How To Be A Better Writer

A Haven for Readers and Those Who Want to be Better Writers

Formidably Formidable Sounds

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In the 1956 sci-fi movie “Forbidden Planet,” there was a trash device—toss in whatever and it would be instantly vaporized.  Being at the age where cleaning house and doing dishes were two of my more dreaded sci-fi moviehousehold chores, I was pretty enamored with how I could use such an appliance. Of course, that approach to efficiency wouldn’t work today. Environmentalists would be up in arms: “What the hell’s wrong with recycling! We need to preserve our resources!”

But think about it—how Hollywood might have handled the concepts of recycling and the preservation of resources then might have produced some forward-thinking products of today. The hottest one on the market might be the ZapIt cleaning machine. After all, lasers have been zapping everything from trash to cancerous tumors in our modern world. The focus has not been on lasers as household cleaning utensils but as weapons of war and medical treatment. And why zap dust when there are enemies out there that need zapping? I have no way of knowing how advanced laser-based weapon systems have really become—my security clearance does not extend much beyond the level of newspaper headlines—but likely we’ve exceeded the science fiction of Hollywood.

Were my childhood friend and neighbor Tom Risa still around, I think he would join me in voting “Forbidden Planet” as one of the best sci-fi flicks of all time because of the quality of its special effects, especially those in the labor-saving, household utilities category. The plot has pretty much become a faded memory, but it had superb special effects that remain impressive today. One of these was the first robot movie star, which later continued to star in a TV series as Robbie the Robot.

Besides suggesting the need to develop humanized androids, the “Forbidden Planet” trash laser was the ultimate in cool. As I recall, it was a sort of column into which you could toss virtually anything after lunch and Captain MidnightZAPP! It’s instantly vaporized. No dishes to wash, no trash to take out—very appealing to a 10-year-old in those days before mechanical dishwashers.

In later movies this early sci-fi household convenience became weaponized into “ray guns” and “blasters.” Wow! To think I was at the dawn of sci-fi noise making sound effects necessary to give these devices resonance respectability. I mean, if you had a space-age ray gun, i.e., laser, it needed to sound space age. That wasn’t an easy transition from the “pow” of a cowboy’s revolver to the gggggrrrrrzzzzzaaaaaapppp of Captain Midnight’s ray gun. It was easy to get tongue-tied trying to maintain and get to roll off the tip of your tongue the appropriate introductory “gggrrrrrrr . . .” of whatever advanced weaponry with which you were armed.

The good Captain was also the perfect canned hero, as one description makes clear:

Captain Midnight was a daring, jut-jawed war hero who led a mysterious government group known as the Secret Squadron. Midnight, his comic sidekick Icky, and the rest of the Squadron traveled around the globe stomping out evil.

They probably should have said, “zapping out evil.”

The nice thing about playing in a futuristic world back then was that anything could become a prop and we all were experts in sound effects. If you were a cowboy in need of a six-shooter sound, you could mimicked the sound of a six-shooter, hardly a challenging task. We had such cowboy models as Gene Autry and Roy Rogers and Hopalong Cassidy giving us lessons at the Saturday matinees. They taught us about guns and how to handle them, and, more importantly, what they sounded like were you to achieve as adequate level of authenticity. And you couldn’t be a cowboy unless you could spin your weapon on your trigger finger . . . without getting a blister. These were the early years, the time before the time when good guys wore white hats and the bad guys black ones. Hoppy’s hat was black.

cowboyIt was era of radio. Sound was king. The sound effects brought scenes alive in our imaginations. I remember sitting on the couch in semi-darkness as the Lone Ranger, emanating from the radio, steadied his horse Silver with a soothing, “Steady, Big Fella,” as the stead’s hoofs clattered against the hard-surfaced ground. Silver would dutifully whinny and settle down. I don’t recall Scout ever giving his master, Tonto, much of an attitude. There I sat in rapt attention caressing my own six-shooter, and whinnying like Silver, ever ready in case some outlaw were to burst through the front door. Usually it was just Dad getting home from work, but I “plugged” him anyway.

I mean to tell ya. I was there at the beginning, as we transitioned from the sound effects of a spinning cylinder of a forty-five to capturing the sounds of a space-aged conflict with Martians. We didn’t have any good models for the latter, but then no one could prove we didn’t sound accurate.

In part because there had not yet been any actual space travel, it was left to my generation to invent the sounds of intergalactic travel and conflict. These new sounds were considerably more complex than the simple “pow-pow-pow” of a Colt 45. As I think back, “pow” might have been the sound made when you socked a bad guy in the jaw and “kapow” or “capow” was the sound of your trusty 45. Maybe some future Ph.D. candidate in linguistics will study the evolution of the syllabic characteristics as cowboys transitioned into space explorers and give my generation credit for how space travel came to sound as it does today.

Tom and I got pretty good as sound effects men. We’d sit at the picnic table on the rear patio of my house and practice them. Frequently that involved mimicking the sounds we had just heard in the sci-fi movie we had just seen. Tom went on into space exploration, working on the early Voyager projects, but he was never asked to develop the sounds of intergalactic travel.

Had they asked, he and I would have gladly recorded a track for the golden LP that was sent off into space glued to the side of the first Voyager. I can just see it being intercepted by some intergalactic explorers from out beyond Pluto somewhere, and who decided to forgo an attack on the third planet from our sun for fear of encountering such ferocious weaponry as heard on the “golden disk.” Think of it—the sound effects that saved our world!

ray gunIt’s not that sound is no longer important these days. It’s been somewhat modified and supplanted by visual effects and tones considerably more eerie and broader in range of sound and modulation. Pull the trigger on a ray gun today and you’ll hear some pretty awesome stuff.

This might sound like a “When I was boy” kind of story, but when I was a boy you had to use your imagination to fill the gaps between what you heard on the radio or saw in a movie and what you came up with to serve as your reality against the Venusians marauders climbing over the backyard fence. Turn a kid lose in his father’s workshop and thirty minutes later he’d emerged equipped with some awesomely destructive something or other made real by some gutturally-produced sound effects. Today, to find such sounds you have to turn a kid loose in a toy store where they probably story old imaginations high up and at the rear of a back shelf.

Watch out!

“Ggggggeeeeerrrrrrzzzzzaaaappppp!”

That was close! Best keep a weary eye out for those creatures. They like to hide in your imagination. When you bring them out to play, they’ll likely turn on you. Just like that!

“Ggggggeeeerrrrzzzzaaaappp!”

By the way, that’s Martian for “Want to play a game?”

Oh no! Another Five Rules of Writing

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Like commandments issued from a disembodied voice high atop a mountain, rules of writing quickly lapse into meaningless mantras, spoken with a certain level of bored automaticity in hopes the speaker will receive the benefit of some blessing merely Not more rules of writing!from repeating them. Good writing is the product of hard thinking and good work and good thinking and hard work. But for some reason, people who write about how to write seem compelled to turn rules of writing into lists of magic tricks that will make your writing shine by effortless application. I suspect you could trace the roots of this mandatory “positiveness” to the salesmanship. A writer magazine with headlines founded in reality probably would have less a tendency to fly off the newsstand than those sure-fire techniques of characterization. But somewhere between “Pollyanna” and “life’s a bitch, then you die” there’s a palatable reality that the terms “hard work” and “writing” do belong in the same sentence. If you fear you will lose readership if you tell the truth, what do you think happens when the audience discovers the truth?

Here’s the truth. To get from Point A to Point B in writing requires effort. Point A is where your story is now and Point B is where you want it to be. If you want to ace the history midterm you read the chapters. If you want to play the violin, you practice. Writing is like playing the violin. The quality of the sound is determined by the talent involve in moving the bow across the catgut.

In the interest of the ongoing search for truth, justice, and the American way, I have taken a list of five writing rules I recently came across and which I found sounded good but didn’t really speak the language of reality. I’ve peeled away the way the facades to get to the underlying truths hiding behind each rule.

RULE ONE: Do your research and decide your structure before you start writing.

Good basic advice, but the author gives the following reasons for the rule, to: (1) avoid the risk of changing your mind about content and structure; (2) avoid the discovery you don’t have enough content; and (3) avoid something popping up that is more complicated than expected and “you have to set your writing aside to head back to the library, which will interrupt your flow.

Rules of CreativityHonest, he wrote that. My initial response was to simplify the offered reasons into something simpler: To be creative, the first thing you must do is to check your creativity at the door.

Writing is a creative process and the creative process, not unlike turning a herd of cattle into hamburger and steaks, can get messy. The offered rule would confine your creative output by locking down your creative process before pen meets paper just to avoid the chance that another idea—potentially even a better one perhaps—might creep in and mess up your schedule. This logic would be funny were it not so ludicrous.

Journalists may hit the newsroom after a public meeting and have the editor limit the story to 15 inches of copy. The editor is putting together the layout of the morning edition and that’s the room that’s been allotted for the story. Welcome to the newspaper business and the formulaic inverted pyramid.

Creative writing is a different animal. It’s wild and unruly and has to be tamed or at least controlled. Like breaking a wild bronco, the process initially requires a lot of rope and a big corral. It’s understandable that a writer’s output may ultimately need to be confined into a small space, but the creative forces behind it should rarely be.

Sometimes writing is the best way to get a handle on and find your focus and approach to what you’re ultimately going to write about. You may have to write for a while to find what you want to say and/or how you want to say it—to find your story. As such, writing is both the tool and the product—the ultimate double-edged sword.

You might well want to do some brainstorming before you start to write by jotting down key words and ideas that come to mind and then sitting back to see how these pieces of the literary puzzle might best fit together. But writing can sometimes be the brainstorming process, and brainstorming doesn’t always produce your best alternative. Trial and error does.

This is not to say you should set aside a roadmap and wander off into the wilderness to see where your writing might take you, although isn’t that what stream of conscious writing is all about? Usually, you have some goal or destination in mind and it’s a matter of finding the best route to it.

Writing captures an idea. Editing gets it to fit into a given space.

RULE TWO: Get into a regular routine.

The fundamental idea here is to establish a well-disciplined commitment. But let’s step back from treating writing as a scheduling effort. The first thing that gets in the way of this rule is . . . life! There are two terms of which a writer needs to be aware: vocation and avocation. Vocation is what you do to put food on the table; avocation is the sideline or auxiliary activities you enjoy. Hobbies fit here. For most of us, so does writing. Vocations have schedules, avocations don’t always and I’m not so sure you should commit yourself to apply the structure of a vocation to the more creative processes that lie behind your avocation. They are fundamentally different creatures. This is not to say you don’t need discipline or that setting aside a specifically scheduled time for writing is not a good idea, but it’s a luxury that many don’t have, so why make them feel that they’ve failed before they even get started? Your writing has to find a groove and once you’ve found it, it starts to flow more and more efficiently. This is achieved not by applying a rule as much as finding the process(es) that work best for you under the given circumstances. And remember, the circumstances are never perfect.

Get into a regular routine.Having a regular time set aside to write is mostly a good idea. In anticipation of its approach your brain can shift gears and open your mental literary files and do the subconscious calisthenics that open those magical doors through which you step from reality into the world where your characters and plot reside.

There’s a process involved in shifting those gears and regularity of your writing schedule enhances the efficiency of that. But don’t feel guilty just because you have less control of your free-time schedule than the ideal writing rule says you should have. When you don’t have the luxury of a consistent schedule, you need to work on coming up with a system that lets you shift as seamlessly as possible into your creative side to maximize the time you have allocated to it. The motto “Just Do It” applies well to writing. The time you invest to whine takes from the time you need to shine.

