Authors: Sol Stein
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
T
hink 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: