and light-filled space will
never be altogether at home in the pale yellow sunlight and soft outlines of
Paris treetops and towers, where the light is diffused by haze that forever
hints of rain. A boy born here may get lost for a while in the Paris fashions
of his day and experiment inadequately with fugitive flecks of light and
blurring washes of haze in which outlines waver, planes merge, and objects lose
their volume; but he can never really find himself as a painter until he has
rediscovered the strongly defined forms, pure colors, clear atmosphere, and
omnipresent flood of light that gives solidity to all the objects it illumines
without seeming itself to appear upon the scene at all.
You can imagine how I felt editing line by line a writer
who used resonance to give the reader pleasure and instruction simultaneously
the way Wolfe does.
By
Hyperbole. A hyperbole is,
of course, an exaggeration that is not meant to be taken literally. For the
novelist, it presents an opportunity to lend resonance to what might otherwise
seem ordinary. Here is Rebecca West’s opening of The Fountain Overflows:
There was such a long pause that I wondered whether my
Mamma and my Papa were ever going to speak to each other again.
By the end of the first paragraph, Papa is apologizing to
Mamma, but the perception by the child narrator of a pause that seems terminal
has magnified the importance of the moment of silence. For children, a pin drop
of tension between parents can resonate like a thunderstorm.
By
Naming the parts of a book. Omens
are important in seeding suspense. The prolific British novelist Francis King
lists five parts for his novel Act of Darkness. The first is titled
simply “Omens.” It lends a touch of resonance even before the reader encounters
the first sentence.
A
greater value can be derived from naming chapters in nonfiction. Orville
Schell’s 1994 book on China, Mandate of Heaven, has some chapter titles
that invoke resonance twice, in the table of contents, and at the heads of
chapters:
“A Hundred Flowers Fade” evokes its familiar opposite, A
Hundred Flowers Bloom.
“The Graying of Chinese Culture” derives its effect
through a metaphor that resonates.
“Shanghai on Commercial Fire” also uses metaphor to
resonate.
By the thoughts and speech of a character. In The
Blue Afternoon, a remarkable and highly praised novel by William Boyd, an
early section is narrated by a character named Kay Fischer, an architect. She
speaks in the first person. At one point, she says:
In architecture, as in art, the more you reduce, the more
exacting your standards must be. The more you strip down and eliminate, the
greater the pressure, the import, on what remains. If a room is only to have
one door and one window, then those two openings must conform exactly to
the volume of space contained between the four walls, the floor and the
ceiling.
My aesthetic mentor, my
inspiration, in all this was the German architect Oscar Kranewitter
(1891-1929). He was a friend of Gropius and like him was heavily influenced by
the austere ideologies of Johannes Itten.
The reader absolutely believes that this narrator, Kay
Fischer, is an architect. She is, of course, an invention of the author. Her
thoughts about architecture provide the resonance that confirms her reality.
Many
years ago I invented a character called Dr. Gunther Koch, a foreign-born
psychiatrist. In The Magician I had him assert his theory of the three
categories of people, those who set their own goals, those who are followers
content to obey instructions, and those who burn with frustration because they
refuse to follow, can’t lead, and don’t know what they want. When the book
first appeared, I heard from psychiatrists who asked to be referred to the
professional literature in which I had found that theory. I hadn’t found it. I
invented Dr. Koch’s theory as resonance to authenticate Dr. Koch and his
profession. In commercial fiction today, technobabble is used in a similar way.
One of my students, a noted inventor, confirms that what writers do in these
instances is the same as what inventors do, though the writer’s inventions only
need to seem to work.
By
the use of Aphorisms. I
can’t recommend aphorisms as a technique for everyone, though my penchant for
their creation has given me much pleasure. I use aphorisms in my characters’
dialogue. Here are a few examples from The Best Revenge as spoken by
Louie, a character who is dead when the book begins, which hasn’t stopped him
from rendering advice:
“Of course the Bible was written by sinners. How else
would they know?”
“Experience is what enables you to have a guilty
conscience when you do something you know is wrong because you’ve done it before.”
“If you think something is a coincidence you don’t know
how God works. Pay attention, He doesn’t have time to give you private
lessons.”
“The best way to move is like a duck, calm on the
surface, paddling like hell underneath.”
“Save your breath. It’s the Devil who negotiates. God
never made a deal with nobody.”
There are two points to remember about the use of
aphorisms: If they are in the author’s voice, the point of view has to be
either the third-person or the omniscient author’s point of view, not the
first-person point of view of a character. If they are in a character’s
dialogue, as in the case of Louie, you had better be sure the character you’ve
created is the kind who could and would spout aphorisms on occasion.
By
the use of Epigraphs. While
aphorisms are your own, epigraphs can be other people’s aphorisms and thoughts
that lend a touch of resonance to your work. An appropriate epigraph can convey
the larger import of a novel, without the novel itself becoming didactic. For
instance, in The Magician I used two epigraphs, one short, one long,
both about the true subject matter of the novelist, human nature, and designed
to lend resonance to the story even before it begins.
The
sources for epigraphs are many. There are quite a few collections of quotations
on the market, with Familiar Quotations by John Bartlett, now updated by
Justin Kaplan, the best known. There are also quotation collections available
in software. If you haven’t used the collections in book form previously, I
would suggest a trip to your local library. Browse through Bartlett and any
others they might have on hand. If you take to the experience, you might invest
in buying a book of quotations. I’ve found that browsing for possible epigraphs
can sometimes provide additional reward in the paths it opens in a
work-in-progress.
Occasionally
a book will seem to be buying resonance insurance. William Styron, an admirable
novelist, prefaces The Confessions of Nat Turner with:
An excess of preliminaries might be interpreted as
defensive. Don’t overdo it.
The
ideal resonance comes from the writing itself. Brooklyn-born Bertram D. Wolfe, whose
biography of Diego Rivera was quoted from earlier, was a master of language who
never wrote a word of fiction, but I have on occasion shown exemplary passages
of his work to novelists for their instructive value. Here is how Wolfe began
his masterpiece, Three Who Made a Revolution:
The great Eurasian Plain opposes few obstacles to frost
and wind and drought, to migrant hordes and marching armies. In earlier
centuries the plain was dominated by vast Asiatic empires, Iranian, Turkish,
Mongolian. As the last of these melted away, Moscovy expanded to take their
place, expanded steadily through several centuries until it became the largest
continuous land empire in the world. Like the tide over limitless flats, it
spread with elemental force over an endless stretch of forest and steppe,
sparsely settled by backward and
nomadic peoples. Wherever it met resistance, it would pause as the tide does to
gather head, then resume its inexorable advance. Only at the distant margins
does the plateau end in great mountain barriers: the snowy summits of the
Caucasus; the Pamirs, roof of the world—where two of our three protagonists
have peaks named in their honor, thrusting up over four miles each into the
sky; the Altai, Sayan and Stanovoi mountains forming China’s natural wall. How
could a people not be great and not aspire to greatness, whose horizon was an
unlimited as this Eurasian Plain?
