Making a Character Real, Part II

HOW DO YOU MAKE A CHARACTER REAL?

 PART II

 

Specificity.   The more specific you get, the more vivid you get.  It’s not enough to speak of someone just as a “big guy,” “little woman,” “pretty girl,” or “smart kid.”

 

Downplay generalities and concentrate on detail.  You walk wide around words that apply to anyone:  man, woman, boy, girl, fat, thin, tall, short, pretty.  Save these as a launching pad.  Start with the big picture, the dominant impression:  adjective of manner, vocational noun.  Then you incorporate additional tags and traits that flesh it out.

 

As you write get down to cases.  Specifics. 

 

That is, if you’re talking about a man with a limp, don’t let it be just any limp.  Maybe the man lurches along, or drags his foot, or humps his shoulders as if each step were painful. Does he walk with a rigid, erect stance, in a manner that says he doesn’t want to acknowledge his handicap?  Or is his progression more that of a person that’s undergone a kneecap job?  Or the tentative, unsteady trotter in the manner often found in someone ninety years of age?

 

If the character is a woman who is less than a fragile flower, don’t be content to call her tough.  Let her retrieve a can of Copenhagen from her purse and jam a bunch into her mouth.  Or perhaps she wears black lipstick, or has a scorpion tattooed on her inner thigh. 

 

These factual details avoid judgmental words and eliminate the writer’s opinion (subjective).  When you say, “She was a tough-looking broad,” you’re passing judgment on her.  You’re assessing her in terms of your personal prejudices.  The reader may or may not agree. 

 

If you report that “She wore a smudged T-shirt torn to point that her bra-less left breast was almost falling out.  The shirt blazed the slogan, ‘Death ‘and the image of a blood-dripping knife,” your  reader is in a position to draft his/her own conclusions.  Same for “She crossed her legs.  The split skirt fell away, revealing a scorpion tattooed high on the inside of her right thigh.”  The onus of judgment isn’t on you.

 

Your goal should be to provide your readers with just enough raw material to enable them to draw their own conclusions.

 

The reader may or may not agree with you when you say that your character looks hung over.  But if you say that the man looks up at you out of “bleary, bloodshot eyes” while he “scrubs shaking fingers along his stubby jaw.”

 

In the same way, your female lead will come through more sharply if she “runs slender fingers along her stocking, scowling and muttering, ‘Oh shit!’ as a nail snags a loose thread.  Think of the difference if you had said ‘exclaiming petulantly.’

 

Conjure up a picture of precisely what you saw in your memory.  What are the feelings that go with it?  Search out words to describe it on a level that your reader shares the experience with you. 

 

Objective presentations are most effective when they concentrate on the particular, the definite and the concrete, rather than the general, the vague and the abstract.  When you speak of the particular, it means that you’re dealing with a unique and special individual, rather than people in general.  “Definite” says exact, specific.  Particular, definite and concrete formulations draw picture in your readers’ heads.  Vivid pictures, especially if you bear down on things you can see and hear and smell and taste and touch.  Seeing is believing and all our feelings spring from sensory perceptions.  Remember the smell of lilacs, bacon frying or day-old sweat?  The smoothness of velvet, the graininess of sand, the roughness of splintered wood.  The taste of ripe Camembert, of sharp cheddar; of chocolate and peppermint and licorice.

 

It will help, too, in your descriptions if you make use of active verbs as differentiated from passive.  An active verb shows a character doing something, rather than merely existing.

 

catherine@catherinealexander.net

 

Making a Character Real Part 1

HOW DO YOU MAKE A CHARACTER REAL?

 PART I

 

TAGS.  Broken down into categories, we speak of tags as appearance, ability, speech, mannerism and attitude. A tag is a limited label.  It identifies a character and helps your readers to distinguish one person from another.

 A name is a tag.  It should identify the character and give the reader an idea of the kind of kind of person s/he is.  Examples: 

 Skinny black detective nicknamed “Biafra Baby” in William Caunitz’s Suspects.  “Nurse Ratched” in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.  “Mr. Wasserfiend” 11/20/08 New Yorker, Think Hard, It’ll Come Back To You --Woody Allen.  “Malvonne” as opposed to “Violet” in Toni Morrison’s Jazz.