As important as a keyboard is to a writer, so is a notebook. Never, ever let an idea slip away for the want of a piece a paper and a pen. Ideas are like butterflies. As beautiful as they are, they will flutter into oblivion, so write them down, and write them down in sufficient detail that when you return to them, they haven’t disintegrated into gibberish or gobbledygook. There should be little notebooks bedside, on your bathroom counter, in your car, on your desk, in your pocket. A notebook is quicker to get to than an electronic device. Getting an idea, thinking about, and making notes about it IS part of writing process and that process needs to be efficient.

RULE THREE: Snatch odd moments.

I like this rule because it’s saying have the flexibility to put your vocational downtime to use working on your avocation when you get the chance. The downside is that you don’t always know when a slice of time will pop up, so you need to be prepared. Have a couple of things about what you’re working on—how to characterize Mrs. Jones or how Jim is going to react when he discovers he was adopted—on your “Think About List” and develop the ability to quickly shift your mental gears and open the file. This isn’t automatic or even easy to develop, but with practice you’ll get better at it and a five or 15-minute break will become a productive slice of time.

This brings us back to the first item on the list, which brushes up against another very important tool for a writer—flexibility. Sure it’s nice to picture yourself sitting in a Hemingway-like setting, but get over it. You’re not there . . . yet. Do not get trapped in a need to be at your favorite (ideal) spot to write. Take on what I call the “paperback attitude.” Paperback books, besides being a lot cheaper to produce, give readers a portability they never had before. Light, storable, and easily replaceable should you spill something on it or leave it at the coffee shop. They give new freedom to reading. That’s the same mentality of portability you need to apply to your writing. Damon Runyon would grab a table and shove it against a blank wall and sit down and write scenes and dialogue in Cinemascope and Technicolor.

Develop the same ability for writing—the ability to be able to write virtually anywhere under an array of circumstances. Tablets have increased your ability to write virtually anywhere, and notebooks always did. You have to convince yourself it’s what is inside your brain that is more important than where you are when you let it out. Don’t let form triumph over substance.

Still I understand that having some minimal standards for the environment you prefer to ensconce yourself in is powerful. If it is a need that you find you can’t fully overcome, learn to use your downtime to make notes or to brainstorm or assess where you want you story to go next. You’ll feel better.

RULE FOUR: Talk it out.

The idea is to dictate your novel.

As a lawyer, dictating equipment was a key tool. First the desktop Dictaphone enabled the executive or writer to dictate notes without the need to have someone with a steno pad present. Those boat anchors gave way to mini-recorders. I recall finding it exhilarating to be able to get up, walk around my office, and look out the window as I dictated my correspondence or a brief.

No doubt there are writers who have become adept at capturing what they want to say “on tape,” but our brains tend to think sloppily, which was only slightly improved by the process of dictation. The real work begins when words appear on screen or paper as s product to work with and edit.

Here is what the original author of this rule had to say about talking it out: “Have you considered dictating your book and using transcription software (or a professional transcriber) to convert it to the written word? It’s worth experimenting with, especially if you find it really hard to write.”

If you find it “really hard to write,” there’s a good chance that you might already be wasting your time trying to be a writer since the physical act is intimately intertwined with the mental act. Writing is a creative process. Writing requires that you get very intimate with the words you chose to express yourself or employ to create a fictional world. You’re not making widgets; you’re making story. It’s not about finding an easier way to get words down on paper, but getting really good words down on paper by whatever means. Writing should not be considered an issue of production but an issue of creation. Even if you are typing a story from your own handwritten notes, it’s still creation, and the closer you stay to the words, the better your final product will be.

The keyboard is the primary tool of a modern-day writer. It is the interface between thought and print. Learn how to use it. But keep the pencils and notebooks handy! Keep control of your words. You might be able to automate their capture and how they are applied to paper, but you can’t automate the processes of their creation, and don’t confuse the two.

RULE FIVE: Don’t worry about your first draft.

Let’s get something straight right here and now. Erase the term “worry” from you writer vocabulary. It’s more than a negative word. Just look at a few of its synonyms: fear, fearfulness, timidity, error, trepidation, horror, fright. Floating around your cranium, it will short-circuit your creativity. It’s like pouring acid on your thinking. It’s at the far end of the continuum from “concern.” Yes, you do need to be concerned about your first draft, and every draft in between it and your final one. The first draft is the key—and initial—part of the writing process, and you want to improve your skills at every stage or level of the process. In fact, as you improve, the “distance” between your first draft and your final draft will likely get shorter. You go from having to catch and edit a repetitive sloppy phrase or structure to not writing it right the first time. Over time you discard bad habits and create new and better ones. Your first draft is a measure of how well you’re doing with that process of improvement as a writer.

typewriterThe author of the rule said this about first drafts: “Allow yourself to write a ‘rubbish’ first draft and let your creativity flow.”

Why does creativity have to start out as rubbish? It’s worse to think that you don’t need to extend as much effort because it’s only a first draft. No, it’s the draft of an idea that already has taken shape and to some extent been honed in your brain. It is the first physical step of your creative writing process. It is important to treat it as important. Writing is a not a fix-it process, it’s a getting better process. The closer your standards for a final draft get to your first draft the better the writer you will likely become.

Don’t pay so much attention to a “rule” that you don’t pay attention to the quality of your writing.

The Mockingbird’s Been Shot

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Well before the book landed on bookstores shelves, those associated with Harper’s Lee’s first book since her Pulitzer Prize-winning To Kill a Mockingbird, had carefully spread a tale of a newly discovered unpublished novel with the same vigor had they unearthed the original tablets of the Ten Commandments, when in fact the manuscript had been safely stashed away in a bank deposit watchbox in Ms. Lee’s hometown of Monroeville, Alabama, for decades. But why not declare it a discovery. Readers have waited a half century for Ms. Lee to produce another novel, the expectation being enhanced by the fact that the first is the most successful piece of American fiction ever published, with thirty-million copies in forty languages distributed in fifty countries. Since its 1960 debut, Mockingbird has never been out of print.

Go Set a WatchmanBut Go Set a Watchman establishes why Ms. Lee never wrote a real second novel. She used up everything she had writing her first. Mockingbird leaves no dark alleys to explore or undeveloped characters to inflate into modified entities who pursue new adventures. Mockingbird was mostly autobiographical to which Ms. Lee deftly applied a patina of fiction. It is a tale of children coming of age in a small, Depression-era Southern town. They would grow up. Things would change. The charm of the childhood characters of Scout and Jem and the mysterious neighbor Boo Radley had no place else to go or grow. Perhaps that is why Mockingbird  became so wildly popular—it was so wildly complete. The story simply offered little opportunities for sequels. But a prequel might be another matter, and that is where Ms. Lee’s publisher, HarperCollins, has staked its claim, unfortunately in a sleazy sort of way.

Ironically, Mockingbird arose from the flashbacks in Ms. Lee’s original manuscript for Watchman. That’s why the grandiose marketing effort for Watchman is founded on its connection to the famed Mockingbird. Just the announcement of Go Set a Watchman earlier this year, prompted a 6,600 percent uptick in the sales of Mockingbird. HarperCollins and Ms. Lee’s attorney, Tonja B. Carter, smelled gold in them thar hills, and weren’t about to let the gold dust slip between their fingers and be blown away as if into the winds of the Sierra Madre. But evidence of greed at a level of Humphrey Bogart’s and his cohorts in “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre” is at play in Ms. Lee’s little hometown of Monroeville, Alabama, where Ms. Lee, now approaching 90, resides in an assisted living facility as her hearing and eyesight, and likely her mental acuity, fade into history.

Harper Lee 1960

Harper Lee 1960

Sales and profit records of the publishing industry are notoriously opaque, but a sixth grader with a five-dollar calculator would likely discover there aren’t enough digits on his device to total up the financial potential to be mined from Go Set a Watchman and the collective value of Ms. Lee’s reputation and fame. From a lawsuit against Ms. Lee’s former agent Samuel Pinkus, royalties earned for Mockingbird by end of December, 2009, totaled $1.7 million, apparently for the year, although the exact timeline represented by the amount is not specifically indicated. The pleadings in the same suit indicate, however, that six months later additional royalties totaled another $816,448. These figures provide a pretty good idea of Mockingbird’s value.

The story behind the new novel has been kept vague and suffers from issues of credibility, inconsistency, and hints of a nefarious plot worthy of its own book—an aging author being taken advantage of by people who she trusts and considers to be her friends.

Contrary to the artfully written hype, Watchman is not a new effort. It was born in the 1950s and gave birth to what became Mockingbird, despite the marketing blurb on the inside flap that suggests otherwise:

Harper Lee 2007

Harper Lee 2007

“Twenty-six-year-old Jean Louise Finch—‘Scout’—returns home from New York City to visit her aging father, Atticus. Set against the backdrop of the civil rights tensions and political turmoil that were transforming the South, Jean Louise’s homecoming turns bittersweet when she learns disturbing truths about her close-knit family, the town, and the people dearest to her. Memories from her childhood flood back, and her values and assumptions are thrown into doubt. Featuring many of the iconic characters from To Kill a Mockingbird, Go Set a Watchman perfectly captures a young woman, and the world, in painful yet necessary transition out of the illusions of the past—a journey that can only be guided by one’s own conscience.”

Those responsible for the publication of Go Set a Watchman, have gone to great lengths to establish and publicize Ms. Lee’s mental acuity and presence of mind—in legal terms, her mental capacity—to give permission to bring the long buried Watchman into the spotlight of print. “Nobody, not even Lee’s lifelong friends, seemed to have known that the manuscript existed and many were confused why it is being published now, so many decades after the author appears to have forsaken it,” is how writer Casey N. Cep described the circumstances surrounding the novel’s sudden emergence in a February New Yorker article entitled “Mystery in Monroeville.”

Ironically, the assurances that Ms. Lee has all her faculties is about the same Harper Lee who in 2007 unexplainably signed over her lucrative copyright to Mockingbird to her then “trusted” agent Samuel Pinkus, a fraud since corrected, although Pinkus has unexplainably been allowed to keep a little bit of his finger in the Harper Lee pie, perhaps because some of Ms. Lee’s friends then are still involved now, including her lawyer Tonja B. Carter.

Attorney Tonja B. Carter

Attorney Tonja B. Carter

Ms. Lee, who had a severe stroke in 2007, and has failing eyesight and hearing, is likely at best tittering on the border of mental capacity—between being capable of understanding and taking care of her own affairs and not. It should be noted that her champion of mental competency remains her lawyer Ms. Carter, and the assessment of Ms. Lee’s mental competency does not come from Ms. Lee’s own mouth or any attending physician but Ms. Carter. As The New York Times reported in February, “The woman (Ms. Lee) who has ignited such frenzied speculation remains tucked away in the Meadows, an assisted-living center, largely cut off from the prying public except for statements delivered through Ms. Carter, her lawyer, friend and gatekeeper.” Ms. Carter apparently now has her fingerprints all over the valuable copyright.

Dr. Thomas Lane Butts, another long-time friend of Ms. Lee, told New Yorker writer Cep, “This business of cutting Harper Lee off from her friends and relatives has been going on a long time.” Cep said a security guard now turns away any “unwelcomed” visitors at the Meadows. Ms. Lee’s plight has become the stuff of grocery store tabloids.

Since the miraculous discovery of the Watchman manuscript by Ms. Carter, the book’s speed into print is nothing short of astounding in the publishing world. This was achieved in part by forgoing the traditional editing and pre-press processes in the name of purity, or perhaps to avoid the potential of any claims arising out of Ms. Lee’s estate were she to die before publication.

images of To Kill a Mockingbird movieWhether fraud is lurking in the background we will likely never fully know, but the story reeks of its potential if not its likelihood. Ms. Carter has, as they say, clammed up, and has deftly attempted to brush away any evidentiary tracks from facts, like the wrestlers in those old western movies to throw off the posse. Unfortunately, Ms. Lee’s infamous distrust of the media lends to the opacity of the facts, and likely the truth.