The visual sweep introduces a work of history with
resonance that stems from the skill of the writing. Perhaps that is too much
for a beginner to hope for, though I have read the work of relative beginners
whose work already embodies the magic of resonance.
Revision
Triage: A Better Way of Revising Fiction
The biggest
difference between a writer and a would-be writer is their attitude toward
rewriting. The writer, professional or not, looks forward to the opportunity
of excising words, sentences, paragraphs, chapters that do not work and to
improving those that do. Many a would-be writer thinks whatever he puts down on
paper is by that act somehow indelible.
Hemingway
said it succinctly: “First drafts are shit.” Judith Applebaum quotes Hemingway
as saying to an interviewer, “I rewrote the ending of A Farewell to Arms thirty-nine times
before I was satisfied.” Asked what stumped him, Hemingway said, “Getting the
words right.”
Of the
most successful authors I have worked with, I can think of only one who
fiercely resisted revising—for the first thirty minutes of each day that we
worked together. Unwillingness to revise usually signals an amateur.
A. B.
Guthrie, Jr., tells the story of a beginner at writing who asked him to
criticize his manuscript. The work showed so much promise, was so close to
being publishable, that Guthrie prepared a long list of suggested improvements.
Three months later, he happened to meet the writer and asked how the manuscript
was coming. “Oh that,” the man said. “I haven’t had time for it. I’m almost
finished with a new novel.” Guthrie reported that none of the man’s work has
ever seen print.
It is
natural to resist rewriting. Every writer wants to be done with it, to cry,
“Finished!” If you set a limit on how much rewriting you will do, you are
merely devising an artificial barrier between your work and success. I have
never encountered a writer who achieved a fully perfected manuscript in a first
draft. In fact, the majority of published writers I have known write first drafts
that are riddled with craft errors and embarrassingly bad writing compared to the version that finally sees
print. They know that writing is truly rewriting.
Even
some of the most experienced authors are not aware of a better way of revising
than repeatedly starting at page one and going through to the end. That
front-to-back process means the writer is rereading his book as he looks for
places in need of revision, a word or two here, a paragraph there, a section
that needs relocation, an unmotivated action, dialogue that isn’t quite in
character, a section that sags. After this process, the writer, having gone
through his entire book, is likely to grow “cold” on his manuscript,
particularly if he soon has to read it all again. He will have disabled himself
from viewing the manuscript again objectively.
I call
my method of revision “triage” after the system for treating battlefield
casualties to provide maximum benefit with limited facilities. Doctors and
nurses sort incoming casualties quickly to give priority to those whose lives
can be saved by prompt medical treatment as against those who are likely to die
in any case and those who will get better even if not treated. In the
conventional method of revision, going from first page to last, the writer is
dealing with trivial corrections one moment, the next moment coming up against
a major problem, then more small matters, in a random process. The problem with
that kind of tunnel revision is that the fixing of important problems may
necessitate changes earlier in the manuscript, which requires clumsy
backtracking; if new material is written, it will be in first draft and have to
be looked at again, which means revising the rewriting on yet another
front-to-back go-through. That procedure is like treating casualties on a
first-come, first-served basis without regard to priorities.
What
follows is a guide to the triage method of revision, which gives priority to
those matters that are the principal causes of rejection by editors.
The
steps I am about to propose are not written in stone. Their order can be
changed, as long as the principle is maintained: major matters are attended to
first.
Even if
you use a computer, I recommend that you have a hard copy of your manuscript to
consult for the simple reason that seeing what you wrote on paper will give you
a fresh impression of your work. If you follow the steps I am about to suggest,
reprint the appropriate section after making any major changes so that you are
working with clean copy when you finally go through the manuscript from
beginning to end. It is easy to be distracted by your own editorial changes.
* * *
The first step is to make a judgment about your main characters. Do you find yourself thinking about them in situations that are not in your book? If so, good! That means your characters are alive in your mind and should come alive in the minds of your audience. If you can’t think of an important character in situations away from the story, that character may need more work. Character problems should be dealt with before beginning a general revision. I am about to ask you some questions about your protagonist that will help you decide whether or not that character needs work.
This
method of revision makes certain that you have humanized your characters by
giving them the kind of thoughts—not always “nice” thoughts—that people have in
life. The danger is portraying a person that nobody wants to spend time with.
I have
a confession to make. When I finished the first draft of The Magician, a
highly regarded editor I showed it to said the sixteen-year-old protagonist was
such a nice, dull, uninteresting kid that he almost didn’t exist.
After
all that work? My confidence shattered like a broken teacup. However, I pulled
myself together and went back to work. I ended up giving Ed Japhet a more
rounded personality at the outset by his denying his father a chance to see him
perform at the high school dance. The reader’s sympathies are with the father.
He wants to see his son perform. The son denies that to him. Not nice, but it
helped to make the son credible. Later in the book, Ed refuses to cooperate
with the district attorney when Ed’s assailant is being prosecuted; he doesn’t
want to have anything to do with the justice system. He had views, convictions,
and was no longer a dull sixteen-year-old. I owe the long-lasting success of The
Magician in many languages to the revision of its central character. Do
take a look at yours.
Does
your main character change in the course of your novel? In the climactic scene
of The Magician, Ed gives evidence of a change in himself, a change so
shocking that one editor, reading the manuscript for the first time, actually
screamed, causing others to rush to her office thinking there had been an
accident. In a story the length of a novel, it is essential that the
protagonist undergo change. If yours at present does not, it isn’t too late.
The next step in revision is to take a hard look at your
villain or antagonist. Note that I use the singular—“villain” or “antagonist.”
If you have more than one, you may be diffusing the impact of the character’s
villainy by spreading it. Is your antagonist morally bad, not just badly
behaved? Does your antagonist enjoy doing wrong to people? Is your character
not just mischievous but malicious? What I’m getting at is the degree of
villainy. Is your character just badly behaved or a truly evil person? The
choice, of course, is yours. But readers find morally villainous characters
more interesting.
Now
let’s swing the other way. Does your villain have something that charms or
entices people? The mustachioed antagonists of yesteryear only provoke laughs
today. If the villain isn’t intriguing, interesting, lifelike, and believable,
he may not be a worthy villain. No villain can attract victims unless he has
charm, charisma, position, or wealth.