 Names also characterize by telling age.  “Esther,” “Ruth” or “Hilda” are not common names these days.   Names like “Kristi,” “Taylor,” and “Madison” have become more fashionable.

 Tag categories are broken down into appearance, ability, speech, mannerism and attitude

 

               Appearance.  Adolph Hitler’s mustache.  A bushy beard.   Extra fine or coarse hair.  Sloppy or fastidious dress, a missing ear lobe, a drooping eyelid.  Matted red curls. 

 

               You can bring appearance into action if you say,” she reaches up one small hand to adjust her beret, the same blue as the color in the painting.”   “She slipped on her sunglasses to hide the carved lines under her eyes.”

                Another tag that says it all:  “He was 47 going on 70.”   Or “Those clever coyote eyes” kept me wondering. “

               Ability.   One of my characters made quilts.  This was certainly not expressed in her nature.  I had to present the background that prepared her for the craft.  How about the skill to make a bomb, style hair, change a diaper, lay cement?  How about the character’s ability to perform such tasks? 

                Speech patterns.  Repetitions such as “sir,” “awesome” or “dude.”  Stuttering.  Never finishing a sentence.

                Mannerism.  Rubbing the chin, blinking eyes, a frown, a squeaky laugh, biting the lip, smoothing the hair.  These are sometimes called “tics.”  My mother was constantly wiping her hands on her apron.

                Attitude.  Mary Poppins’s eternal cheeriness.  Racism, sexism, cynicism, idealism.  Not to mention being paranoid, fundamental in religious beliefs or a born-again atheist.  A slacker or driven to succeed.

 

Catherine@catherinealexander.net

Sensory Details & Emotional Memory

SENSORY DETAILS & EMOTIONAL MEMORY

 

(Of his wife on her deathbed).  “I found myself, without being able to help it, in a study of my beloved wife’s face, systematically noting the colors.” – Edouard Manet

        

Remember those five senses?  Sight, Hearing, Touch, Smell & Taste

Memory resides in specific sensory details, sometimes referred to as emotional memory:  what the nerves and skin remember as well as how it appeared. In what particular way was Mama beautiful?  What did that angry neighborhood bull dog sound like? If we can capture and name the particular smell of the wax polish in that long-ago house, then other memories seem to follow.

For example, “Russell Baker says he remembers very well the day of his father’s death.  Although he was only five at the time, Baker could tap into vivid details that have stayed with him. “I can still hear people talking that day.  I know what the air smelled like.  I know what people’s faces looked like.  How they were dressed. What they were eating.

“If you find yourself having trouble getting into a story you want to tell, it is always a good idea to get up very close and start using your senses.  You may have a good idea of the whole story in your mind, but your vision of the whole may, in fact, be a hindrance to finding the way in.  Describing some of the details, using your ears and eyes, calling up a smell that belongs to a story, or reaching an imaginary hand back through time to touch a piece of furniture, or the texture of a dress, or someone’s skin – these acts of memory will serve you well.  They can and should be exercised over and over, not only to get you going, but also to push your story deeper, pull your reader closer, and lift the heart of the story out of obscurity into a sensory world that you and your readers can inhabit together.” –Writing the Memoir by Judith Barrington, pages 116 and 117.

Exercises --

 

Change the following so that the reader can capture the essence.  Use the senses.

The strawberries were overly ripe.

The horn blared loudly.

The afternoon was warm.

Mother and Dad loved each other.  (You can use touch, taste, sight.)

The reader should to some degree get to know the characters through the sensory details that you provide.

 

Catherine Alexander
catherinealexander.net

 

Metaphors and Similes

Metaphors and Similes

 

Metaphor is a powerful way of telling the truth in other than a concrete way.  It’s called abstract.

 You can give your descriptions a big push with a metaphor.   Essentially, a metaphor is the likening of two objects, phenomena or concepts to each other. 

 As a figure of speech, metaphor is a way of describing one thing in terms of another. 

 “My husband is a bulldog.”  “The day was a diamond.” 

 A vivid metaphor is compelling. It opens a door, adds zip to a piece, gives you a way to express something difficult and is a forceful tool.

 “In Alaska, icebergs are white prisons.”

 “My heart is a rose that blooms for you.”  Corny, but makes a point.

You can use a metaphor to compare, contrast or describe. “His hair was so fine that a kitty cat could lick it off.”

 “It was like a gold filling in a mouthful of decay.”

 “He talked like a verbal machine gun.”

Let’s say that we a comparing a children’s beach ball.  What part of it are you going to make the metaphor about?  The plastic smoothness of its surface?  The shape of its trajectory as it arcs through the sunlight?  The sound it makes when Uncle Bill slaps it with his palm?  The smell of it when you’re blowing it up?  Let’s say we pick the shape of its trajectory. There are infinite possibilities.  One is that the ball is the sun arcing across the sky.  Another would be that the ball arcs like a rainbow over the ocean.

We can begin with a known metaphor and make it more abstract to move away from the cliché:

“Her hair was black as night.” (Cliché)  “Her hair was as black as the hour after bedtime.”  Or, “Her hair was as black as her patent leather pumps.”

As a metaphorical comparison, we sometimes use “than.”  “Her scar was wider than the San Andreas Fault.”

Metaphors are one of the most powerful ways to express the wholeness of our ideas.

My mother’s alcohol abuse:

 The house on Lauderdale Avenue had moods.  Sometimes I saw the house standing square and tall.  As soon as I stepped inside, the place welcomed and warmed me. The slipcovers on the couch were straight, orange gladiolas graced the fireplace mantel, the dining room table was set for four, the house exuded roast beef and Yorkshire pudding and the smell went clear through to the rafters.

Other times, the house folded in upon itself.  As I walked up the porch steps, the house sagged.  Once I got inside, the grief was strewn all over.  The slipcovers on the couch crumpled, ashtrays were dumped, gladiolas were dead and the dining room table was shamed by sticky glasses with lipsticked rims.  The only smells from the kitchen were from bourbon and Pall Malls.

Defining work:

“…to succeed on the Salomon Brothers trading floor, a person had to wake up each morning ‘ready to bite the ass off a bear.'"  -- Michael Lewis, Liar’s Poker.

 Simile

Simile is saying that one thing is similar to another, using like or as:  my love is like a red, red rose.  It sounds casual, conversational and lacks the authority of a metaphor. But similes are fun and sometimes what something isn’t can tell you a lot about what is:

 

As comfortable as a hairbrush in bed

As graceful as a hippopotamus on roller skates

As clean as a coal miner’s fingernails

As convenient as an unabridged dictionary

As reassuring as a dentists’ smile

As exciting as a plateful of cabbage

As pleasant as ice water in your shoe

As welcome as a rainy Saturday

As easy as collecting feathers in a hurricane

As interesting as the magazines in a doctor’s waiting room

As happy as a four-year-old in a bathtub of Kool Aid

As sweet as snake venom

Cleaner than Comet

 

Using metaphors and similes makes for artful truth telling.

Catherine Alexander
catherine@catherinealexander.net

The Elephant in the Room

The Elephant in the Room

 

Often we write about our experiences in a general sense, i.e., who, what when and where.  We’ve honored the prohibition on honesty -- we don’t air our dirty laundry, reveal family secrets, cross boundaries, hurt our loved ones, etc.  But if we strain against these barriers, our work becomes deep, compelling and lifts off the page.  Consider the most difficult, the most taboo subjects in telling your truths in an artful way.  This can be done through irony, metaphor, humor, tone, point of view. 

 Keep in mind that we must beware of revenge as a motive.  Writing that has retaliation as its goal is always transparent and makes readers uncomfortable.

 On the other hand, what if we write about the elephant in the room? 

For example, my mother was always getting “sick.”  She spent hours in bed during the day, visited the doctor often and spent time in the “hospital.”  She “fainted” at my aunt’s wedding.  The elephant in the room was alcohol abuse.

