how to write – Page 2

sensory writing

Did I mean sensory, or sensual? In essence, both. I’m talking about concrete ways to make a work more sense-aware as well as making its characters (and setting) seem more ‘real’. It’s also about learning to describe perceptions.

For instance, how does a rose really smell? A rose is a rose is a rose. But some mornings it smells like watermelon. Other times, like velvet on a peach. When you tell the reader an object smells like something they hadn’t expected, you create a link that lingers (just like an aroma) in the mind.

EXERCISE 1

Let’s imagine we want to set a story in a roundhouse during the middle ages.

Roundhouses were made of wattle (a method of weaving sticks between uprights) and daub covered over by masses of thatch. They were called ’roundhouses’ because a circular array of poles supported the rafters. Thus the wattle-and-daub (mud) wall was merely the shelter while the structure was visible as a series of poles circling the space inside.

But while knowing the above is necessary for being able to describe a roundhouse, it doesn’t necessarily place a reader ‘in’ there. And we want that immersion, right? So in this exercise you need to think and write sensorily.

Using past experiences, what do you think it would be like to close your eyes and stand in the middle of the roundhouse (not on the hearth, mind!) smelling and ‘feeling’ the environment? Do this in your mind or jot down single phrases or words to capture the feeling.

Doing this, I get: smoky; dingy; vaulted; muffled; stew-smelling; earthy; cavernous; and so forth.

Using your word-list as inspiration, write a paragraph describing what it’s like to enter the roundhouse for the first time.

using the senses to extrapolate

We all use our senses, some of us differently or in more limited ways than others.

The point of this post (and associated exercises) is to develop a more ‘writerly’ approach to sense-thinking. It’s about harvesting the information that is at your disposal in order to convey what isn’t. This can help make your settings and events as well as characters feel more ‘real’.

I’ve said before that novel writing is 10% experience and 90% extrapolative invention. Of course, if you’ve lived through an earthquake, you probably don’t need to do much extrapolating.

But perhaps you were a bit too busy thinking of surviving to pay attention to details, or perhaps like me you were out of town when the earthquake hit.

So how do you write in-the-moment (that is, sensorily) about something you’ve never lived through?

– you can research — of course. Researching an event is an important way to gain insight. However often this is distant insight — useful for overview, but not so useful when writing from the perspective of a character in the moment being described.

– you can experience similar (presumably lesser) things and extrapolate.

Having only lived through my share of noteworthy events, I’m a big fan of extrapolation.

So what sorts of things am I talking about ‘extrapolating’ from?

If you’ve ever slid down crumbling scree or fallen off a moving object you have some experience with which to begin to imagine the earth shaking and ground moving. How about being on a train or bus that suddenly stopped?

If you’ve ever hit your knuckles hard, you’ve got some clue of what it might feel like to have one’s fingers chopped off or stomped on by a boot. That is, you don’t know how either of the latter feel, but you’ve some idea how it might.

If you’ve ever loved or been loved (requitedly or unrequitedly), you can imagine how to write anything from romance to adoring (or losing) a child.

A fight scene can be rendered more ‘real’ if you can remember and write how it felt to fall, take a knock, or lash out at something.

So how do you turn these remembered sensations into something bigger-picture or more gripping? In large part that’s the wordcraft business. To do this more effectively, look at my other posts on writing from the senses and metaphor.

Meanwhile, it can help to jot down a list of memorable experience you’ve had, and try to write at least 3 words or phrases that sum up the sensations or emotions involved. Be as glib as you like; for instance you might sum up the end of an affair like this:

shock — rejection — loss.

Those are three flat, unimaginative words, right? But now we can turn them into equivalent physical sensations to make them seem more graphic, so they might linger in the mind of the reader. Emotions can be described via physical movements as well as sensations.

For ‘shock’ you could think along the lines of how your body felt during a shocking moment: chilly; numb extremities; tingling; tight-lipped; dry-mouthed. Was there a lightning (hot or cold) flood through the limbs or a jabbing in the temples?

For ‘rejection’ you might describe sensations of shrinking or shrivelling; protective flinching; hot-headedness; dizziness; acridity in the mouth; bile or another bad taste. You might slouch; you might cringe; you might stare helplessly into space.

For ‘loss’, you might feel your clothes have become too big; you might grasp at things; you might feel hollow-stomached; you might continually look for something that isn’t there, or drop a hand onto the seat beside you frequently.

Whatever you describe, putting emotions into physical terms, if you can do so without resorting to cliché (‘pain in the heart’) will help them seem more ‘real’, while paying attention to how your senses work means you’re in a better state to write any situation realistically.

Just be careful if you decide to fall off a bicycle down a hill of scree for ‘research’.

two-word character creation

The way to do this is to begin by looking at what film people call a ‘pitch’, or short punchy paragraphs used to sell the idea for films. Pitches are good to examine for the purposes of writing because they employ as few words as possible to sum up the conflicts hindering a character, and also hinting at that character’s journey.

Usually in a pitch the description of the character is no more than two words, the first being an adjective relating to personality, a vital physical characteristic or general outlook, the second a noun drawn from a verb (that is, a word describing the person’s job, main activity or chief interest).

Thus we could have a woebeggone archaeologist, an embittered principal, a jaded writer, a talking pumpkin… whatever.

Of course there’s a major art to getting the character to mesh in somehow (or clash with?) the theme. But that’s another story. Right now I’m just talking about coming up with ‘tags’ you can use to begin to flesh out your characters from scratch. After all, sometimes all we have to start with are words.