When I
really like a villain of mine, I find that critics and readers like him, too. I
liked one of my villains so much, he overshadowed the protagonist, and I spent a long time rewriting
the hero to bring him up to the stature of the villain!
If
you’re having difficulty making your villain charming or interesting, try
seeing him through the eyes of someone who loves him. Or at least cares a lot
about him. The villain will be a more effective adversary if he has been
humanized.
The
trap I spoke of earlier applies to villains, too. It is an easy temptation for
the writer, consciously or not, to use an enemy as a model for a villain in a
story. The writer may lack sufficient distance from the character to write a
villain who is both truly bad and at the same time interesting and perhaps even
charismatic and charming. Novels are not a place to get even. Think of yourself
as in the business of creating characters who are more interesting than the
nasties you know in person.
The
next step is to give some thought to your minor characters, who are often not
minor if the credibility of a scene depends on believing their verisimilitude
(lifelikeness). Just one special characteristic can make a difference. An easy
way to help characterize minor players is to use one of the senses you may have
neglected.
The next
step is to be sure you have a credible conflict between your protagonist and
the antagonist. Stories from time immemorial have consisted of people
overcoming obstacles against high odds and strong adversaries. If you’ve
followed a different course, your plot may not be strong enough to sustain the
reader’s interest. If your plot needs strengthening at any point, the guidance
in Chapters 6, 7, and 8 will help.
The
next step is to evaluate the scenes. What is the most memorable scene in your
book? Don’t go to your manuscript for clues. If you can’t remember the scene,
it isn’t memorable! Then ask yourself what is the least memorable scene? You
may have to browse through your manuscript until you find it. That’s okay, just
don’t start reading word for word. That’s what makes you grow cold on your
book.
What in
the scene you selected as most memorable made it work so well? What does that
suggest about the least memorable scene? This comparison in itself may spark an
idea for revision. Don’t be disappointed if you can’t think of a radical
revision of your least memorable scene. The usual remedy is to cut it! If
cutting it removes some piece of information the reader needs, find some other
way of conveying that information in an existing scene.
Once
you’ve revised or done away with your least memorable scene, you now have a new
least memorable scene! You need to subject it to the same tough scrutiny.
Would the book be stronger without it?
In
dealing with many authors over the years, I found it desirable to set a standard.
If any scene falls below that standard, out it goes. The process stops when the
remaining scenes all seem to contribute strongly to the work as a whole.
Is it
painful to cut a whole scene? Yes indeed. Why, then, should you do it? Because
like a surgeon you are interested in preserving the body of the work by cutting
out a part that’s not working properly or that’s causing harm to the body as a
whole. What if you are blind to its faults and can’t find a weak scene? Put the
manuscript aside for a week, a month, or longer (the longer the better), then
look again. The weakest scene will jump out at you, staring you straight in the
eye until you decide whether to let it live or die.
Once you’ve dealt with scenes that weaken your manuscript,
the next step is to test motivation. First, from memory, jot down what you
believe to be the three most important actions in your novel. Is each action
motivated in a way that you would accept if this story were told by somebody
else? The credibility of your work depends on the three main actions being
motivated to your satisfaction. If you find it difficult and need help,
remember that motivation has to be either provoked by circumstance or planted
ahead of time. Motivation can usually be established by planting it ahead of
the scene in which the action takes place.
Chekhov
said that if someone has a gun in the first act, the audience knows that the
gun must go off in the third act. Among playwrights that’s known as the
obligatory scene. If a gun is seen in the hands of someone who is not known to
carry a gun and then almost immediately fired, it will seem as if the author’s
heavy hand is at work. If the gun is planted much earlier, the use of it
becomes almost inevitable. In fact much suspense can be derived from its not
being used when the audience thinks it will be.
The
news too often brings us cases of serial or mass killings that seem to have no
reason behind them. Then follow-up stories deal with the investigation of the
backgrounds of killer and killed because we want reasons for actions, not
just to prosecute the killer but to understand human behavior, especially when
it is not like ours.
The
motivation of important deeds is not an option but a necessity. Writers of
so-called commercial fiction often rely on coincidence. They assume their
readers suspend disbelief more readily than the readers of literary fiction.
Motivating actions takes work, and using coincidence is much easier. But coincidence is the mark of
transient works, and I have met few novelists who are satisfied to think of
their work as merely temporary entertainment.
After you’ve dealt with the three main actions of the
book, the next step is to review any other significant actions, ferreting out
poor motivation and anything that might seem to happen just because the author
wants it to. Is there any action in your manuscript that is not in keeping with
the character? Is there any action that under examination sounds far-fetched?
It might be fixed by planting a motive in a prior scene. Do this before
undertaking a general revision so that you can judge the success of your
revision as you read through from beginning to end.
Until
testing motivation comes easily, I suggest rereading Chapter 15. That will help
anchor in your mind the means of establishing credibility. The examples in that
chapter will help remind you that motivation can often be derived from
something simple.
You are almost ready to undertake a general revision of
the entire manuscript. Take the first page and put the rest aside out of sight.
Next do something else. Anything else. Take a walk. Take a drive. Play tennis
or golf. Visit a neighbor. Make a cup of coffee. Whatever you do, try not to
think about your manuscript. Then come back and make a new title page that
looks like this:
Your Present Title
by
[Insert the Name of a
Contemporary Author You Admire]
Now read the first page as if it were the other author’s
manuscript. After reading the first page, would you go on to the next page?
If
there isn’t a compelling reason to go to page two, it usually means that you
haven’t sparked the reader’s curiosity. If that’s the case, you need to go back
to Chapter 2 of this book and see if you can use its guidelines to improve your
opening.
Of
course, if your first page as presently written compels you to read on,
congratulations! You are ready to begin the general revision of your manuscript
that I’ve kept you from by suggesting all of these other steps first.
* * *
Embarking on a general revision calls for starting on page
one and working through the manuscript to the end, reading as a reader and an
editor, not as a writer. If you’re not used to the process, and if the fun we
had with the title page didn’t give you enough distance, try to think of the
manuscript this way: It was recommended to you by a friend, but you doubt the
friend’s judgment. He or she has previously recommended books you found
wanting. Maybe this manuscript will turn out to be the same. You are going to
read it critically, like a tough editor.
Before
you begin, I want to caution you not to disimprove what is there. If in
doubt about a change, don’t make the change. Instead, make a note to
yourself for later consideration. I find that when I look at such notes days or
weeks later, many of those questionable ideas for revision get discarded.
Your
first objective in a general revision is to tighten the manuscript. I know of
only one novelist who writes tight first drafts that need expanding in
revision. The others need cutting, lots of it. It is perfectly normal to
overwrite in first drafts. The test of a writer’s skill is in recognizing on
later reading what can be eliminated, and then having the guts to do the
cutting.