A long-ago Harper editor, after reviewing the Watchman manuscript, told Ms. Lee the better book lay in the flashbacks of Watchman. Ms. Lee invested another few years revising and rewriting the novel that ultimately became Mockingbird. Watchman is neither a prequel nor sequel, but rather the parent of Mockingbird, and Ms. Lee has said so.

What has irked many critics about Watchman is its characterization of the elder Atticus Finch as a racist. But having Watchman published second doesn’t change the reality of chronology. Ms. Lee redesigned and redefined Atticus into the character we first met in Mockingbird, and who came to life on screen in Gregory Peck’s masterful performance.

Evolution is a forward moving process, but it appears efforts are afoot to skew literary history in order to give Watchman the appearance of being a follow-up novel and lend credence to the idea of a changed, older Atticus. But history tells us that the Atticus we met in Mockingbird is the Atticus Ms. Lee intended for us to meet. Treating Watchman as a follow up novel, however, stirs the pot of controversy as joyfully as the trio of witches in the opening scene of Macbeth, who would likely tell you such hurly-burly sells books.

Unfortunately, that same hurly-burly libels the original Atticus Finch and may sufficiently damage his reputation to have Mockingbird lose its perennially favored place on the reading lists of millions of middle and high school students around the country. One wonders what Ms. Lee might think of that.

Both Watchman and Mockingbird come from an era when publishers tightly controlled the access to bookstore shelves. There was no such thing as self-publishing. What little of it existed was labeled as the “vanity press” and delegated to a second-class status. Watchman didn’t make it into print back when because the editors at HarperCollins probably decided it wasn’t good enough or not ready and gave Ms. Lee some incredibly valuable advice and homework. We are lucky that she took the advice and salvaged the chapters from Watchman to create Mockingbird.

Alan Gopnik, in The New Yorker, points out the clear distinction between these two novels, writing, “. . . ‘Watchman’ is a failure as a novel (if ‘Mockingbird’ did not exist, this book would never have been published, not now, as it was not then), it is still testimony to how appealing a writer Harper Lee can be.”

And that  appeal is what HarperCollins now panders to enhance the perceived value of Watchman in the name of profits without consideration of what it and the controversy that surrounds it might ultimately do to the value of both books. HarperCollins is not motivated by some desire to enhance literary history but to expand and enhance its corporate balance sheet. In its “let’s make a fast buck” mentality, the publisher has denigrated the esteem of Atticus Finch. As Mr. Gopnik so eloquently puts it: “Not since Hemingway’s estate sent down seemingly completed novels from on high, long after the author’s death, has a publisher gone about so coolly exploiting a much loved name with a product of such mysterious provenance.”

But the term “exploiting” is too inadequate a term to describe what HarperCollins has done—irreparably damage the reputation of an iconic character of literature who has served as a role model for generations of young students by the way he guided his children through tumultuous events in a sleepy Southern town so many summers ago. To this reader, Atticus ignited my interest in becoming a lawyer and becoming his kind of lawyer—honorable and honest. Now I’m being told he’s a hypocrite.

In Mockingbird we encountered some pretty sleazy people from the town of Maycomb; in Watchman we can spot some pretty sleazy people from HarperCollins hiding behind the curtains of legitimacy like the wizard in Oz. In Mockingbird, Atticus gives his children air rifles for Christmas and tells them they can shoot all the blujays they want but to never kill a mockingbird. A confused Scout asks her neighbor Miss Maudie about the distinction and Miss Maudie explains that mockingbirds “don’t do one thing but sing their hearts out for us.”

With Watchman, HarperCollins has shamelessly shot the mockingbird.

The Dialogue & Detail Blend

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The Dialogue & Detail Blend

Well-done dialogue brings characters to life. Well-done exposition brings a scene to life. Creatively blended, these two ingredients can add to and enhance the quality of your overall narrative by giving it life.

When you think about it, if your characters are not in dialogue, the reader is left with description of some sort. Explanation is a form of description.

A CharacterDescribing a character passing through a scene or who is merely there to serve as a foil can be handled cursorily, the writer slipping in only those details that keep the action moving forward and not make the reader stop or shift gears to acquire and assimilate new information. Each tidbit of narrative that adds some descriptive detail about a key character can be critical, not just to the character but to the story as a whole.

The highly detailed character, which we refer to as “round,” breathes life into a story, especially one that depends on the actions of its characters to come to life in the reader’s imagination. But, to stop the flow of a story just to interject a sidebar of pure description runs the risk of slamming on the brakes of a reader’s flow and sterilizing a story by giving it an overly objective lilt. It becomes more like reading a police report than a flowing plot. It can kill the mood and momentum of the story.

To avoid this, a writer can blend characterization and description and dialogue into a narrative description like the ingredients of a recipe. The ingredients can be individually identified, but their blending is what creates the tasty batter.

When the description of a scene and the characterization of the protagonist or antagonist are artfully blended together, they become part of a portrait and give the reader a sense of being there. They paint a picture that presents or confirms the intended flavor of a story or a character that pulls the reader into the pages. Separately presenting these elements can make the flow of the story jerky, and rather than paint a scene, the reader is left with a paint-by-number collection of fragments.

So when our character Jake Harrison approaches the Tarbender Tap saloon, a single word—“seedy”—might adequately describe the scene, but a smattering of details about its sagging steps up to the weathered gray siding where deterioration has won the war over once prosperous white paint, and the dilapidated, mismatched swinging doors no longer swing freely announce the character of the place, maybe its management, and perhaps the town of Sidewinder.

In a few lines, the writer paints a mental picture for the reader that would take hours for an artist to adequately capture on canvas. When the physical details of a scene are blended into the human activity of the story’s characters, the scene comes to life and so does the story overall. Sounds simple, but it isn’t. You could say Frankenstein comes to life, but you want life with the grace of a ballerina, not the discordance of a beast at the edge of imbalance.

The distinction is important. Take away the dialogue of a story and you are left pretty much with description. Even the ever-present “he said” or “she said” is description—which character is talking. But if you present dialogue then shift to narrative description, and bounce back and forth between the two, things get boring pretty fast. The trick is finding the proper blend and maintaining a rhythm that becomes neither discordant nor boringly repetitive in style.

“Jake walked into the saloon,” is description. Bare bones as it is, changing the word “saloon” to “bar” has a substantive impact. Remember, it’s about the words and words are ALWAYS important.
Let’s add more detail:
“Jake Harrison walked into the saloon for the first time after the sheriff pinned the deputy’s badge onto his shirt. The discordant banging of the swinging doors turned heads, but the color of his skin, wrapped around his six-foot four frame, brought the place to silence. / “I th . . . th . . . think we’ll be seein’ fewer gunfights fights,” said Harvey Smith, the town drunk, in a whisper everybody could easily hear.”

This paragraph is loaded with description and also opens the file on Jake Harrison’s characterization.

If you had Jake step over to the bar and nod to the bartender, you could add even more detail and characterization—spice to the soup.

A typical western barJake Harrison extended a ham-size fist across the bar. “You’d be James Taylor, the owner of this place?” he said in a voice that sounded like coarse sandpaper on wood. Taylor, a slight man under gray thinning hair, reached his hand up to the new deputy, and when the deputy gave it a hearty shake he practically pulled Taylor off his feet. There were a few gasps of wonderment from close by patrons. As slightly-built as Taylor was, he owned a pair of famously large hands with long spidery fingers, perfect for playing the honkytonk piano on Saturday nights. Taylor seemed as surprised as his patrons to see his hand consumed by the deputy’s, like a big bass swallowing a small worm as he looked up at the black man. “Welcome to Sidewinder deputy, and to the Tarbender’s Tap.”

This interchange introduces two characters and adds character traits for both without sounding like a police report. The dialogue and the narrative descriptions blend and flow into observations that the reader sees and hears through the dialogue. It’s obvious that we’re in the “Old West” so we don’t necessarily need to spend too much time writing a detailed description of the saloon’s interior. TV and movie westerns have supplied that. The interchange merely tapped into the reader’s “learned” memories, i.e. stereotypes. If for some reason there was need to make the saloon not so stereotypical we could easily interject additional information into the dialogue. For example, Deputy Harrison might scan the place and note the padded chairs and well-finished tables:

“Sheriff said I might be surprised by the quality of the furnishings,” said the deputy with a friendly smile filled with perfectly straight white teeth. / ”Small town. We do double duty here,” said Taylor. “The Methodists use the place Sunday mornings. We open at noon.” / The deputy looked at the well-stock shelves behind the bar. / “We have a curtain we put up to cover all that up,” said Taylor, “and I close the lid on the piano and put a couple horse blankets on top so it won’t sound too tinny when the preacher’s wife is ‘Bringin in the Sheaves.”

The name of the town hints of its general character and reputation that appears to be fading, but the saloon serving as a church hints at some level or effort of advanced civility. Were we writing a TV script, it might well be Monday morning and the deputy would look suspiciously at the stack of hymnals on the corner of the bar. Barkeep Taylor could simply tell the deputy about the place serving as a church, but in books you paint pictures with words. For the big and little screen the process is reversed—pictures provide the narrative detail.

A writer needs to be sensitive and pay attention to how best to present and use detail in narrative description. By carefully blending description and dialogue, the scene is smoothly constructed and has a better chance of coming to life in the reader’s imagination. You want sentences that serve as brush strokes that blend into a picture. Like the Tarbender’s Tap, your sentences can serve double-duty—deliver both dialogue and description.

The quality of your descriptive exposition determines the credibility of your characters and the scenes into which you place them. The level of detail you give to a scene or character depends on how important either might be to your story. You can wax eloquent about the minutiae of the doctor’s office where your character is waiting for the receptionist to get off the phone, but absent some connection to the story or scene it can be a waste of time and distract from the flow of the story. Why not just write, Jill glanced at her watch and noted waiting to see the doctor had already eaten up fifteen minutes of her value investigative time. It felt more like an hour and she felt herself getting impatience and just a little perturbed.

If the important thing is for Jill to find the office that’s tucked away in some corner of the hospital, getting there is likely more important than what your character observes while waiting for the doctor. But if this is the office where the victim went missing, the reader will expect your character, Detective Jill Gormelly, to pay close attention and share her observations. If the important thing is to meet with the doctor, you’d be better advised to spend your descriptive time with the detective’s impatience and the evidence of a waiting room of fidgety people—victims perhaps of the doctor’s busyness or lack of concern for courtesies, or both. “It makes him a suspect,” Jill thought as she glanced at her watch for the fifth time.”

No matter how well you write detail, if the detail is not readily relevant to the story, then you’re wasting the reader’s time, and you detract from the impact of descriptive detail that is needed. Although it’s not nice to yell “Fire!” in a crowded theater, that is precisely what your descriptive narrative needs to do. “Listen up dear reader, this is or will be important!” If it proves otherwise, you will have let your reader down.

The theatrical adage applies: If there’s a shotgun over the fireplace in act one, it had better go off before the end of act two. In other words, everything needs to, in some way, advance the story. In a play, virtually all narrative description is achieved visually and/or through dialogue. By writing your story to give the reader a feeling of watching a play, you enhance the effectiveness of your efforts.

Unless there’s a legitimate reason to do otherwise, most descriptive narrative is better when woven into the fabric of the story. If Det. Gormelly steps into the scene of the murder, she is going to be very observant and share her observations with the reader. If she’s stopping by her new Captain’s office to give him a status report, the details might not be as important and the focus would be on the dialogue. But wait. Every encounter between characters offers an opportunity to interject some observable detail that provides insight into the characters as well as the story, like seasoning to that soup.

“In the corner there was a little shrine to the Captain’s bowling skills. Maybe past bowling skills would be a better description. Some of the shine had faded. When I turned to face the voice behind me, the Captain extended a chubby hand connected to the girth of the legendary detective Nero Wolf.” / “I didn’t throw strikes, I threw explosions,” he said with a slight smile.