I have had it relatively easy.  Mother has been dead for 20 years and I can always tap into one of her “episodes” to get me started writing.  She’s a never-ending resource for me to get words on paper.  The way she held her glass and cigarette in the same hand, the lipstick on her glass, the package of Pall Malls along side the bottle of rum.  The Bacardi bottles teetering on the garage rafters.

Writers are users.  We use the stories around us.  We have the right to tell our stories, but also must be ready to accept the responsibilities, if our writing is to be considered art and a power for good.  If you are worried about the consequences, legal or otherwise, of publishing a story that might upset someone, consider making them unrecognizable.

Writing and publishing are two separate stages of a writer’s work.  Deal with them one at a time.  Sometimes writing about the elephant may spur us on to other lively subjects!

A memoir is a slice of life about which a writer muses, struggling to achieve some understanding of a particular life experience.  A successful memoir demonstrates a writer’s slow coming to awareness, some reckoning within herself/himself over time, some understanding of how her/his unconscious is at work.  Because of this reckoning, the writing of memoir is not without pain.  A memoir that successfully taps the reservoir of universal human feeling resonates strongly with its readers.  The writer has the capability to connect with everything and everyone.

Look deeply within yourself, calling up emotions that are often repressed or avoided. Letting sleeping dogs lie is not conducive to successful writing.

 SHAME

 Shame is said to be a made-up emotion, but some of us feel it deeply within us. It’s a powerful resource for writing.  Tap into it.  Do you remember how you felt when someone said to you, “shame on you?”

When I was four, I traced a swastika made on the house next door. I took the paper with the tracing up to my room and practiced over and over trying to make a perfect swastika.  The longer I worked, the worse I felt.  I have no idea why I felt shame, perhaps it was collective, but I tore up all those attempts at drawing and put them down the toilet.

 I think I was seven when I passed a baby buggy parked in front of Rexall Drugs.  The baby was crying furiously.  I walked back and peeked into the buggy.  The baby’s little fists were balled up tight and its face was purple. I took my squirt gun out of my pocket and let the kid have it. “Now be quiet,” I said, and ran off.   Shame on me.

 GUILT (very closely related to SHAME)

Another baby story.  I was 14, babysitting Norman, around three months.  The card table was used for changing.  I put him on the table and turned around to grab a diaper.  Norman rolled off onto the floor.  I grabbed him and ran next store, which happened to be his grandmother’s house.  She took him into her arms and told me to go home.  Norman’s mother called me that night and told me never to come again.  I felt too guilty to ask how the baby was and I never told my parents why I wasn’t going back.  Still to this day I don’t know what happened to Norman.

 HATE & SHAME

My friend and her husband had this Siamese cat called Valentine.  He was a talker and a hisser, mostly hisser, around me. When I tried to pet him, he would go to bite or scratch me.  Heaven forbid if I ever tried to pick him up. Penny and her husband treated this cat like their child.  One night I was over for dinner and they set a place for Valentine, with a bowl of Scotch broth with barley, apparently his favorite. It was his birthday.  They called “Vally” to come to dinner and planned on singing Happy Birthday to him.   I thought I was going to get sick.  I pleaded illness and left without eating.  I HATED that cat and could not sit at the dinner table with him, let alone sing Happy Birthday to that monster.  And yet I felt shame (whether it was justified or not) because my friends adored that animal, mean as he was.

 FEAR

What scares you the most?  Why?  Have you ever felt on the brink of disaster?  Threatened?  In a place where you couldn’t get out? 

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 Writing exercises:

 Who said “shame on you” when you didn’t deserve it?

 Is there a person or animal you dislike and you feel guilty about it?

When were you last on the brink of disaster?  Look at your stories, if there’s no brink, add one.

Try at least one of the following:

Make a list of everything you consider taboo for yourself.  Think about which things on the list you could begin to write about.

 Write a memoir beginning with the words “It would be much too dangerous to talk about..."

 Tell the story of something in your life you are proud of without trivialization or modesty.

 

Good luck.