One of
the students in my advanced fiction seminar had a manuscript acceptable to his
agent but not to him. He knew it was too long. He took advantage of his
computer. Every time he came to a paragraph he wasn’t sure contributed to the
book, he marked it and with a block move transferred it to the end, after the
last page. When he finished he found that he had transferred dozens of
paragraphs and that only one or two, in modified form, deserved a place in the
text. It’s a useful strategy. I’ve tried it and it works.
Your
second objective is to watch out for the between-the-scenes material,
especially the offstage recounting of actions not seen. Try to eliminate as
many of these as you can, or make them active and interesting in themselves. If
this needs clarification, reread Chapter 3.
If
you’re not used to extensive revision, you may feel as if you’re trying to do too
many things at once. I want to assure you that over time you will be able to do
it. In the meantime, do as many as you can and then go back over the manuscript
for the others. Remember, I am trying to keep you from growing “cold” by
keeping down the number of your reviews of your work.
In your
general revision, cut words, phrases, sentences, or paragraphs, pages, or whole
scenes that seem not absolutely necessary. Watch for places where your own attention flags. That’s
usually a sign that something needs to be revised or cut.
If your
sentences are all approximately the same length, the effect will be monotonous.
Vary the length of sentences. Ideally, follow an especially long sentence with
a short, even abrupt sentence. Don’t do this all the time. A pattern of
short-long-short-long can get almost as monotonous as all long or all short
sentences. One of my students writes naturally in a mellifluous cadence. It’s
her greatest fault. An unbroken mellifluous cadence, lovely for a few
sentences, if kept up will put a reader to sleep.
Unless
you are consciously trying to slow things down between fast-moving scenes, be
relentless in moving the story forward. If you find it bogging down at any
point, it could be for many reasons: perhaps too slow a pace, not enough
happening. If you don’t see an immediate fix, mark the place in the margin and
write down what you think might be wrong. Come back to those places later.
If you
catch the author talking at any point, or a mix of points of view, mark the
section so that you can return to Chapter 13 for guidance.
Are
your characters under stress from time to time? Does the stress increase? Keep
reminding yourself that fiction deals with the most stressful moments of the
characters’ lives.
As you
go through, cut every unessential adjective and adverb. Cut “very.” Cut “poor”
for everything but poverty. Make every word count.
If
you’ve said the same thing twice in different words, pick the better one and
cut the other. If you find yourself using the same uncommon word twice within a
few pages, use your thesaurus to pick a synonym. And in your read-through, mark
every cliché for excision.
One of
the most common improvements I find in line-editing a writer’s manuscript is
changing the order of words, phrases, or independent clauses in a sentence. The
simplest instance is where you put the identification of who is speaking. Do
you write,
George said, “They treating you okay?”
Or:
“They treating you okay?” George said.
If there is any chance that the reader won’t know who is
speaking at that point, the “George said” should come first. If it is clear who
is speaking, “George said” can follow what he says or be omitted.
In my
own work, I make transpositions hundreds of times in a book-length manuscript.
Sometimes it is to let the emphasis of a sentence fall in a different place.
Here’s an unedited sentence:
Josephine Japhet of course knew why her son was a reader
in a universe of listeners to rock music.
That puts the emphasis on rock music. I transposed the
phrase “her son was a reader” to the end of the sentence, since that was where
I wanted the emphasis to fall:
Josephine Japhet of course knew why, in a universe of
listeners to rock music, her son was a reader.
In another scene, Ed Japhet is in school, outside the room
where his father has just finished teaching and is trying to get away from a
student pestering him with questions after class. Ed shows his impatience this
way:
Your old man teaching in your school was bad enough.
Depending on him for a ride home was the pits. Come on, Dad, move it.
The thought was improved by transposing the last of the
three sentences to the beginning of the paragraph, so that it read:
Come on, Dad, move it. Your old man teaching in
your school was bad enough. Depending on him for a ride home was the pits.
After a fight, a boy is lying in the snow, badly hurt. See
if you can spot the glitch in this sentence:
The other cop slid out of the car, knelt beside Urek,
fingers feeling for a pulse in the neck.
Because readers will undoubtedly have had experience with
a pulse being taken at the wrist, they may suppose that immediately on reading
the word “pulse.” Immediately, they read “in the neck” and have to change their
first view. That kind of glitch can momentarily disturb the reading experience.
To avoid it, I simply transposed a few words:
The other cop slid out of the car, knelt beside Urek,
fingers feeling the neck for a pulse.
It pays to transpose sentences for clarity. In the
following example, a woman who is not always articulate, on the phone to a
lawyer expresses her concern about what will happen to her if her husband is
convicted:
“If Paul goes to jail, I won’t have anywhere. I can’t pay
the mortgage on my own. He listens to you. Please come over.”
In my opinion, the phrase “I won’t have anywhere” is not
immediately comprehensible in its present location. Transposed, it works well:
“If Paul goes to jail, I can’t pay the mortgage on my
own. I won’t have anywhere. He listens to you. Please come over.”
“Purple prose” means writing that is overblown. It turns
off editors and readers almost immediately. Here are some dreadful examples of
purple prose:
The cry of a soul in torment, swept by a tide of anger
and outrage.
Terror plucked at her taut nerves.
Jagged laughter tore at her throat.
Ghastly red
spatterings, viscous red-streaked gobbets of his brains.
Fierce rending triumph.
Enough? Nobody writes that way? These are all from the
bestseller Scarlett, Alexandra Ripley’s sequel to Gone With the Wind.
A
phrase need not be “purple” or “flowery” to be conspicuous, by which I mean
that every time you pass it, it jumps off the page and pleases you. When you
“love” certain images or sentences, they are frequently so conspicuous as to
interfere with the story. If they are, save them in a special box that you’ll
look into five years from now, and thank me for having asked you to remove them
from your manuscript, though it may have hurt at the time.
Root
out sentimentality, which is an excess of response to a stimulus. It makes
writing “flowery.” Your job is to stimulate emotions in the reader. An excessive response turns off the
reader, just as it does people in life:
“Why Fred, I am so excited to see you I just can’t bear
it.”
That kind of gushing is just as incredible in fiction as
it is in life. Underplay to evoke emotion in the reader:
I looked at her eyes. They were dry.
Given the right context, that would evoke more emotion
than something overblown like “She was ready to cry her heart out.”
As you
read through, look for imprecision, when the word you used is not exactly the
word you needed. Consult a dictionary. Consult a thesaurus.