Later this same man might surprise your character when he moves around a murder scene with the grace of a ballerina, warning a uniformed officer to be careful where he steps. “Don’t they teach you about the reverence of a crime scene at the academy?”

The quote contains hints of characterization, and all the little tidbits will ultimately and collectively create the captain’s character.

To try and explain the techniques of how to blend narrative detail and dialogue would require an endless volume of examples. They are a bit like fingerprints, infinitely variable. It’s knowing the impact of effectively blending these two elements that will, with practice, help you become a better writer. When you read, analyze how well the writer has blended narrative detail and dialogue and how and where s/he injected pure description. Your analysis will become your best teacher because you’ll discover not only the finer details of the techniques available but also how they are employed.

Just for a little nightcap, here’s a segment from Raymond Chandler’s 1958 “Playback” to give you more ideas. Here the main character, Marlowe, shares his observations (one of the benefits of writing in the first person). Chandler turns otherwise pure description into part of the scene and the patter Marlowe has with himself describes the scene for the reader:

“Hold it! Hold it right there!” There was a silence. Then in a steady voice that didn’t bluster any more: “I’ll call Washington the first thing in the morning, Marlowe. Excuse me if I sounded off. It begins to look as though I am entitled to a little more information about this project.”
“Yeah.”
“If you make contact again, call me here. At any hour. Any hour at all.”
“Yeah.”
“Good night, then.” He hung up.
A cityI put the phone back on the hook and took a deep breath. My head still ached but the dizziness was gone. I breathed in the cool night air laced with sea fog. I pushed out of the booth and looked across the street. The old guy who had been in the taxi slot when I arrived was back again. I strolled across and asked him how to get to The Glass Room, which was where Mitchell had promised to take Miss Betty Mayfield to dinner—whether she liked it or not. He told me. I thanked him, recrossed the empty street and climbed into my rented car, and started back the way I had come.”

Just remember, you don’t write something because you can or to show off some talent, but to tell story as effectively and realistically as you can.

It was a dark and storming night in the city that never sleeps . . .

George Eliot’s Agency

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Violetha Bennett always told us grammar schoolers that if we used a new word three times it would become ours. It made logical sense. It would take some cognitive effort to consciously use a specific word in context three times, three ways. And it’s easier for your brain to snag a new word as it goes out your mouth rather than come in through your eyes or ears. But I’ve just discovered a word that although at once familiar presents a brand new meaning and challenges the use-it-three-times rule: agency.

Mary Ann Evans, a.k.a. George Eliot

Mary Ann Evans, a.k.a. George Eliot

The first thing that comes to mind is a storefront insurance or real estate office. The term also has a long relationship with the law, and in the old days, law students took a course entitled Agency. It later became contracts. Nowhere along the way between then and now did I happen across the usage of the word “agency” that New York Times columnist David Brooks has offered. He used the term “agency moment” in a recent column to describe how George Eliot reached an epiphanic moment in her life and when, according to Mr. Brooks, “she stopped being blown about by her voids and weaknesses and began to live according to her own inner criteria, gradually developing a passionate and steady capacity to initiate action and drive her own life.”

First things first, however. George Elliot was the pen name of English novelist Mary Ann Evans (1819-1880), and her bibliography includes The Mill on the Floss, Silas Marner, and Middlemarch. According to Mr. Brooks, she expressed her “agency moment” in an 1852 letter she wrote to Herbert Spencer, the English philosopher, biologist, anthropologist, sociologist, and liberal political theorist of the Victorian era. Eliot was in love with Mr. Spencer and at age 32 wrote to ask for his commitment to her. “If you become attached to someone else,” she wrote, “then I must die, but until then I could gather courage to work and make life valuable, if only I had you near me. I do not ask you to sacrifice anything—I would be very glad and cheerful and never annoy you.”

She apparently realized such actions reflected a forwardness quite out of character for the Victorian era, but tossed aside any concerns. “I suppose,” she penned, “no woman ever before wrote such a letter as this—but I am not ashamed of it, for I am conscious in the light of reason and true refinement I am worthy of your respect and tenderness, whatever gross men and vulgar-minded women might think of me.”

A portrait painter's version

A portrait painter’s version

Her effort failed. The narcissistic Mr. Spencer rejected her offer in part because of Ms. Eliot’s lack of good looks. Ms. Eliot did not die as the result of the rejection and went on to publish her first complete novel, Adam Bede, in 1858. The book was an instant hit and generated much inquiry into the identity of this hot new literary talent. Ms. Eliot stepped forward and out came details of her private life, including the fact that she had by then taken up with philosopher and critic George Henry Lewes. They started to cohabitate back in 1854—apparently she got over Mr. Spencer’s rejection—and they pretended to be married. They had little choice but to pretend since Mr. Lewes was married to another woman, who herself had children by another man. They had an “open marriage” in the broadest definition of the term. Oh the chatter amongst all those Victorians ladies this must have generated!

I’m not convinced that Mr. Spencer provided Ms. Eliot her “agency moment” as much as her experience with him served as a catalyst to her obviously and already existent independent thinking and motivated her to find the confidence to seek her own fame. She took a rather confident position in her offer to Mr. Spencer, but maybe that is what an “agency moment” means—when something happens in one’s life that causes the person to put or see things in proper order and perspective and have the insight and courage necessary to take the next step toward maturity—confidence. Too often, maturity is thought to be chronologically driven. Likely it’s event driven. And more likely, it requires that the events that stir intellectual growth be sufficiently substantive to awaken one’s subconscious and skills of introspection.

This is important for the writer to consider and understand. So often writers try to emulate others when it would be more fruitful to spend the time discovering themselves. Maybe Ms. Eliot’s Spencer letter was in reality a letter to herself, and in finding the courage to write it to him, she discovered her own potential independence. Or it might just as easily have been an errant, ill-conceived emotional act of love that she might later have slapped herself on the forehead in regret when the topic came up. History certainly indicates she didn’t pine away after Mr. Spencer’s rejection but instead thrived. Based on the subsequent chronology of her life, she got along rather well, found her focus, persevered in her passion and achieved great success. So why does Mr. Brooks seem compelled to give the credit to Mr. Spencer? Perhaps to provide the basis for his position about modern young people of a certain station in life.

Mr. BrooksOpines Mr. Brooks:  “Among the privileged, especially the privileged young, you see people who have been raised to be approval-seeking machines. They act active, busy, and sleepless, but inside they often feel passive and not in control. Their lives are directed by other people’s expectations, external criteria, and definitions of success that don’t fit them. / So many people are struggling for agency. They are searching for the solid criteria that will help them make their own judgments. They are hoping to light an inner fire that will fuel relentless action in the same direction.”

Seems to me that Ms. Eliot did—and still does—just that. She learned and moved on. What she learned, however, more likely arose from her experience with Mr. Spencer, not from Mr. Spencer. It might be more accurate to associate Ms. Eliot’s subsequent reactions and intellectual growth with Nietzsche’s essay “On Self-Overcoming” in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. She found her own way.

Giving credit to a male for a female’s intellectual success seems misplaced. It’s clear that George Eliot may well have exceeded her former lover’s intellectual capacities, and that she fell victim to the problem traditionally encountered by men—letting her sex drive get ahead of her intellectual wisdom. There is evidence that she succumbed to it on other occasions, but that doesn’t warrant giving credit to the intimate activities she shared with Mr. Spencer as a basis for her literary talents. But prurient interests have always trumped historical accuracy.

Unfortunately, such relationships are less likely to occur today. Modern technology, as much as it is founded on communications theory, has removed much of the level of intimacy reflected in Ms. Eliot’s letter. We are more physically and psychologically distant in the world of email and social networking posts. Ms. Eliot and Mr. Spencer’s relationship ended. Why can’t history leave it there? Ms. Eliot deserves credit for her own literary efforts. Maybe somebody should focus on whether Mr. Spencer had any regrets.

It’s probably a waste of time to try to find your Spencer. In college you’re too young and after graduation too busy. Instead, you need to light your own inner fire, and find the necessary fuel to maintain it within yourself. Mr. Brooks offers no specific guidance in this regard when he writes that agency is not automatic but has to be given birth to. “It’s not just the confidence and drive to act [but having] engraved inner criteria to guide action,” he writes. When I first read that, my immediate response was “what the hell is that supposed to mean?”

But as I think about it, Mr. Brooks is telling us we need to do less careening down our path toward maturity and more planning for it. You  don’t have to read far into any biography of George Eliot to learn that she was a disciplined talent. Too many of us end up where we had neither the intention nor the desire to go and along the way sort of missed the turn off to our envisioned bulls’ eye. We give up; fall short; lose motivation; get redirected. What George Eliot represents is staying on target despite external challenges and what might be labeled as character weaknesses, although her libido was probably an asset to her writing. As titillating as Ms. Eliot’s escapades (relationships) are, the evidence indicates they did not get in her way to succeed in her work and receive recognition for it.

She succeeded at a time when most woman did not. Her lesson to writers is to develop and husband your perseverance and to forge ahead despite colliding with the inevitable brick walls life presents you. And who knows but that her experience with Mr. Spencer taught her about the kind of people with whom to associate. After all, her greatest productivity came during her subsequent relationship with George Henry Lewes. In fact, it’s said that she took her nom-de-plume from Lewes. George from his first name and Eliot from her code “L—I owe it” for his last. Where Mr. Spencer was unable to overcome his personal criteria for beauty, Eliot’s suffered no loss to her literary abilities from lack of handsomeness. I’m not so sure that would be as easily achievable today.

Henry James, after meeting Ms. Eliot, wrote to his father: “She had a low forehead, a dull grey eye, a vast pendulous nose, a huge mouth full of uneven teeth and a chin and jawbone ‘qui n’en finissent pas’ (never-ending).” But, continued James, “. . . in this vast ugliness resides a most powerful beauty which, in a very few minutes, steals forth and charms the mind, so that you end, as I ended, in falling in love with her. Yes, behold me in love with this great horse-faced bluestocking.”

And then there was Queen Victoria

And then there was Queen Victoria

Now that’s agency! And it speaks reams of Ms. Eliot’s character strengths and literary talents that Mr. Spencer likely had little to do with. But for some reason, virtually every George Eliot biographer invests time in contemplation of her lack of beauty. If you look at pictures of English female novelists, you might rank her at the top of a list from ugly to beautiful. Maybe the fascination with her lack of beauty is derived from her success despite her homeliness, the fact that she flaunted the social norms of the Victorian era, and the fact that Middlemarch is frequently described as the greatest English language novel. Or, as likely, it arises from a jealously of her courageous ability to be her own person at a time when such behavior was unheard of.

At least she proved that misogyny can be trumped by talent and perhaps that is the lesson we should be celebrating, especially in these times where surface beauty seems to trump everything. We need more people with George Eliot’s courage and character and intellect, and perhaps that is the source of any writer’s “agency”—not of the moment but of a lifetime.

When Rules Rule

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FreytagWhat does geometry have to do with writing? When you think of Freytag’s Pyramid of the seven elements of fiction, you tend to envision an isosceles triangle—two equal sides with two equal angles and the climax designated at the apex. It’s oh so neat. The problem is that the isosceles form doesn’t accurately represent the structure of a story. Why would the complexity associated with all the conflicts that makes up the “rising action” on the left side of the triangle be the same length as what happens after the climax—the “falling action,” resolution, and denouement—on the right side of the triangle?

In realty, the representation of fictional writing would be better reflected perhaps by a “scalene” triangle. So you don’t have to look it up, a scalene triangle has neither equal sides nor equal angles. This allows for the longer “ride” up to the climax and the logically shorter ride down through the falling action to the denouement and on to the conclusion. You also need to sort of tip the triangle off its base and up and to the left because you never end up at the same level from which you started. Life doesn’t work that way so your story shouldn’t either.