What I propose you do is make two separate lists along the lines above, then pick a word from each to be your character summary. The first list will be adjectives that have some relation to mood, personality or an important (which is to say, thematically connected) physical attribute; the second list will be all ‘doing’ words, or rather ‘doer’ words.

However as we’ll see later, not all personality traits or professions or pursuits promise much conflict to come. Still, here are some lists off the top of my head:

nerdy	archaeologist
witty	high jumper
boastful	clown
hopeful	obstetrician
pretentious	stockbroker
logical	princess
empathic	ex-soldier
homely	translator
successful	pig farmer
brilliant	deserter
deceitful	politician
damaged	demon (why not?)
romantic	card sharper
disabled	lion tamer
clownish	tax official
uptight	husband
washed out	medium
abandoned	gold digger
driven	dog trainer
snappish	tightrope walker
sensitive	chess player
credulous	accountant
obedient	romance writer
sex-starved	sculptor
hygienic	madam
churlish	pastrycook
deluded	warden

Huh, I just realised ‘deceitful’ is next to ‘politician’. That was entirely happenstance, believe it or not!

The next step is to pair one of these ‘doer’ terms with a word from the list of personal traits. Unfortunately some just don’t work, do they?

‘Romantic romance writer’, for instance, is not particularly going to jump off the page. There’s no core conflict; no sense of a mismatch or lack. Another ridiculous example would be ‘clownish clown’. But what about ‘churlish romance writer’? Or ‘washed-out demon’?

Of course this exercise is more of a start-up one than a true character creation tool. And it must be underscored that the success of it depends in large part on finding new and unusual combinations of character traits. Genre and theme will almost certainly dictate the character’s social role, chief interest, corporeal state or profession.

selfish characterisation

Selfish? Pardon. I meant ‘based on oneself’.

Virtually all writers, I’m going to argue, use their own experiences, thoughts and perceptions to guide character.

No, this doesn’t mean they write about themselves; not at all. It simply means that the only way we have to comprehend and therefore write about human perceptions is to think and feel them ourselves. Let’s call that 10% of the process. The other 90% is, of course, extrapolative invention.

I’ve never had a broken leg or fallen out of an aeroplane. But I’ve hurt my toe and fallen off a horse. I’ve seeing the giddy wheee! of scenery blurring past and felt the crunch of iron-hard ground. The rest, I suspect, is internet research.

The beauty of having a self — an embodiment — is that you’re your own best information gathering device. The other beauty is that you can use this information to make even borrowed or stolen characters seem ‘real’. Selfish writing lives on the page because it gives the sense of an actual person, not a cypher.

Of course, you may not want ‘true’ characters, or even particularly lifelike ones. Your work might be subverting the idea of psychological realism, or playing with stock characters as a kind of sport. Your novel might be comedic or metaphysical. One size character-strategy doesn’t fit all.

But you can do worse than pay attention to being alive.

EXERCISES:

Using the senses.

Sensory writing.

stealing characters

Stealing characters is practically a time-honoured profession. Firstly there’s real life. These are the people we’re closest to: workmates; children; sweethearts. And haven’t we all based characters on ourselves?

Then there are tropes we can borrow or pinch. Holmes is a trope-character, because he’s been recreated and borrowed so many times.

However, there are rules to both borrowing and stealing. With borrowing you say to the reader: ‘Hey, look! This is a character you already know!’ Sherlock Holmes might be homosexual or aspergersy in your fiction, but you’re always displaying your library card.

Stealing is more underhanded. The idea is to change details and traits in order to make a known character less recognisable. There’s a continuum to this, of course. One one end — we’ll call this the ‘lazy’ or ‘slack stealing’ end — a writer changes a few basic details, a bit like giving a wanted man a false moustache and haircut. Anyone who looks closely can see the similiarity, but perhaps they won’t look. At the other end, practically everything except your core idea of the character’s personality is altered to suit your work. This can produce a revolution in characterisation. What do you factor in to create this new setting and set of ideas? What do you import from Sherlock and what do you jettison?

None of this is really stealing, of course. Arguably it’s just accessing a lineage of characterisations: Sherlock himself evolved out of an ancestry including Edgar Allen Poe’s The Murders in the Rue Morgue. But whether you import a trope-character blatantly or discreetly, it’s what you change and why that matters.

So steal away, if you wish! Just make sure you either spell out your homage — or camouflage it to the point where only you notice!

characters & persuasion

The main character of Jane Austen’s Persuasion is a wilting wallflower whose brief early romance was nipped in the bud. With nail-biting anguish Anne watches as her former lover becomes an eligible bachelor courted by all.

While Captain Wentworth’s deepest character remains elusive for much of the book, her own character is a superb mixture of unappreciated loyalty and constant desire to please. Thus she embodies constancy in the face of abandonment: rejected by a vain parent; loving but undemanding as a person; feeling the full weight of rejection in all aspects.

What makes her story so profoundly engaging is not only the complete tie-in between characterisation, plot and themes. It’s that somehow Austen manages to make Anne a real-seeming person, not a cypher. She represents thematic qualities even as she exists in her daily life and navigates its complexity. Thus the core of Anne’s characterisation — her endurance through neglect and heartache — gives the story its great depth and meaning, while the daily workings of her intelligence inside this fluctuating world make it seem true.

Persuasion, abandonment, constancy, suffering — and reversal.

Perfection!