Until
you are in the habit of making sure that there is something visual on every
page, while reviewing the draft put a small V in the lower right corner of
every page that has something visual on it. This provides a discipline as you
develop the experience of reading with an editor’s eye. If a page has nothing
visual, mark NV and return to it later to introduce a visual element. If you
have two or more consecutive pages with nothing visual, you may have a larger
problem that needs remedying, perhaps too much narrative summary where an
immediate scene is needed.
In
dialogue sequences, if your characters usually speak in complete sentences, fix
it so they don’t. Have you used enough dialogue? Remember that one of the
virtues of dialogue is that it makes scenes visible. If your dialogue
sufficiently confrontational? If any dialogue runs longer than three sentences,
break it up with an interjection from another character or a thought or action.
Check to see that responses in dialogue are oblique, at least from time to
time. If any exchange of dialogue seems weak or wrong in comparison to other
dialogue exchanges, mark it for later improvement or excision.
In your
general revision, catch the places where a character “muttered,” “screamed,”
and the like instead of “said.” Substitute “he said” and “she said” for
language that tells the reader how the lines are spoken. That’s the dialogue’s
job.
Can you
now see why I suggested you perform triage on major matters before your general
read-through? If you are new to the process, you’ll want to make a checklist of
all the things I’ve suggested catching during general revision. If you find
that you just can’t do everything in one pass, save some things for a second pass later on. In time, if you
do a good job of triage, you’ll be able to handle most remaining matters in one
reading.
Does
that mean you’re finished? You are never finished rewriting until you receive
galley proofs. You will still make essential revisions, but professionals try
to do all the revising they can before the book is set in type (the cost
of “author’s alterations” beyond a minimum is borne by the author). When you’ve
completed triage and then a general revision, you still have work to do. You
may want to ask yourself, if you were to bring a strong scene forward, would
that provoke the reader’s curiosity more than the scene that presently starts
the book? Having revised the manuscript, all of it will be fresh in your mind,
which will make it easier to identify a strong, curiosity-arousing scene that
might be brought forward.
You
might consider at this stage whether the ending of your book is a high point of
satisfaction for the reader. If not, is there another scene or circumstance
that might make a better ending?
After finishing your revision, let the manuscript lie
fallow for several days or longer. Don’t rush to show it to a friend or family
member. Let it cool down. Go on with other work, then come back to the
manuscript and read it with your changes. As you become more expert at
revision, you will be a better judge of your work than laymen who love you and
don’t know anything about craft.
For
your next read-through, work with a clean manuscript in which the changes
you’ve made are not visible as changes. (One of the great advantages of working
on a computer!) This time, as you read, watch for anything that momentarily
makes you see words on the page and takes you out of experiencing the story.
You are aiming for the reader’s total immersion. You should be able to
spot these flaws after you have made the kind of changes I’ve suggested.
If all
this checking seems excessive, ask yourself would you fly in a plane in which
the experienced pilot felt so cocksure that he didn’t actually perform the
checklist that makes flying safer for all of us?
If
you’re of a mind to ask, “Stein, do you do all this revision yourself?” I’ll
report that The Best Revenge, a novel of mine I’ve quoted many times in
this book, was turned in to my publisher in its eleventh draft. It was accepted
without a single change. Then, on my own recognizance, I did two more drafts.
Reprieve: Revising Nonfiction
How many
times in the course of a lifetime do we wish we could relive some conversation
or event, do it differently? Revision provides that opportunity. First drafts
of nonfiction can be flawed in organization, quality control, interest, and
language. Lucky for us writers, this is the one place in life where we get a
reprieve.
Perhaps
if we did get a second chance in life, we’d blunder right back in and muck
things up again. That’s what can happen in revision unless we have a plan of
action. I will attempt to provide a plan here.
Attitude
is important. If you review what you’ve written and exclaim, “Oh my God, this
is awful!” you’ll only dispirit yourself. The experienced writer knows his
first draft will be flawed, that he will get a chance to employ his editorial
skills in fixing it. During my decades of editing, I met only one professional
writer who believed that his first drafts were graced with perfection. And who
is to argue with a man’s religion, as long as he takes his manuscript somewhere
else?
Just as
in revising fiction, the nonfiction writer is in danger of growing cold on his
manuscript quickly if he starts revising at the top of page one and goes
through paragraph by paragraph to the end. To avoid growing cold, I advocate
fixing major things before starting on a page-by-page, front-to-back revision.
This will confer two advantages. If you fix the larger problems first, you will
in all likelihood make some first-draft infelicities in the new material that
you will then catch on your subsequent page-by-page revision. In addition, by
working on specific problems, you will not have grown cold on the manuscript
when you tackle the read-through.
A good way to begin is to personify your subject matter in
an incident involving an individual. Sometimes the germ of such an anecdote is buried elsewhere in the draft. If so, examine
it to see if it has the potential of being made stronger than your present
opening.
Also
ask yourself if your opening is sufficiently visual to be seen by the reader.
You may recall that in Chapter 3, “Welcome to the Twentieth Century,” I
explained the differences among the three main components of
fiction—description, narrative summary, and immediate scene—and pointed out
that understanding the differences could be of immediate help to a nonfiction
writer also. Most important, the nonfiction writer who learns to use immediate
scenes wherever he can will also find a dramatic improvement in the readability
of his work. The ideal place for your first immediate scene is on page one.
Before
you settle on a beginning, ask yourself if it provokes sufficient curiosity in
the reader. How soon after your beginning will the reader comes upon the
“engine” of your article or book, the place at which the reader decides not to
stop reading?
If you
are writing an article, does it make one point after another on a plateau, or
does it build toward a climax? If it is a book, does the end of most chapters
point toward the next?
Have
you summarized material that would make interesting visual passages if you
converted the summaries to events the reader could see? If there are summaries
you cannot or don’t want to convert to scenes, can you shorten them in order to
avoid losing the reader’s attention? If you want to “jump-cut,” the reader will
go along with you.
Have
you created occasional suspenseful interest by raising a question and
withholding the answer for a while? Can you recall any place where this might
be done now?
Does
your work have reverberations of other times or places, of important events or
influential people? The most mundane subjects can be given a lift by the use of
resonance. There are a number of reference books that go through history,
period by period or year by year, giving you the highlights of the time, its
influential people, and significant political and cultural events. Browsing
through one of these books can sometimes provide you with a few relevant facts
that will lend resonance to your work. You can refresh your recollection of
other sources of resonance in Chapter 31.
Have
you consciously tried to create stress for the reader, some delicious tension?
Would it help to look at Chapter 10, on tension for fiction writers, to see if
it sparks any ideas for tension in your work? Some of the suggestions can be
adapted for nonfiction quite easily.