Once you visualize this shape, flip it. The short, falling side becomes the rising action side, and after the climax comes a long slide down to the conclusion. This actually represents the structure of some mysteries and thrillers, especially those from the 1930s. It is still, I submit, what makes British mysteries different from those generated on this side of the pond. For example, in Agatha Christie’s Ten Little Indians, Freytag’s structure gets stood on its head. With a string of people turning up dead in the mansion filled with guests on a lonely island, there’s a constant increase in tension as solutions that keep getting dashed . . . in the head, in the library, with a candlestick. The whole affair involves chasing solutions through an array of conflicts and climaxes.

In a more modern application: kablooey, dead guy in a tuxedo shows up in the middle of the street in the middle of the night in the middle of the bad part of a town . . . You get the idea. It’s from there that the story opens up as the investigation, driven by the observed and discovered evidence (cue the forensics guy), gets methodically unraveled. What Dame Christie did was to constantly derail the traditional linear methodological efforts and create a methodology of her own. She didn’t so much deliver a climax as continuously disrupt the efforts of others to reach it.

Of course, all the efforts to solve the accumulating murders could arguably constitute the rising action and the stuff on the right side of the triangle (pyramid) merely runs down a really short side to the final conclusion—Sir Lawrence Wargrave and his hypodermic needle! If you analyze some of today’s popular television detective series, you could debate which literary structural element goes where for a month of Sundays. Like everything else, we teach writing using rules and guidelines, and this creates a tendency to want to find the parts of a story and label them as if dissecting a frog in biology class. What’s important is to not let the formal concepts and delineated structural rules and guidelines of fiction get in the way of the frog, i.e., the telling of a really good story.

It’s easy to fall into this “checklist trap” when writing. Like a pacifier to a baby, Freytag’s pyramidal elements of fiction provide a level of comfort to the newer writer, and perhaps that is what motivated Mr. Freytag to first spell them out in his 1863 Die Technik des Dramas. But the good stuff of fiction usually resides beyond the safe harbor and in the choppy waters with white caps beyond the bay. To venture there, you have to lift anchor, and the rules and guidelines can be more akin to an anchor than a sail. If you spend too much time adhering to them, you’ll remain in sight of the shore—safe but boring. The rules should be thought of more as a map, but an ancient map with the unexplored parts of the world indicated by the warning, “There be dragons here.” That is precisely where the writer needs to go.

Indeed, by focusing on making your story uniquely interesting, you might miss or gloss over some structural rule or guideline in your first drafts. If it turns out to be important, any such deficiency will show as you reread, edit, re-edit, and rewrite. Although it’s important to start at some point, which is the inciting incident usually (where you supply sufficient information to orient the reader), after that you’re not tethered to any absolute rules of linearity in structure. So long as you don’t confuse and lose your reader, go for it. If you find yourself at the end of a dead-end inlet, paddle around and search for another route. As a writer you should not follow a map, you should create your own.

The reason I bring this process up is to remind you of the importance the rules and guidelines play as you learn the basics, but the dangers they present if your strict adherence to them becomes too habitual. Work to break free from trying to fit your story into some traditional, logical, or customary format, and work to discover or create you own.

As a litigator, I didn’t care much for the “Perry Mason” television series. To me a lawyer needed to have his case well prepared before he entered the courtroom. Mr. Mason seemed destined to solve the crime during a client’s trial. Luckily for him, the real culprit always showed up in court and broke down under cross-examination. In my real world, the courtroom was where you presented your already well-prepared case to the jury. It was in the preparation phase where you solved the mystery that would determine whether a jury would find your client guilty or not guilty. The trial was the orderly presentation of your efforts. Oh there was great joy in the dramatic delivery and I tried to structure my presentation of evidence and witnesses along the lines of a TV show to keep the attention of the jury focused on the case at hand, but it was bad preparation to wait until trial to solve your case, and very risky for your client were you to make a misstep and fail. But the dramatic, in-court discovery of the real culprit worked for the plot structure of a television show because it was not confined to the basic rules of logic and reality; the fictional courtroom was bigger than that. So here we are, almost 57 years later, watching Raymond Burr as Perry Mason in reruns. Perry Mason had staying power because the plot structure had staying power.

My problem was that I tried to apply the reality of proper investigative techniques—the rules and procedures of my legal training—to my assessment of a fictional courtroom. There are dramatic moments in a criminal trial that give rise to memorable interactions, but mostly it’s the presentation of a case in a logical and straightforward manner via Q and A, and if it weren’t for bathroom and lunch breaks, you could run the risk of jurors becoming inattentive or dozing off. Don’t get me wrong. An effective trial attorney will present her case in the most dramatic way she can, but even then the underlying formula is structurally simple, and frequently can be downright boring. The fiction writer takes this real life structure and electrifies with extra voltage to make it crackle and spark. That’s what the fiction writer must keep in mine at all times—the crackle and spark. Too strict a commitment to the compliance with structural rules of fiction can drain the life from a story. The fuse burns out.

Like flipping the direction of play at half time, you need to alter your perspective and that of your characters and your readers. In her Narrative essay, Kay Boyle referred to what she called “restrictive thinking.” It’s what causes a writer to hold back his or her creativity. One can read the works of others as examples, but Boyle takes the position that although that exercise might reduce or alleviate the fear of speaking (writing), “. . . one cannot be sure that the students will dare to understand the words that other men have said. It takes courage to say things differently. Caution and cowardice dictate the use of the cliché.”

In lieu of the term cliché, we could use “tried and true” or “safe” or “hackneyed.” Whatever the term, it’s what happens when the result becomes predictable and thus boring to the reader. When a reader yawns, the writer is in serious trouble.

The flipside of cowardice is fear of embarrassment. This is particularly true of younger writers because their cohorts are more inclined to use the ever-handy put down if they try something that flops in the execution. Older students and others with a little more life experience appreciate the display of courage. The writer needs to ignore his reluctance, i.e., fears, and fend off stage fright and put his words out there in the spot light. Boyle offers this insight:

“Most adults, having somehow lost touch with the great simplicities, have forgotten that to write is to speak of one’s beliefs. Turning out a typescript with the number of words neatly estimated in the upper right hand corner of the first page has nothing to do with writing.”

You read the works of others to gain perspective. You follow guidelines and structural rules for your own comfort as you find your way through the story you are creating, but in the process you can easily forget that your primary goal is to engage the reader in your telling of story. To do that usually requires that you color outside the lines. The most important perspective to change from viewing the rules and guidelines from the writer’s perspective is to view them from the reader’s perspective. Readers know when something is working because they continue reading. The writer has to constantly ask herself as she writes, “Does this grab AND hold my attention?” If it doesn’t, it certainly won’t grab the attention of readers.

So take the elements of fiction—inciting incident, rising action (conflict), climax, falling action, denouement, resolution, conclusion, and shake them up like dice and give them a toss. Try starting your story from a completely different perspective or one from an unexpected character’s perspective. What would have happened if Dame Agatha Christie in her Ten Little Indians instead of solving the crime and finding the murderous culprit, would have delivered the story from Sir Lawrence Wargrave’s perspective and focused on his efforts to fend off suspicion and misdirect inquiries? It would have altered the dynamics of the story.

Sometimes it’s as simple an exercise as exploring how you might make the familiar unfamiliar. The exercise will make you think about your story from different perspectives and from that you might find a better, more effective—not to mention unique—perspective from which to relate your story.

detectivesI knew an L.A. County district judge who, as a young prosecutor, met his wife, an L.A.P.D. detective, standing over a dead guy in the middle of Wilshire Blvd. in the middle of the night sipping coffee and discussing what happened to the corpse and how it got there. Great beginning for a crime story, but perhaps an even better beginning for a romance story. Think how you could interweave the soft romantic side of two people meeting for the first time at a crime scene with their hard-nose professional personae? Oh the complexities you could add as they struggled to find their romantic way. I smell a series! Maybe the dead guy turns out to be the detective’s estranged husband who was already under investigation by the prosecutor’s office for professional misconduct—another lawyer! Maybe the detective comes under suspicion and the assistant D.A. assumes the role of investigator to prove her innocence. It’s in that process where they fall in love. That plot might sell a lot of soap, as my father would say.

Yes, you do generally need to plug the various ideas about your story into Freytag’s categories somewhere along the way. They do, after all, represent the necessary ingredients of effective fiction, but in what order and how you present them is where you play with the recipe and add the hot sauce rather than ordinary pepper to the pot.

So if you have a story idea you like but have had trouble coming up with a way to tell it, try mixing things up a bit. Unlock yourself from logic and absolute rule-driven linearity; shake up the elements of the story and pick one and see how you might use your selection to create a unique approach to your story.

Were this a classroom rather than a blog, I would list a set of factual ingredients of an event with a list of characters and turn students loose to discuss how many different ways the story could be written and from what perspectives and how would they change the facts and/or characters. You can do that by yourself. It’s called brainstorming. Over-reliance on rules and guidelines that generates what Ms. Boyle labeled restrictive thinking puts a damper on brainstorming.

Remember that the incident that gives rise to your story has to be bigger than life. So do your primary characters. Anything less and you might just have your readers read the menu in a restaurant. You could start with a few characters with characteristics and a plot you find interesting and decide what you need to do to make them fascinating. Create an event that brings them together and let them interact. At this point you’re just making notes and not writing story. You will be amazed at how soon you find yourself piecing the parts together to create a unique story with unique perspectives—you know, those dark alleys readers love to wander into.

Ralph Waldo EmersonThink of the elements of fiction as lights along the shore. They keep you from getting lost, but they also keep you from exploring very far. Look for those areas on your literary map marked “There be dragons here” and steer directly into them.

Ralph Waldo Emerson would likely take the position that too much reliance on guidelines and rules leads to a foolish consistency, about which he said:

“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words, and tomorrow speak what tomorrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict everything you said today. –‘Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.’ –Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be a great is to be misunderstood.”

scalene triangleI like Mr. Emerson’s term “hobgoblin.” Writers are frequently attacked by them, as I suspect Emerson was on occasion. Perhaps it was not that those people he listed were misunderstood as much as they provided a new approach to various thoughts and it took their audiences a while to catch up with them. It’s the writer’s duty, however, to help your audience catch up, and show them the path clearly, but don’t make your literary triangle too obtuse.

Writers’ History

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I don’t find it in my library so I must have relegated it to the Goodwill box. It was a sort of coffee-table book of photographs of the rooms where famous authors did their writing. I didn’t make a list, but I remember being amazed at the number of authors who wrote in bed.

I am sure that not an insignificant number of the people who purchased the book sought to emulate the bedroom style of one of the featured authors in hopes that their favorite writer’s bedtime writing habits might magically rub off onto them as they nestled into copycat featherbedded bliss.

For me, prone translates almost immediately into slumber. It takes but a few paragraphs of reading before the sandman intervenes and kicks the offending volume from my hands. The pages of any book on my nightstand would more likely yellow with age and turn brittle before I reached the final chapter from a prone position.

Frankenstein's monster being destructiveI do keep a notebook there, however, because I have discovered that in the twilight hours, and before I assume my slumber-inducing horizontal position, much of the busy work of my brain gets set aside and ideas lurking below the daylight surface, like vampires, burst free from their subconscious tethers to float to the surface in the dim light. Were I not to grab them, as I sit on the edge of my bed, they would, I am convinced, sink back into the neurological depths of my cranium, there to become wedged in some dark corner near my foramen magnum, never to surface again.

I am equally sure that many writers who try to emulate the writing discipline of their favorite authors do so for the same reason they might take up writing in bed by candlelight—that the literary magic of their favorite author’s techniques will enhance the quality of their own writing. It can be a fool’s errand, for I suspect that many of those who suffer from it are the same people who attend weekend writers’ workshops in search of the magic formula to effortless creativity. Their time would be better spent creating their own literary disciplined habits.