 

Catherine@catherinealexander.net

 

 

 

Unreliable Truth, Emotional Truth, Memoir and Memory

Unreliable Truth

Emotional Truth

Memoir and Memory

 

The purpose of memoir is to capture the essence of the narrator rather than the factual details of parts of life.  Memoir is rarely whole or factually correct.  Memory is selective; it distorts.  It gives pleasure, it reveals disappointment.  We continually create memory from the pieces of our experience.  The stories we tell and retell are unreliable.  Who can say whether these pieces are an actual image from a specific event we remember and not from a photo?  Many people “recall” events from the childhood from looking at old photo albums. Who can say whether the emotions associated with a particular experience actually belong to it or are some feeling we have learned to express?

 

Memory is not false, but it is unreliable in its inclination to make a totally accurate story of the past.  The idea is to make sense of what has happened in a life and to entertain the listener.  Memories reflect our purpose and identity; a reflection of how we see ourselves.  The way we begin to tell our life story is the way we begin to live our life. What we remember is a reconstruction of image and feeling that suits our needs and purposes.  It’s an attempt by the author to narrate memories with the greatest emotional truth.  If you’re the writer, it’s your memory of the event written from your perspective – not your sister’s husband or your child’s.  Each of your family members may tell the story of a particular event differently because of their particular point of view, but that doesn’t mean that your account is untrue.

It is your job to relate your memory as honest as possible and to assure the reader that you have done a sufficient amount of reflection to write your best understanding of what originally happened.  The reader cannot expect you to remember every single detail or conversation accurately. But the reader has the right to expect that what you claim to be true will be accurate to the best of your recollection.  Memoir is about honesty, not about how you appear to others. If you write with emotional truth, your reader will care about you and the events your life. The stories we leave the next generation become the memories upon which they build their lives. Anyone can write facts; not everyone has the courage to write the truth.

 
Most memoirs are written in first-person.  This is your life you are writing about -- your ambitions, success and perhaps, even your failures.  Your memories are filled with people who have adorned, scarred and skewed the plot of your life. You must summon back the men, women, children and animals who have crossed your life.  To preserve the important people you have known, put them in your stories before time robs you of your impressions.  These people are waiting in the wings.
 

What do you remember about your first date?  Did you insist you weren’t hungry so he wouldn’t see your teeth looking disgusting?  Were you afraid to say you needed to use the bathroom?

 Who was the most mean-minded person you knew?  Try to recapture the feelings you had for that person.

Conversely, how about the sweetest person you knew?  Did that person ever fail you?

Who was the one person that drove you completely nuts?

 

Do you often wonder what would have happened if you didn’t:

             Take the plane ride                  Move away

            Marry that person                    Attend that college

            Go to that concert                   Take that job

 

Catherine Alexander

Catherine@catherinealexander.net

Memoir vs. Fiction

MEMOIR VS. FICTION

A memoir is a selected aspect of life.  It is a story from a life.  It is not a replica of a whole life.  That would be an autobiography.  A memoir doesn’t have a shapely plot in the way that fiction usually does.  Imagination plays a role in both kinds of writing.  However, the application of imagination in a memoir is bound by facts, while in fiction it is centered on what the reader will believe.  If you name what you write memoir or fiction, you enter into a contract with the reader.  You say this is what really happened (memoir) or you say that this is imaginary (fiction).

There is one rule that applies to both memoir and fiction:  Be interesting!

Please note that not everything in a memoir is factually accurate.  No one can remember the exact dialogue that took place at breakfast forty years ago. The author says that this is my story as I remember it.  It is up to you how far you will allow yourself to go to fill in the memory gaps.  We all know that siblings often have different childhoods; a memoir is a story of your past.  But you are limited by your experience, as you remember it.  For example, if you say you had four sisters and this is not the case, then you are telling a lie.   In a memoir, the author stands behind the story, saying that this is what happened; this is true.  The central point commitment is not to fictionalize. 

 

In fiction you can invent characters, places, change chronologies and make up a better ending.  In other words, you are free to lie.  You can conflate several characters into one composite character. A story can sound like it’s true told in the first person, but if the writer presents it as fiction; the reader will usually perceive it as such.  Once you begin fiction, you owe your allegiance to the story and not to the facts.  Sometimes a lie tells a larger truth.  Perhaps Aunt Mabel from Tennessee can be better told as Genevieve from Connecticut, or your mother’s beginnings in an orphanage better explain her behavior as an adult.  Thus, fiction is not bound by facts.  It tells a story by tampering with the truth.

 

 Helpful exercises for writing memoir or fiction:

A.  For all you list lovers, try any of these on and see if you can come up with a story.

1.           List the friends you’ve had who made a difference, even the ones who weren’t exactly friends.

2.            List all pets you’ve ever had, even the short-lived goldfish from Woolworth’s and the little turtle that turned into cardboard overnight.

3.            List the moments you’d live over again for whatever reason.

4.            List the worst moment(s) of your life.

5.            List anything you’ve done that you’re ashamed of.

6.            List objects that you’ve lost; the ones you wish you now had.

7.            List the person you wished you had never met.  The person you want to meet.

8.            List the best meals that you’ve ever eaten and where you ate them.

9.            List the toys and games that you owned as a child.

10.        List your favorite songs and the ones that you can’t stand.

11.        List your favorite smells.

12.        List the things that make you afraid.

13.        List what you resent the most.  Conversely, what you appreciate the most.

 B.    Or write a portrait about someone you hate, knowing that person will never see it.

C.     Or write the story of a particular vacation and why it was good or bad.

D.     Or write a story using this beginning:  “I can tell you how it happened.  It’s easy to say how it happened.”

E.      Or incorporate some of the above material into a story you are presently writing or have written.

 

The more you write, the better you get.

 

Catherine Alexander

catherine@catherinealexander.net

Small Island by Andrea Levy - a dialogue study

Small Island is an excellent example where dialogue makes the story come off the page and creates distinct relationships.  The novel is told from four different voices.  In 1948, Hortense Joseph arrives in London from Jamaica to meet her husband who has returned from the war.  If I remember correctly, they were only married six months before he left.  Hortense expects a much more elegant and honorable welcoming.  Her Jamaican husband, Gilbert, expects a much more obedient and passive wife.  Now we have a situation. 

The first and second chapters narrated by Hortense and Gilbert respectively are clever and funny with snappy answers, the Jamaican way.  The author uses her craft here.  This is not "real dialogue."  People just aren't that fast on their feet.  But it seems natural and believable in prose. 

I would recommend Small Island as a super read.  And for writers who are looking to polish their dialogue, it's a must.

Catherine Alexander
catherine@catherinealexander.net

Dialogue: The Heart of Scene

Dialogue is often at the heart of scene.  Dialogue makes events in your story more vivid.  Relationships take on life through dialogue.  They become more real than they could ever be just through narrative.  This is because dialogue adds to the narrative’s force.  No longer are people being written about.  They are now coming to life, actually taking part in a drama.  When they come to life, so do the relationships between them.

 Dialogue is not small talk.  It must always depict change, reveal character, advance the plot and express theme. 

 Dialogue must appear realistic without being realistic.  It should:

 Not be natural, but suggest naturalness.

Be brief.

Add to the reader’s present knowledge.

Eliminate the routine exchange of ordinary conversation.

Convey a sense of spontaneity but eliminate the repetitiveness of real talk.

Reveal the speaker’s character, directly and indirectly.

Depict the relationships among the speakers.

Real talk is anything but orderly.  People don’t always answer each other’s questions directly.

He:  “You want a coke with your pizza?”  She:  “Why were you looking at her like that?”

                 He:  “You want diet or regular?  Why do you ask?”

 If this were written dialogue, the reader might be a little confused.

Effective written dialogue isn’t real.  If you transcribed a real conversation, you’d find it full of fillers and inconsequentials such as “um,” “I guess,” “I mean” and plenty of unfinished sentences, even dropping off words, such as  “Never mind, I  was just wonder…”  Written dialogue may employ some of these fillers, but be sparse!

Every piece of dialogue needs a reason to exist.  Each line should add to the reader’s knowledge of the situation, the people, events relationships or the feelings.  Dialogue that merely gives information is better turned into direct narration –NOT “Look over there in that window display of mannequins in silky beige bras and matching thongs.” BUT “Honey, don’t look,” she said, pointing at the store window mannequins in silky beige bras and matching thongs.”