If you
were the editor of your manuscript and it was written by someone else, what
would you choose as the weakest part? Look at that section now and see if you can eliminate it.
If you can’t cut it entirely, can you condense it? Is there anything you can
add to the beginning of that section that would arouse the reader’s curiosity?
Consider your most memorable passage. What makes it so good? Does that provide
a clue as to what you might do with your weakest part?
Surprise:
If you’ve cut or changed the weakest part, you have a new weakest part. In
retrospect, do you know why it is weak? Can you improve it? Can you cut it and
stitch together what comes immediately before and immediately after?
When
you’ve considered those questions and fixed whatever needed fixing, it may be
time for a focused reading, by which I mean a reading of your manuscript in
which you read not as a reader but as a hunter for specific errors and
omissions as if on assignment to do so. If you wrote the manuscript on
computer, I suggest working with a clean hard copy of your manuscript. It will
seem fresher to you, and faults you may not have noticed before will be
suddenly apparent.
Is
there something visible on every page? If you are reviewing what you wrote in
hard copy, pencil a V in a lower corner of every page that has something
visual, and on pages without a V, see if you can create something visual, even
if it is a leaf falling from a tree.
Have
you eliminated most adjectives and adverbs, and the unnecessary words we call
flab? Go after them as an editor, not as the writer.
Cut
every cliché you come across. Say it new or say it straight.
Can you
spot any similes or metaphors that show signs of strain and should now be cut?
If
you’ve never done this before, you may find it difficult to look for all these
things at the same time. If so, you may need to check the following list every
once in a while until you are used to the process:
As you work along as an editor, do you see any places
where the author might have padded the manuscript with unnecessary digressions,
overly extensive patches of description, or anything else that strikes you as
filler? You always strengthen text when you remove the padding.
As to
the last, an anecdote. At a New York party long ago, a nonfiction writer whom I
knew by reputation but had not met came up to me, well into his cups, and asked could he come
see me with a manuscript he had kept secret from everyone. One hears things
like that at parties. They seldom mature into appointments. This writer phoned
for an appointment and showed up with a large scrapbook under his arm. What was
the “secret” manuscript with which he had intrigued me?
The
writer published regularly in a magazine that paid him a generous monthly
advance against his articles. The advance, much like an account at a company
store, was paid down at so much per published word. The scrapbook contained his
articles in the magazine. In each he had bracketed in color the many sections
of padding that he had added in order to produce more published words and
thereby to decrease his indebtedness. He was now interested in publishing a
book of his pieces minus the padding. For reasons lost to time, I no longer
remember why this project did not proceed, but its lesson about padding
remained in my mind, as I hope it now will in yours.
Now
that you’ve fixed the larger problems and hunted and killed the smaller ones,
take some time away from the manuscript and then read it as a reader, not an
editor. But keep an editorial pencil handy, just in case.
Where to Get Help
Where to Get Help
BOOK DOCTORS
Some decades back if your work was talented and thought to
be eventually publishable, your book could be bought and an editor assigned to
work with you on any necessary revision. As bottom-line management took over
most publishing houses, detailed and especially prolonged editing was viewed as
not cost-effective, and agents were expected to submit manuscripts that were as
final as possible. That change occasioned the development of a new profession,
book doctors, mainly individuals who are experienced editors or writers or both
who evaluate and work on manuscripts, helping the authors bring them up to
speed. That help does not come cheap, but the hourly rates are a lot lower
than, say, lawyers charge. Many book doctors charge by the assignment, whether
it’s an evaluation, a long memo of recommendations, or actual line-editing of
an entire manuscript. Some book doctors advertise in Writer’s Digest, some
do not advertise anywhere. I can only refer writers to the small number of book
doctors whose work I know. Readers of this book can obtain a list of them, with
addresses and phone numbers, by phoning (914) 762-1255 during business hours
eastern time and asking that the Book Doctor List be sent to you. It’s free.
DICTIONARIES
If you’ve come this far, you know that the quality of a
written work is in large measure dependent on the precision with which words
are used. The more words I learn, the more I use a dictionary. Over the years I
have become increasingly impatient with writers for whom the approximate word
will do. The serious writer is addicted to the precise meaning of words in his own work and admires le
mot juste in the work of others. For him, the approximate word is never
satisfactory, and he delights in the tools that enable him to be as precise as
possible.
I
suggest keeping at least two dictionaries handy while you work, a desk
dictionary for convenience, and a larger dictionary on a stand or on top of a
chest-high bookcase for easy turning of the pages. Page-turning ease is not a
light matter. Many writers will use any excuse not to lift a heavy tome and
riffle through its pages. (I refuse to use the two-volume Oxford unabridged dictionary
I own because of the inconvenience of tracking its minuscule type with a
magnifying glass.) I no longer need to resort to my Webster Unabridged because
of the excellence of The American Heritage Dictionary of the English
Language, which I now use more often than any other, not only for my
writing but also to look up all the medical jargon physicians use to
communicate with each other in reports that their victims are not supposed to
see.
LITERARY AGENTS
The most comprehensive listing of agents with useful commentary can be found in a large-format paperback book, Literary Agents of North America, available from Author Aid Associates, 340 East 52 Street, New York, NY 10022, Phone (212) Plaza 9-4213. The Fifth Edition is $33, plus $7.50 for priority mail delivery in the U.S. They accept checks or money orders but not credit cards. An extensive listing of agents can be found in the Literary Market Place, the huge annual directory better known as the LMP, published by R. R. Bowker. The Writer’s Handbook, edited by Sylvia K. Burack and published by The Writer, Inc., has a smaller listing. Several other paperback books on the market contain evaluative material on a number of literary agents, but some of the important agencies decline to be listed. A free copy of the brochure “How to Get a Literary Agent to Represent Your Work” by Sol Stein is available by sending a business-size (#10) stamped and self-addressed envelope to free agent booklet, The WritePro Corporation, 43 South Highland Avenue, Ossining, NY 10562.
SOFTWARE
While I have taught writers at universities on the coasts
and in the Middle West of the United States, the advent of the computer and its
almost universal use by writers have enabled me to clone myself in several computer programs. As a result, writers
in thirty-eight countries are now able to plug me into an ear, as it were,
while they write and revise their work. In these quasi-interactive programs, I
function not only as teacher but also as editor, guiding the user step by step.
Those programs, thanks to supportive reviews in over a hundred newspapers and
magazines and to distribution by the Book-of-the-Month Club and the Literary
Guild, have reached a great many writers I have not had the opportunity of
meeting in person.
All the
programs have a two-minute, automatic installation process, come with their own
built-in word processor, and save everything you write automatically so that
you can concentrate on your writing and not on computing.