Talent lies well beyond the reach of home decorating techniques and the choice of typewriters, pens, and posture. If you want to live like Hemingway you’re welcome to it, but don’t rely on it to magically translate into assimilating his writing style. And why would you want to? The roadsides of Hemingway’s African outback are littered with the corpses of writers who sought to bag his style.

Still there is much one can learn by studying the histories of writers who came before us. And, since most of us qualify for inclusion in the Homindae family, we naturally tend to try to glean as much information as possible from such sources historic in the hope that the effort will render onto us improved writing skills from analyzing how our predecessors worked and wrote and thought. But history is a dangerous mentor to a writer. All things rust, oxidize, and accumulate a patina over time. Only recently, through the efforts of such talented historians as Doris Kearns Godwin and David Beschloss, has there been a serious effort to “de-patina-ize” history generally and find the real truths hidden beneath. Writers would do well to adopt this approach when they explore the sources of writing advice and guidance. They don’t need to be negatively skeptical but certainly more demanding about the accuracy of what’s presented.

Famous people, then as now, seek to present themselves in the best possible light, and in part, because of our love of lists and platitudes and idioms, we try to reduce history to its barest essentials and in such truncated forms as lists and checklists. It’s this historical surface mining that is dangerous to the writer. He or she needs to know what resides behind the alleged facts—the emotions and psychological factors that made some writer the writer he or she was. That is where the useful wisdom and usable insights reside and hide.

BooksSo as a writer, you must be aware of this element of danger—to accept the surface presentation of history as the ultimate truth—when in search of literary wisdom from popular histories. And you need to keep in mind that the patina that coats writers’ histories is sometimes applied by the writers themselves—not in an effort to outright lie, but certainly to conceal it or put a better spin on it. Shine it up a bit.

Some people stretch the truth, others manufacture it. What writer doesn’t want to project an image of genius and perfection when in fact he or she had to struggle—perhaps embarrassingly so—to come up with what they finally got down on paper. And, truth even gets fuzzier over time, like the parlor game that starts with one person relating a story to the next person and she to the next, and so on until by the time the story comes full-circle around the room it bears little resemblance to the original tale.

To the mix we also have to add the human tendency to forget, especially items of embarrassment or discomfort. It’s a natural process to not want to report the personally unpleasant. Ever come up with a whiz-bang idea and work it into some satisfying product, and then, when you thought about the process, found yourself unable to remember just how the original idea came about? The fact of the matter is you were too busy writing to take notes on the sources and processes that lay behind your creativity. So you forget and/or don’t remember the details. When that happens, it’s also human nature to come up with, i.e., manufacture, some explanation. As a result, the explanation of how fiction writers wrote their fiction turns out to be fiction. That’s why so many of the “magic formulas” in all those writer’s magazine articles tend not to work.

Despite knowing this, writers still suffer from the tendency to seize upon a speech or essay about how some past writer wrote and treat it as Holy writ to glom onto and light candles in its honor. (Hopefully, you’re not into human sacrifice.) Then when it doesn’t work for them they get frustrated and start to believe it’s their fault and that they aren’t up to the task. Writers are a sensitive and touchy lot by their nature and could do well without such self-inflicted wounds from trying to live up to “truths” and “standards” that never existed in the first place.

I’m willing to bet some great writers didn’t become great writers because they gave up, seeing a bump in the road as a mountain instead of the molehill it actually was or failing to duplicate some perceived goal or result. This process resides on the flipside of the concept of repeating the same experiment over and over expecting a different result. If you bang your head against a brick wall and the wall does not move, the lesson should be learned on the first effort. And if you had carefully assessed the situation in the first place, you probably would not have needed to bang your head against the wall in the first place. Blow it up instead! Writers need to do the same thing in assessing whether they can replicate the past efforts of other writers or, more importantly, follow some perceived rules to success—without assessing the veracity of the rules. Does snake oil come to mind?

An important thing for every young writer to understand is that there are no overnight sensations; let alone elixirs for success. The Beatles didn’t spring to life as the leading edge of the British Invasion of the 1960s. They labored hard for years traveling to and performing in the night spots of Hamburg; thus their song, “Eight Days a Week.” We tend to look to the effort of others in order to gain lessons for ourselves and hopefully reduce the extent of our own efforts. It’s this desire to short-circuit the normal processes that gets writers into trouble, and when the lessons themselves are not based in reality the trouble is doubled. Success is rarely duplicated through copying, especially after the complexity of the original effort has been simplified and distilled into a checklist of six rules.

To a writer, history has two prongs—the facts and the lessons gleaned from the facts. It’s dangerous for writers to assume that any presented history is factually correct. It’s best to start with the opposite assumption. The search for the truth—reliable facts—from which to learn needs to have both breadth and depth. Any lessons gleaned or learned need to be founded on the true facts, not those coated in the patina of evolved (truncated) history and legend.

Mary GodwinIt’s Halloween time so lets take the story of Frankenstein as our example. Our image of him is based mostly on movies and Boris Karloff playing the monster. In truth, Frankenstein was not the monster but the monster’s creator. In the original story, the monster is never named. Anyway, we probably know that Frankenstein, the story, was the creation of Mary Godwin, who would later marry Lord Byron’s poetic friend Percy Bysshe Shelley. The story is that Ms. Godwin penned her tale over a weekend and the rest, as they say, is history—another overnight success story we all wish to emulate.

Ms. Godwin started her scary story at Lord (George Gordon) Byron’s rented manor, Villa Diodati, on the shores of Lake Geneva back in 1816. Byron had recently attained fame and fortune with the publication his Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage in 1812. History has it that Lord Byron suggested that the collected group, which included John Polidori, Bryon’s personal physician, write their own scary stories after the group shared several scary tales, no doubt in the front of a warm fire on a dark and stormy night.

In reality, it took several days for Ms. Godwin’s story to jell. And it took further encouragement from her thereafter husband Percy before she expanded it into a novel. It wasn’t until 1818 that Frankenstein’s monster came to life in the publishing world, and then it was initially published anonymously. The second edition waited until 1822, and the first popular single volume version didn’t arrive until 1831. So much for overnight sensations.

The same goes for Dracula, whose embryonic story was created during the same stormy gathering. Byron came up with the concept, but Diodati subsequently relied (“plagiarized” might be a more accurate description) on Byron’s discarded eight pages of notes for a story entitled The Vampyre. Ultimately, it took Braum Stoker’s hand to craft that tale into a hit considerably later in literary history (1897). So Polidori “stole” it from Byron and Stoker stole it from Polidori? Actually, Polidori likely stole it from Rumanian folklore and the tales of Vlad Tepes and his perverted behaviors around 1428.

History of booksBut back to Frankenstein. A review of history’s finer details also discloses other interesting and relevant facts about the novel. It and Dracula, were written in the epistolary style—based on correspondence between the primary characters. In the epistolary style, the various main characters tell their versions of the story rather than being told by a single narrator. The style offers greater intimacy by letting the reader share the horrors of a story from several first-person perspectives. The technique has fallen out of favor, perhaps not rightly so, but it sheds insights into the creative talents of the group.

Beyond the circumstances of the group’s gathering at Diodati, however, is the literary environment of the times. Scientific inquiry was expanding and likely extrapolations of its boundaries were a common source of dinnertime conversations and great fuel for a fiction-writer’s mind. As Mary Godwin later described her resulting dream (and inspiration):

“I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life . . . His success would terrify the artists; he would rush away . . . hope that . . . this thing . . . would subside into dead matter . . . he opens his eyes; behold the horrid thing stands at his bedside, opening his curtains . . .”

Today we have accumulated a vast scientific history that allows us to freely extrapolate future developments, but likely with greater difficulty as the boundaries between reality and science fiction continue to blur.

Looking fiendishBack then, science was more akin to magic and mystery, of which you can find plenty in the story and the characters of Frankenstein. Light was still measured in candlepower, not wattage. Exploration into the properties of electricity was in its infancy, including the idea of human reanimation—Galvanism—generated by the reaction of frog legs when zapped with an electrical charge. Mary Shelley’s father, William Godwin, was well connected with the intellectuals of the time and certainly Mary, then but 19, was exposed to a range of scientific discussions about the then hot topics, including the use of dead bodies in medical studies. You can see how discussions among these intellectuals might have given rise to the births of Frankenstein and Dracula.

Plied with fine wine, and stormy weather—itself the product of the eruption of Mt. Tambora in Indonesia the year previous—the group saw the usually beautiful weather turn to what one writer described as “melodramatically tempestuous,” including thunder and lightening storms. Armed with these realities, the collective imagination of such a literary group could easily have traveled down many alternative avenues to give rise to enumerable horror plots, and obviously nightmares.

I won’t belabor all the details of the issues that seem to have tentacles attached to the Godwin’s (Shelly’s) story of the reanimated monster, but if you want to delve into the birth of Frankenstein’s monster, you might to read Andrew McConnell Stott’s new book The Poet and the Vampyre – The Curse of Byron and the Birth of Literature’s Greatest Monsters (Pegasus, 2014).

What is important in this short walk through history, is the value of pursuing the road less taken and walking the untraveled trail into the realities and truths of history. So much can happen if you invest in the search for details based on truth rather than the patina of legend. Reality, it turns out, is more fascinating than some legend distilled from long-ago facts. The time spent retracing the realities behind some story or concept or author might well lead to the uncovering and the discovery of some new and unique approach for a story idea of your own. That’s the bonus! This is why as a writer, your approach to history becomes not only a search for accurate details but also a source of inspiration.

car batteryLet’s see . . . Someone discovers a body that ultimately is determined to be the Frankenstein monster in the basement of some ancient New York tenement (inherited so you can have fun with the family’s Rumanian history) only to discover that the monster is not dead but can’t live on modern Alternating Current (AC). Quite by accident, your character discovers that car batteries can supply the monster’s need for Direct Current (DC). This monster isn’t initially on a murderous  rampage but inflicts copious property damage in search of those delectable electrical morsels under the hoods of modern day motor vehicles. Dozens of cars with dead batteries could lead to such interesting, and terrifying, discoveries. That’s how history delivers the big payoff. When you dig a little deeper, something may well prick your creative and inquisitive mind and story ideas emerges. That’s why history to a writer isn’t the same as history to others. But be careful in all that digging not to nick Dracula. That might really piss him off. Then we’d discover what’s in the box in the corner of the musty basement. The original buddy system!

“Expositionary” Force

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When Snoopy leaned over his typewriter and wrote, “It was a dark and stormy night,” he was writing exposition, the first point on Freytag’s Pyramid. (See my earlier blog entitled: “Incite Insights.”) In modern jargon it can be called the setup—where the writer traditionally introduces his characters and places them in the setting where the inciting incident takes place that kicks off the story. In theater it’s when the curtain goes up and the audience sees the set and perhaps some monologue or conversation between the maid and the butler that introduces the play.

Because of the visual focus of television and movies, the inclination there is to start with the inciting incident (kaboom!) and backtrack to educate the audience or in some way blend exposition into the inciting incident.

a risky ventureThe opening scene might be a group of commandos in a plane over enemy territory being shot at by antiaircraft batteries as they apply blackface and their CO says, “We’ll gentlemen, I told you this was a risky venture.” At this point we might flashback to our protagonist trying to explain to his girlfriend why he volunteered for such a dangerous mission, or telling his best bud that since he and Margery broke up he had little to live for. The setting makes it obvious the story takes place in WWII. The verbal exchange might well bring the audience up to speed as to the who, what, where, and why. Suddenly we’re back in the plane just as it’s hit and the CO is killed and the paratroopers have to parachute out of the craft before it crashes—many miles short of their objective. Our protagonist steps in and helps get his fellow teammates launched. It becomes obvious that he will become the leader of this nefarious group of misfits—something made clear by the tidbits of exchanges between and among the actors.