Effective dialogue doesn’t need the help of “said” substitutes or adverbs stating how the lines are delivered.  Writing appears more professional when people simply say their lines, rather than breathe, croak, snarl, hiss, wheeze, chortle spit, gasp or sigh.  These are called tonal tags.  These often tell the reader what can be found in dialogue itself.  When you insert explanation in dialogue, you cheat the reader out of a chance to collaborate in the creation of the scene.  However, there is plenty of good writing that uses verbs and adverbs to create the speaker’s emotion.  Today, however, it’s considered an intrusion and unimaginative.

One of the most common reasons for flat dialogue is the formality of language.  This is conversation that sounds stilted. Try short sentences, interruptions, contractions.  Use verbal tics, accents and expressions.  Natural speech isn’t fluid.  It starts and stops.  It wanders.  Phrases are rethought halfway through and substituted with other phrases that are themselves rethought.

Consider how the following affirmative statements can be used to make dialogue natural at the same time as they can be used to differentiate between characters.  And all you’re doing is changing the idioms:

Yes.             Yep.    

Yeah.           Sure.

Whatever.

In my next blog, I'll given an example of one book where dialogue comes alive.

Catherine Alexander

catherine@catherinealexander.net

 

 

 

 

Scene: Show, Don't Tell

Scene is showing!.

For fiction, standard advice runs, “Show, don’t tell.”  For memoir, telling is used more often.  After all, you are telling about your life.  Still, there should be a mixture of scene and summary.  Scene is showing, summary is telling.

 In fiction, stories allow us to love, condemn, condone, hope, dread and hate without any of the risks those feelings ordinarily involve.  Writers show the emotional impact of experience through or with characters. The attention is not so much on the words but through the words where the vitality of understanding lies.  It’s not enough to tell the reader that your character is in love – you must show it.  A scene must be an integral part of the story, an important detail that will surface later in narration or in developing character.  There are techniques for accomplishing this – for making scenes vivid, moving and resonant – which can be learned and can always be strengthened.

 By scenes and scenes alone do writers show not tell.  So what constitutes a scene? 

 Everything slows down or stops.  There is dialogue, or actions that display character, that change the course of the story in some way, advance the plot or change the way we feel about this character or that character.

Get to a good scene as quickly as possible in your writing.  How about this one:

 “Some killers are born.  Some killers are made.  And sometimes the origin of desire for homicide is lost in the tangle of roots that make an ugly childhood and a dangerous youth, so that no one may ever know if the urge was inbred or induced. 

“He lifts the body from the back of the Blazer like a roll of old carpet to be discarded.  The soles of his boots scuff against the blacktop of the parking area, then fall nearly silent on the dead grass and hard ground.  The night is balmy for November in Minneapolis.  A swirling wind tosses fallen leaves.  The bare branches of the trees rattle together like bags of bones.

“He knows he falls into the last category of killers.”    -- ASHES TO ASHES by Tami Hoag

 Or – or a character can be thinking, talking to himself or the reader such as:  This is the start of John Grisham’s THE TESTAMENT:

 “Down to the last day, even the last hour now, I’m an old man, lonely and unloved, sick and hurting and tired of living. I am ready for the hereafter; it has to be better than this.  (What a first sentence!)

 “I own the tall glass building in which I sit, and 97 percent of the company housed in it, below me, and the land around it half a mile in three directions, and the two thousand people who work here and the other twenty thousand who do not, and I own the pipeline under the land that brings gas to the building from my fields in Texas, and I own the utility lines that deliver electricity, and I lease the satellite unseen miles above by which I once barked commands to my empire flung far around the world.  My assets exceed eleven billion dollars.”

Catherine Alexander

catherine@catherinealexander.net

 

 

 

Elements of Fiction: Scene and Summary

Elements of Fiction:  Scene and Summary

However structured the memoir or fiction, certain skills need to be employed in order to make the most of the story element. Two important aspects of moving through story are scene and summary. The object is to intersperse scene and summary.