The
first, an award-winning program called WritePro®, is a tutorial program to
which I direct beginners, though it has been used successfully by experienced
and published writers. The author of some nineteen novels said in a review that
he used the program to remind himself of all the things he didn’t know he’d
forgotten. I want to call your special attention to two things. You cannot get
writer’s block while using WritePro, a great help to beginners. Steve Bass, who
is president of the Pasadena, California, IBM Users Group as well as a
journalist who reviews software, wrote that his “absolute favorite” function
was the Flab Editor™, a copyrighted computer software invention that enables
the user to strengthen his writing by highlighting individual unnecessary words
on a page under guidance, and with a keystroke make them disappear so the
writer can see how much stronger the text is without them. The words can be
brought back at will or deleted with a keystroke. The Flab Editor™ is in
WritePro’s Lesson 5, but the technology is usable in all WritePro lessons.
You can
obtain a free WritePro lesson by phoning 1-800-755-1124, 9-4 eastern time
weekdays, or by writing to The WritePro Corporation, 43 South Highland Avenue,
Ossining NY 10562. They charge only the nominal shipping and handling cost. The
lesson on disk, with the manual, is free if you tell them you own Stein On
Writing. Be sure to specify whether you want the DOS, Windows, or the
Macintosh version. The people at the same number and address can also provide
you with further information about the lessons. If you wish to purchase the
lessons, tell the order taker you own this book and you will receive the
highest available discount.
FictionMaster™,
also selected by the Book-of-the-Month Club, enables writers to improve their
characters, plot, and dialogue by transferring chapters from their manuscripts
to the program and editing them under my instruction. FictionMaster can also be
used as an interactive tutorial
on most of the subjects in this book; you master a technique by using it in
your own work. Though FictionMaster is the most advanced program of its kind
available anywhere and is used by published writers, it is designed so that a
smart beginner can use it also. Phone 1-800-755-1124 and ask to receive all of
the FictionMaster menus, which will give you a clear idea of the areas covered.
They are free.
FirstAid
for Writers® also enables the user to transfer his own writing into the
program, fix anything in need of fixing with my advice, and transfer it back
out to his word processor. In addition to its four modules for fiction,
FirstAid for Writers contains a complete module for non-fiction that is used by
journalists and nonfiction book and article writers. You can obtain a free
schematic map of the more than sixty subjects included in this program from the
WritePro office.
TAPES (AUDIO AND VIDEO)
An audiotape that writers find useful is “Dialogue for
Writers.” It contains the essence of the twelve-week course on dialogue that I
gave at the University of California at Irvine.
Another
audiotape, “What Every Author Should Know About Publishing,” is based on my
one-day crash course on “Publishing for Authors” given at the University of
California.
If you
identify yourself as a reader of this book, you can receive a free copy of
either tape with the purchase of any WritePro computer program.
A
two-cassette video entitled “Stein on Writing” (no connection to this book,
though the title is the same) was produced by Mayo Entertainment in Los Angeles
in 1992. The first cassette allows you to be a fly on the wall and eavesdrop on
one-on-one conversations with more than a dozen of the writers in my advanced
fiction seminar, each focusing on a different writing problem. The second
cassette enables you to visit the Santa Barbara Writers Conference of 1992 and
hear the entire presentation I gave to an audience of about 370 writers that
year. To obtain the two-cassette video, call or write to Mayo Entertainment,
1818 Thayer, Los Angeles, CA 90025, (310) 475-3333. The price is $39.95 plus $5
shipping and handling.
THESAURUS
Most writers use computers now. A day doesn’t go by in
which I fail to use two different on-line thesauruses, marvels of convenience
and speed. A thesaurus does not provide as many words with precisely the same meaning as it does words with similar meanings.
The thesaurus that came with my most frequently used word processor is racy and
inexact, producing distant cousins of the word I’m looking up. Which is good.
That on-line thesaurus often surprises me with a word that I would not have
thought of on my own and that gets me thinking in a different direction. I also
keep memory-resident The American Heritage Thesaurus, which is scholarly
and prissy. Checking the two thesauruses against each other is fun and a
stimulant to the imagination.
For
example, a student of mine had a story in which the word “harlot” was overused.
My prissy thesaurus came up with the synonym “prostitute” and that’s all. My
other on-line thesaurus came up with no fewer than twenty-one “synonyms”—some
near misses and some pretty far off—that enabled my student to add color as
well as diversity to her text: seductress, temptress, coquette, flirt,
nymphomaniac, siren, tart, tease, vamp, wanton woman, prostitute, whore, call
girl, hooker, hussy, slut, streetwalker, tart, tramp, trollop, wench.
The
book I favor for synonyms is a paperback called The Synonym Finder by J.
I. Rodale, published by Warner Books, which is organized alphabetically. You
don’t have to look a word up in the back to find out what section up front you
might find its relatives in.
WRITERS’ CONFERENCES
My students consistently tell me that they find writers’
conferences beneficial for learning, networking, and meeting other writers. The
fact that writers keep coming back to the same conferences year after year attests
to that. Writers enjoy the camaraderie of other writers as much as they do the
instruction they receive in workshops. If you are relatively inexperienced in
the commercial side of writing, writers’ conferences are also a good place to
hear agents and editors talk, and to meet them. Lists of writers’ conferences
are available in the Literary Market Place, published by R. R. Bowker,
and The Writer’s Handbook, edited by Sylvia K. Burack and published by
The Writer, Inc., and in some issues of writers’ magazines. A few of the
conferences ask to see several pages of your work ahead of time. It’s a good
idea to talk to another writer who’s been to that conference before applying.
The conference administration might supply you with the name of someone living
in your area who has attended the conference previously. You might want to get
your name on the mailing list of conferences that interest you, since the most
popular conferences fill up within a few weeks of sending out their annual
announcements.
A Final Word
Whatever the effect this book might have on your writing,
I trust that it will have made you into a more perceptive reader for the rest
of your days.
I hope
you will have occasion to benefit from the techniques that I’ve been passing on
to writers for nearly four decades. In time, some of these techniques will
improve your chances of successful publication, or if you’re already
publishing, will enhance your work. Hemingway said, “We are all apprentices in
a craft where no one ever becomes a master.” We know that’s not literally true.
Many of Hemingway’s stories and some of his novels are masterly. He meant we
can always learn more. You can return to this book like an old friend for
guidance and support whenever you feel the need.
In the
course of reading this book, you may have come to the correct conclusion that a
writer is a manipulator for whom the end justifies the means, a teller of white
lies, a deceiver, all to a good end. He is also a shaper of the destinies of
the characters he brings to life, a creator of golden idols he hopes some
readers will worship. Hence the form of the following advice.