Exposition is the key ingredient for introducing a story and its primary characters and to bring the reader/audience up to sufficient speed.  It orients the reader to time and place and provides and feeds the foundational ingredients of the conflict necessary for fiction. Exposition has to hook the reader and pull him into the story. It’s where the writer makes promises that he later must keep as the story transitions through the other six elements of Freytag’s Pyramid: inciting incident, conflict/rising action, climax, falling action, resolution, and denouement (the wrap up).

The first few paragraphs of anything—a letter, a report, a news story, a novel—are critically important, and serve different purposes for each type of prose. In the ever-late letter home, the first paragraph begins with an apology to mom for not writing sooner and a promise to do better. The real intent—“I need more money”—might be concealed until page three.

A report’s first paragraph typically alerts the reader to what is going to be addressed in the report and frequently tells the conclusion or findings that will be discussed and explained. A news story’s first paragraph, called the leed, is loaded with as much who, what, when, where, and why factoids as can be shoved into a sentence or two. Elegance takes the back seat to the delivery of information and facts.

For the short story, the first graphs are not unlike those of a news story. They give the readers information that encourages them to read on. The breadth and depth of a short story by its very nature is narrower in scope than a novel, so the writer can’t be too obtuse in her exposition or she risks having to invest valuable words needed to tell the story to un-confuse the reader. If you lose the reader by the end of the first few graphs, odds are against you that you’ll have another chance to get them back.

This isn’t to say that a novelist can afford to wander around the literary countryside before getting down to the telling of story. Readers expect forward movement starting with paragraph one, even sentence one, in all things fiction. The first few paragraphs of a novel need to have the report of a starter’s pistol. They must live up to the “hype” of the title and cover that encourage the browser to pick up the book and take a look in the first place. The importance of the leed to a news story pales in comparison to the investment a writer makes in the first paragraphs of a novel—a few hours versus sometimes years of effort. The cost of losing the reader of a news story is miniscule if a reader turns the newspaper page compared to when a potential buyer sets the novel back down and moves onto somebody else’s. Ouch!

a teaserIn journalism school, students spend a great deal of time learning about and practicing writing leeds. They are formulaic and rule driven. But were the opening sentences and paragraphs of exposition of your novel to come across as formulaic, you can likely kiss the reader goodbye. The novelist needs to hook the readers and make them want to find out what happens next, and next, and next. Whatever does that must be fascinatingly unique and linked to the story and its characters. The beginning paragraphs of a novel must be like the Frito Lay potato chip TV ad from the 1980s, when Bert Lahr, dressed as the devil, teases viewers with “Bet you can’t eat just one.”

In the scheme of things, exposition might not be considered the most important element of a novel, but it beats whatever comes second. Without it, the rest of the effort easily goes for naught.

However, of all the topics of writing that float about the ether, articles and essays on exposition are perhaps the rarest. That’s because it’s the one Freytag element so esoteric that any attempt to decipher rules might not afford general application. Here are few general “rules” that I’ve tried to discern:

1)    If your initial efforts fail to hook, keep trying until one does. The effort will likely make you feel like the robin teetering on the edge of the nest looking over at his mother: “Whad’ya mean just flap my wings?” Fortunately, there have been no known fatalities from a literary fall.

2)    Write the ad copy to sell your book—not the blurb in the local TV guide, but a powerful paragraph that captures the essence of your efforts. You can’t write powerful exposition if you don’t know what your story/book is really about. What would the poster about your book hanging on the bookstore wall say? Having to describe what your novel/story is about can point you in the direction of how it should begin. Try to be concise, say no more than 100 words. That makes you weigh the value of each word and the words in your exposition need to carry a lot of weight.

3)    Cute and clever probably won’t work so don’t invest time in thinking they will.

4)    Fully answer this question: Why should I want to read this book? (Note: That’s not the same as what the book is about; it’s about who your readers are and what interests them and how you have addressed those interests. In other words, it requires that you know your audience.)

5)    What makes your story unique or different from the other stuff in the same genre/category already in the market?

6)What would your target audience want to see/hear about your main character? What is it about him or her that would entice potential readers to want to read his or her story? But remember, in his “Hills Like White Elephants,” Hemingway described his female character with, “she had taken off her hat and put it on the table.” Does that mean there’s a rule about less is more? The definitive answer to that question is: “Maybe. Maybe not.”

woman walkingThese questions aren’t meant to be definitive but merely to make you think, because the role of your exposition extends beyond mere exposition.

As I’ve previously written, story ideas arrive closer to the middle than the beginning of Freytag’s Pyramid. We write beginnings to make sense of our middles. The writing process is dynamic, and an idea might change or morph into something else as the effort progresses. But ultimately, the beginning needs to set your story’s focus. It does for the writer what it should do for the reader.

Before you address the above questions, you would probably be best advised to go to the library and/or bookstore and read the titles, cover blurbs, and the first page or two of as many novels as you can. Treat this not as an exercise in endurance, but an effort to learn how to analyze what you read: Do the first paragraphs pique your interest and make you want to read more? If so, why? If not, why? What intentions or goals of the writer can you deduce? If you think they didn’t succeed, write a memo to the author in which you offer your sage insight and advice. If they did, write a note of praise.

By comparison, an Internet browser (the person, not the interface) invests but a few seconds before deciding whether to look at or leave a website. So how long does it take you to glance at a book’s cover, peek inside, read the first few graphs in a bookstore? Did some books have greater appeal that made you linger longer? To what do you attribute that? Don’t just think in terms of the first few graphs. It can also be a matter of staging by the bookstore. Before your first few paragraphs can have an impact, the cover needs to lure the potential readers to pick up your book and look inside. The marketing messages have to tweak their interest. But when they look at the first lines of copy under “Chapter One” those words had better keep the promises intimated by all the other stuff that enticed them to pick up the book and open the cover in the first place.

Admittedly, this investment of time doesn’t take into consideration the time someone might have spent reading reviews and/or listening to reports of friends. But a substantial majority of bookstores visitors, both physical and digital, come with no specific intention other than to browse. Likely the browser has a limited range of interests and that’s why bookstore operators stack books on tables by genre, and, yours has to stand out. That’s where the competition for eyes and minds reside and focus.

Here’s the worst thing: a reader picks up the book, looks at the cover, reads the blurbs, and then decides to take a look inside. Your two killer initial paragraphs of prose go for naught, however, if disappointing ones immediately follow. The first paragraphs must grab, the next several have to set the hook. They serve the purpose to entice the reader. Once enticed, the reader will look a bit further, might even flip through a few chapters to see if the style that caught his eye holds it. The first few paragraphs make promises that the rest of the book needs to deliver on.

So how might you find guidance on how to write effective expositional paragraphs? Few authors have taken on the topic. In 1993, Donald Newlove put together a compendium of 250 great novel openings in his First Paragraphs, but because each is uniquely linked to the content of individual novels they offer little in the way of rules, and when somebody ventures forth to make up a few rules they are frequently, and quickly, proven wrong. My favorite example is E. L. Doctorow. He warned would-be writers away from opening a novel with references to weather—sorry Snoopy—then proceeded to write a best seller that did just that.

charactersConsider Raymond Chandler’s opening to The Big Sleep. When he seems just about to get bogged down in—of all things—a description of fashion before he delivers a couple powerful statements:

“It was about eleven o’clock in the morning, mid October, with the sun not shining and a look of hard wet rain in the clearness of the foothills. I was wearing my powder-blue suit, with dark blue shirt, tie and display handkerchief, black brogues, black wool socks with dark blue clocks on them. I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn’t care who knew it. I was everything the well-dressed private detective ought to be. I was calling on four million dollars.”

Chandler’s paragraph actually is a good example of how to approach any effort to analyze what makes for great exposition. Had Chandler extended his opening by another few sentences, he might well have pushed his luck a little too far. Note how the opening finishes with his “sock-in-the-jaw” sentences. One discloses that our narrator is a private eye and the other tells us there’s four million bucks involved. In fact, what happens if we were to use those final three sentences as the first paragraph? Probably would have worked. But we need a spiffily dressed PI to gain access to the $4 million mystery and contrast him from the society with which he was about to get involved, for which it was important to be well dressed and sober.

In paragraph two, Chandler’s private dick enters the main hallway of the two-story “Sternwood place.” This intimates wealth and supports the need to dress for the occasion and be on one’s best behavior. Chandler takes us out of the world of the hoi palloi and into the world of the hoity-toity, a powerful invite back in 1939 when the book originally came out. Does that mean a rule of exposition should include leaving subtle hints? Maybe. Depends on the story . . . and the writer’s style.

A little more analysis is needed perhaps. The technique Chandler employed might be useful as you consider the options for luring readers into your own story. Chandler hooks us by sharing details and facts about his narrator’s attire, which provide insight into the thinking of this nattily dressed PI. He’s not quite a fish out of water, but he’s about to swim into the deeper end of the pool where there’s caviar and champagne and money.

If you take another read of Chandler’s opening you should now be able to pickup on its characterization and contrast! That’s a lesson worth knowing, because the only things more important than your first few paragraphs are the rest of them.

“Incite Insights”

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“Freytag’s Pyramid” lists the seven basic elements of fiction writing in chronological order: (1) exposition, (2) inciting incident, (3) rising action (conflicts), (4) climax (at the top of the pyramid), (5) falling action, (6) resolution, and (7) denouement. It’s important for the writer to understand that Freytag was not listing a set of rules but rather a compilation of observable structural elements present in virtually all fiction writing. They constitute the common ingredients of storytelling.

The distinction is important to the writer. Rules are compliance driven, the items on a list to be checked off; for example a pilot’s pre-flight checklist or the surgical nurse’s inventory to assure some piece of gauze or a clamp has not been left inside the patient.

Rock ClimberRather than rules, Freytag’s list of the fundamental common elements of fiction serve as the structural skeleton at the heart of a story—reliably ever-present but the location and precise contents of which are individually subjective. Rather than rules, the writer should consider them as tools to help construct an effective piece of fiction—one that grabs and holds a reader’s attention and carries him or her from the beginning through to the end. If readers sense the absence of any one of these fundamental elements, they likely will find what they are reading lacking and move on.

As you construct a story its skeletal elements become lost in the tissues and organs and skin you’ve added to create the completed body, but they are what holds it together. That’s what Freytag’s elements do.

Rules attempt to objectify complicated processes by breaking them down into more bite-sized pieces. For example, a cell’s structure as diagrammed in a biology textbook has sharp lines that clearly distinguish the borders of its various parts, which are neatly labeled. Under a microscope, however, there are no labels and the actual parts of a living cell appear considerably less distinct—mushy even. It becomes difficult to distinguish the boundary lines of the cell’s constituent parts.

Like a living cell, the story you are writing is considerably more organic and subjective—mushy under the microscope. The pieces of a story become blended, less distinct at their edges as the subtleties of details and transitions are added and mixed together to become a whole. Like making a cake from scratch, the ingredients are distinct, just sitting there in their containers on the tabletop, but as you blend them together, they combine into batter. If you try to maintain each element as distinctly separate, your story becomes less like smooth batter and remains lumpy. It simply won’t flow and certainly won’t bake up right.

To a reader or literature student, Freytag’s elements serve as the checklist of what to find in an analysis of a story, like locating the parts of a cell under the microscope. To a writer, however, the listed elements serve as the constituent ingredients of story to be blended together. From this perspective, awareness of and sensitivity to Freytag’s pyramid becomes an invaluable aid to the writer as s/he nurses an idea—the sudden brainstorm or flash of inspiration—into a completed story.

Once you get into writing a story, it’s easy to forget where the original idea came from, but one given remains: rarely do story ideas arrive in a complete package of chronologically arranged parts. Stories start out as fragments of action that need to be fitted into a complete story held together by Freytag’s seven elements.