 Scene:  close-up, using dialogue          Summary:  long-shot, telling or narrating

 Scene is a close-up camera zooming through a kitchen window.  Two characters are talking at a table. The camera goes up really close to each face while the audience hears each character speak.  In other words, it’s showing.

Many of the details of the kitchen are lost with this camera shot, maybe a blurry blue pitcher on a sideboard behind one of the speakers can just be discerned; perhaps there is a vague impression of yellow walls and an open door, but in this scene it is the speakers and what they say that matters.  Only selected details are in sharp focus.

In this short span of time, we slow down the narrative to something more like the actual time it takes for the scene to unravel in life.  Because the writer is going in close and because there is no need to crunch a lot of time into a small place, we can give the dialogue, note the expressions, reactions and movements of the speakers, as well as sounds, sights, smells, etc., in the immediate environment.  We can go inside a character’s head and give the reader thoughts that aren’t expressed in the dialogue.  We may describe the facial expression of one character.  We select details to render in close-up.

 

         Indoors the fire was sinking and the room was dark red.  The woman put her saucepan on the hob, and set a batter pudding near the mouth of the oven. Then she stood unmoving.  Directly, gratefully, came quick young steps to the door.  Someone hung on the latch a moment, then a little girl entered and began pulling off her outdoor things, dragging a mass of curls, just ripening from gold to brown, over her eyes with her hat.

         Her mother chid her for coming home late from school, and said she would have to keep her at home the dark winter days.

         “Why mother, it’s hardly a bit dark yet.  The lamps not lighted, and my father’s not home.”

         “No he isn’t.  But it’s a quarter to five!  Did you see anything of him?”

                                              --DH Lawrence, Odour of Chrysanthemums

To write good scenes, we need dialogue. Don’t be tempted to add spice by way of attributions.  These are the “he saids” and “she saids,” which are sometimes needed to make it clear who is saying what.  Since the usual practice is to use a new line each time you switch speakers, attributions are likely to be needed less often, use them only when the conversation would be unclear without them.  Don’t shore up the dialogue with descriptions such as “he snapped” or “she mused,” or phrases such as, “he said in an endearing tone.  In the best writing, that kind of information is revealed in the dialogue itself and the reader gets to know the speakers through their own words.  Move your story along with dialogue that adds to your depiction of the characters.

Summary is the long shot – the one that pulls back to a great distance, embracing first the whole house, then the street, then the neighborhood, and then, becoming an aerial shot, it takes in the whole city and maybe the surrounding mountains too.  The view can include a huge number of details, but all seen from a distance, none apparently more important than another. 

Translated into literary time, these two approaches represent difference paces.  We use the summary when we want to cover a lot of time in a few paragraphs; it gets us from the end of one scene to another scene a year later, and on the way there it fills in information that is important to the continuity of the story. It can accelerate the tempo of a narrative, hurrying us through events that might be uninteresting or distracting. In other words, it’s narration or telling.

Summary can also offer rich, sensory detail and is certainly not merely a way of moving time along between scenes.

          I started school in the middle of hurricane season, and the world grew suddenly bigger, a vast place of other adults and children whose lives were similar, but whose shadings I couldn’t really explore out of respect and dignidad.  Dignidad was something you conferred on other people, and they, in turn, gave back to you.  It meant you never swore at people, never showed anger in front of strangers, never stared, never stood too close to people you’d just met, never addressed people by the familiar tu until they gave you permission . . .  In school I loved the neat rows of desks lined up one after the other, the pockmarked tops shiny in spots where the surface hadn’t blistered, the thrill when I raised my desktop to find a large box underneath in which I kept my primer, sheets of paper, and the pencil stubs I guarded as if they were the finest writing instruments . . .

                                                                                                                                                                       --Esmeralda Santiago, When I was Puerto Rican

 Because this is summary rather than scene, the verbs refer to an ongoing set of actions that took place over time.  Although this summary gives many interesting details it never moves into a scene, which would require the writer to fix on one particular day within that period.

 

The best story is interspersed with scene and summary, making it an engaging and interesting read.