TEN COMMANDMENTS FOR WRITERS
When you get the good news of a book contract, let me know
and share the pleasure.
SOL STEIN
Action:
In fiction, action connotes something happening that is not necessarily
physical movement. Adversarial dialogue is action.
Architecture:
In the design of a larger work such as a novel, the purposeful order of
scenes.
Aria:
In any creative form, a longer speech designed to evoke an increasing
emotional effect on the reader or viewer. See speechifying.
Backstory:
The characters’ lives before the story, novel, or film began.
Book
doctor: A person who provides a free-lance editorial service to writers for
a fee. Book doctors critique book manuscripts and shorter material; some do
detailed suggestions and line-editing of complete manuscripts, services
previously supplied by publishers. They charge by the hour or by the nature of
the assignment.
Cliché:
A hackneyed expression, tired from overuse.
Coincidence:
In fiction, something that happens by chance and is insufficiently
motivated.
Crucible:
In fiction, a situation or locale that holds characters together as their
conflict heats up. Their motivation to continue opposing each other is greater
than their motivation or ability to escape.
Diction:
Choice of words, probably the best identifier of quality in writing.
Eccentricity:
An offbeat manner of behavior, dress, or speech peculiar to a person and
dissimilar to the same characteristics of most other people.
Echo:
In dialogue, an answer that repeats the question.
Engine,
Starting of: The moment when the reader’s curiosity is so aroused that he
will not put the book down or turn to something else. It usually carries an
intimation of conflict, a character threatened or wanting something badly that
he can’t have.
Episodic fiction: A story told in parts in which one event
happens after another without seeming to be integrated into the whole.
Flab: Extraneous words, phrases, and sometimes lengthier matter the
elimination of which strengthens prose.
Flab
Editor™: A copyrighted computer software function enabling the user to
highlight individual words and hide them or bring them back at will to see the
difference their excision makes in the strength of text. See the Software
section of Chapter 34.
Flashback:
A scene that precedes the time of the present story.
Handle:
A short description of the book designed to evoke interest in it.
Immediate
scene: A scene that is visible, as if being filmed.
Jargon:
Words or expressions developed for use within a group that bar outsiders
from readily understanding what is being said. The purpose of language is to
communicate or evoke; jargon obfuscates or hides.
Line
space: Four blank lines in a double-spaced manuscript, used within chapters
to indicate a break, usually of time, or a shift to a different location.
LMP:
The initials of the Literary Market Place, the directory of the
American book publishing industry, listing book publishers, editorial services,
agents, associations, events, and industry yellow pages. This huge, expensive
directory can be consulted in many public libraries. It is invaluable for the
writer whose work is ready for the market.
Marker:
An easily identified signal that reveals a character’s social or cultural
class, heredity, or upbringing.
Metaphor:
A figure of speech that results when words or phrases are brought together
that do not ordinarily belong together, yet by their proximity convey a fresh
meaning. One thing is spoken of as if it were another. Some of the best novel
titles are metaphors (e.g., The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter).
Motivation:
The source that impels an action, the reason that something is done.
Narrative
summary: Offstage action usually conveyed in general terms.
Oblique
dialogue: An indirect reply not in line with the preceding speech, not
directly responsive.
Omniscient:
Describes the point of view in which the author roams everywhere, including
the minds of all the characters.
One
plus one equals one half: A formula designed to remind writers that
conveying the same matter more than once in different words diminishes the
effect of what is said. A corollary of this equation is that if the same matter
is said in two different ways, either alone has a stronger effect.
Particularity:
A precisely observed detail rather than a generality.
Point
of view: The perspective from which a scene is written, which character’s
eyes and mind are witnessing the events.
SASE:
Seldom spelled out, it is an abbreviation for “self-addressed stamped
envelope.” To receive whatever is being offered, you are required to enclose
such an envelope with your request or the item or information will not be
furnished.
Scene:
An integral incident with a beginning and end that in itself is not
isolatable as a story. It is visible to the reader or audience as an onstage
event, almost always involving dialogue and other action.
Segue:
Derived from music, it means to glide as unobtrusively as possible into
something new.
Showing:
Making fiction visible to the reader as if it were happening before his
eyes, moment by moment.
Simile:
A figure of speech in which two unlike things are compared, linked by “as”
or “like” (e.g., “He’s fit as a fiddle”).
Speech
signature: Within dialogue, a tag that is characteristic of the speaker,
such as Jay Gatsby’s “old sport.”
Speechifying:
Monologue of one person that runs too long.
Static:
Describes a scene lacking visible action or dialogue that moves the story
forward.
Suspense:
The arousal and sustaining of curiosity as long as possible. Involves
anticipation and sometimes anxiety about what is going to happen.
Tags:
The means by which a speaker is identified, most commonly “he said” or “she
said.”
Telling:
Relating what is happening offstage.
Tension:
Delicious moments of anxious uncertainty. Derived from the Latin tendere,
meaning “to stretch.”
Vanity
press: A firm that advertises to writers, offering to publish their books
for a fee. Usually the service is that of manufacturing a small edition and
providing scant notice to the public that the book is available. A few of
America’s most prestigious publishers have kept a well-guarded secret: they
also publish books under “vanity press” conditions. Consider it a last resort
for a book a writer must see in print whatever the cost.
Voice: The author’s “voice” is an amalgam of the many factors that distinguish
a writer from all other writers. Many authors first find their voice when they
have learned to examine each word for its necessity, precision, and clarity,
and have become expert in eliminating the extraneous and imprecise from their
work. Recognizing an individual author’s voice is much like recognizing a
person’s voice on the telephone.
This glossary Copyright © 1993, 1995 by Sol Stein. Reproduction or excerpting without prior written consent prohibited.
(JAN, 2003)—Scanned, proofed, and formatted by Bibliophile.
[1] “The Housebreaker on Shady Hill” has always held a special interest for me because I’ve lived in that house for more than thirty years. I hasten to add we are not the people in that house. The house on Shady Hill is not the house Johnny Hake lives in. It is the house he steals from in the story.
[2] I deal with the sexual politics, outrageous experiments, glories, and shenanigans of this interesting group in a work-in-progress entitled Passing for Normal. Here I concern myself solely with the technique playwrights learned that can be used to advantage by writers of fiction and film.
[3] In Afterwords: Novelists on Their Novels, edited by Thomas McCormack, New York, 1988, St. Martin’s Press.
[4] I urge every writer who wants to improve his sense awareness to study Diane Ackerman’s extraordinary book The Natural History of the Senses.
[5] As a guide to the probable sources of romantic love, I have recommended to many writers Helen Fisher’s Anatomy of Love.