Brainstorms of story ideas inevitably arrive as explosions of action or conflict that structurally belong toward the top left side of Freytag’s pyramid. An ending may come to mind, but rarely do we see the beginning in any great detail. Beginnings generally have to be constructed. This is not a weakness in your thinking but part of a quite logical process. Action is the heart of any story, and it’s the image of action that typically serves as the catalyst behind brainstorms in the first place.

Once the rising action (conflict) is visualized, you merely have to apply techniques of reverse engineering and back the action of the brainstorm or idea up to find or create a strong and effective exposition and inciting incident(s) that will dovetail into your already conceived rising action. Story ideas always arrive with the horse before the cart! A writer has to put things in order and Freytag’s elements can help do that.

pitonsSo an idea explodes in your mind and you enjoy the experience, but, ultimately, you have to come up with a beginning. Think about a story idea you’ve had. I’d bet that it didn’t arrive fully developed. Your mountain climber didn’t start with a wild hair during a boring office meeting, or getting ready at basecamp, or saying goodbye to his wife. It started with Joe—played by you—on the shear face of the mountain, perhaps a thousand feet below the summit and facing certain death on the rocks three thousand feet below. He looks over his shoulder at the unexpected storm moving in very quickly as he contemplates the discovery that he brought along inferior quality pitons that likely won’t hold his weight and suddenly realizes they were a gift from his wife. Can’t climb down, but does he have the time to make it to that craggy outcropping a few hundred feet above that might offer protection from the elements? Sleet is starting to pelt him. Any free-climb path to that ledge is going to get very icy, very fast if he can’t do something about the pitons.

The conflicts come into focus—man against the mountain, nature against man, man against the clock, man against some deadly plot. It just takes some backing up from the flash-of-inspiration scene on the mountainside to find where the inciting incident belongs and what it might be. By then you will have primed your mind to come up the ingredients of the story’s exposition where the characters start to come to life. Their thoughts and actions will lead you to an appropriate inciting incident that carries the action forward to connect with your original flash of inspiration.

Creating story from an idea is similar to when you have a vivid dream. After waking up, you inevitably try to figure out where the dream came from. When you have a brainstorm for a story, it’s a similar process, only you have to invent where the story would best start.

This is where the second writer’s list plays a key role in your story development. Freytag’s elements are the file folders; you have to insert the contents. The second list, which consists of the Five W’s & H—Who, What, When, Why, Where, and How—will help with that. Come up with the answers to those questions for each of Freytag’s elements and you’ll soon have compiled the details that put life into your original flash of action and fatten your Freytag file folders. The questions will also help when you find yourself stuck on the ledge of someplace and not certain which direction to take. The questions force you to review the key ingredients of each step, starting with your exposition and on into your inciting incident. Your answers will provide focus on which “horses of action” will best pull your story’s cart forward.

pilot following a checklistThis internal Q and A process will flush out the details of your characters, their actions, the location, and the all-important inciting incident that will pull a reader into your story and give it life and credibility and have the readers hooked by the time you take them to the rising action. Let’s say you like the idea that your mountain-climbing protagonist has a potentially lethal spouse. The Five W’s & H will help you come up with the details about the climb—from the mountain, its location, the other members of the climb team (too far away to help), and the underlying reason(s) that your protagonist is here in the first place. The questions will also help you decide where the wife’s plot first got started—a boyfriend perhaps, or to keep the protagonist from discovering her involvement in something far more sinister (Subplots!). Did she add a few million in insurance coverage on her husband’s life insurance policy a year ago or perhaps she has a boyfriend who is a crooked insurance agent who plans to kill her once she collects on the policy. He plans to stuff the cash into an exercise bag and slip away to the islands.

You can see how the two lists work in tandem. Freytag’s helps you keep your story linearly focused, and working through the list of W’s and H generates the details that bring your story to life.

But the two lists, although very helpful, do not comprise the complete story telling kit. A good story, well written, will create a movie in your readers’ minds. For the writer to achieve that, s/he needs to think visually about the answers to each question, and actually see the story, its characters, scenes, and actions, and then select the words that best paint the scenes into reality for your reader—in Cinemascope and Technicolor and Surround Sound. Lists won’t help you with those. You need skills of narration and dialogue, internal and external.

Joe reached down and grabbed a piton from the looped collection hanging from his belt and nestled its point into the narrow crevice—a crack in the granite that opened perhaps thousands of years ago when some temblor rattled the mountain. Once the piton was slightly wedged into the crack, he flipped his wrist in a well-practiced maneuver and his hammer jumped up and landed in his thick-gloved hand. He liked the showy move, which he practiced frequently. It gave him a sense of control and surgical synchronization. The perfection of the flip of his wrist was as reliable as the ting the tempered steel of a piton made when you first started to drive it into a crevice. But this time, there was no ting. The missing sound didn’t at first register; not until he hit the piton a second time. It returned a sound more like a six-penny nail being driven into a two-by-four. “What gives?” he thought. He pulled another from his loop and inspected it, something he should have done during bivouac at base camp, or when he was packing his gear, but didn’t because they were new, a good luck gift from his beloved Jane. The piton lacked the usual markings of its manufacturer. The lack of quality was glaring in comparison to the pitons he normally used. Didn’t Jane say they were the same brand?

“She’s always trying to save money,” he tells himself. “But why would she cut corners on these? She knows how important they are.”

Funny thing about being in a deadly dangerous situation with few if any options; your mind starts to run scenarios if not race about fully amok. You see and feel things that are not true. But sometimes you see things that are. Aspects of your life come into very sharp focus. He shouldn’t have used so many of his original supply of pitons first. He cursed himself for his carelessness as he looked up to estimate the distance to the outcrop and then over his shoulder to calculate when the full force of the storm would slam into the mountain, and him.

First he needed to think about survival. If he survived, then he’d think about the pitons. But thoughts of why slapped him in the face along with the wind-driven sleet that announced the storm. He needed to make these pitons work.

“Think about what to do now,” he yelled at himself. “Now! Now!”

He’d think about Jane’s potentially deadly intentions later . . . if there were a later.

First you have a character in a tight jamb—your brainstorm. Then you back up a bit to find the potential facets of exposition and the inciting incident(s) that will work to kick off the action that has the protagonist in the fix in which he finds himself. Ideas ping-pong back and forth between the character’s situation and the beginning exposition and events that put him there. An inventory of facts and alternatives mount and you start to pick and choose from them those that will best work.

By understanding how the process works, and the elements of a story’s structure, and how to interrogate yourself, backing up from the beginning of an idea to a beginning of a story becomes less arduous. Once you understand how something works, you can focus on making it work better for you.

Armed with these two lists you’ll soon find that nursing story from an idea becomes easier, but it’s also easy to suddenly find yourself dangling off the shear side of a mountain trying to figure out how save your story idea. But with a little practice you will gather the confidence that you can build on. Just remember to check your pitons before you start to climb into your story.

Characterization

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If readers don’t buy into your characters, they won’t buy into your story. Characterization is how a writer interjects the strengths, weaknesses, flaws, and all the other elements, personality traits, and behavioral peccadillos that make humans human, into their characters. E. M. Forster first distinguished these more Complicated makeupfully developed characters as “round” and distinguished them from all the others, which he labeled as “flat.” Not all characters in a story have to be round, but the most important ones must be. The greater the burden you give a character to carry the story, the greater the need to more fully characterize him or her.

Round characters, said Forster, have the ability to surprise the reader. Flat characters are predictable and thus stereotypical. They are consistent and have no complexity. They will make your story boring because they are boring. Round characters are capable of interjecting the tension that makes fiction what it is. We go through life trying to keep our lives on an even keel. We like books where the lives of the characters are anything but.

Unfortunately, many writers merely stop the story and physically interject narrative description, thinking they are adding characterization. Characterization is not a spice to be sprinkled over the top of your narrative or, like spackle, putty-knifed into the cracks between the action and dialogue. Characterization consists of threads woven into the fabric of your story.

Elements of characterization can be determined by (1) a character’s actions, (2) his or her statements, (3) what s/he thinks or feels (internal thoughts) (4) what others think or have to say about him or her, or (5) some combination of the above. Characterization may consist of pure physical attributes or deep mental analysis—from the heroine’s button nose or her quirky preference for the chemicals she used to poison a string of wealthy husbands.

How characterization is interjected into story depends in part on the story’s voice. A first person narrative lets the reader into the main character’s (narrator’s) mind. The first person narrator would likely supply much of the characterization of the other characters, although the dialogue and interaction of the characters could help provide alternative sources of insight into their personalities. In the third person narrative, the available tools of characterization expands, as would the potential depth of the resulting characterization, depending on the latitude the writer gives to the narrator, of course.

Characterization can range from the physical attributes of a person to their deepest and most intimate of thoughts. Whatever elements of character are presented, they need to be relevant to the content of the location within the story where they are placed. In a police story, the sergeant may well open a file and rattle off characterization details of a criminal from the folder. But if you stop your romance story and essentially do the same thing, it will come across as forced and jarring, like hitting a pothole on an otherwise smooth road. As important as characterization is, the technique of injecting it into you story in the right place and right way is as important. The alternatives need to be carefully considered.

Jim had chubby cheeks is descriptive, but The frigid night wind chilled Jim’s chubby cheeks and he pulled his scarf up to the bottom of his thick glasses works better to give us an idea of Jim’s physical attributes while staying within the story. Before you can interject such description, however, you have to have a pretty good idea of the character traits of your key characters. You can sit down and create a sort of personality profile of each character, or build a dossier as your story proceeds and you put more and more life into your characters.

You can imagine how complete the character traits file for Kinsey Millhone, Sue Grafton’s female gumshoe in her “Alphabet” detective series, became as she approached her twenty-sixth volume. Apparently, Kinsey was not fully formed in the beginning. As Grafton writes in Kinsey and Me (2013), the detective “entered [her] life, like and apparition, sometime in 1977.” F. Scott Fitzgerald allegedly detailed his chapters right down to the number of words he would use, so likely he had a very good idea about his characterizations before he wrote a single word in an actual chapter. I tend to let my characters take shape as I write. That means I have to go back and flesh them out more fully later, but I feel I have more flexibility and control over the structure of the story doing it this way. Soon enough, as Grafton says about Millhone, your character will be “peering over [your] shoulder, whispering nudging [you], making bawdy remarks.” Mine have told me when they wouldn’t do something the way I was suggesting they would.

Making an elaborate mask.There is no perfect way or technique of characterization, i.e., formula. You find what works for you. But you must contemplate characterization as you write and as you think about what you have written and as you think about what you’re going to write next.

I think Harper Lee is the master of characterization, and for that reason I’ve included a lengthy example from To Kill a Mockingbird to show how effectively characterization can be interjected into the story, becomes part of it, and, as a result, draws the reader into the story.

Jem and his sister Scout and their next-door friend Dill don’t run around on the pages of the novel. They pull you into them. You don’t see mere characters but dear friends with whom to sympathize and empathize. While their father Atticus was out of town, Calpurnia, their black housekeeper, took Jem and Scout to her church on Sunday morning. Scout, the narrator, reports:

Slowly, painfully, the ten dollars was collected. The door was opened, and the gust of warm air revived us. Zeebo lined On Jordan’s Stormy Banks, and church was over.

I wanted to stay and explore, but Calpurnia propelled me up the aisle ahead of her. At the church door, while she paused to talk with Zeebo and his family, Jem and I chatted with Reverend Sykes. I was bursting with questions, but decided I would wait and let Calpurnia answer them.

“We were ‘specially glad to have you all here,” said Reverend Sykes. “This church has no better friend than your daddy.”

My curiosity burst: “Why were you all takin’ up collection for Tom Robinson’s wife?”

“Didn’t you hear why?” asked Reverend Sykes. “Helen’s got three little ‘uns and she can’t go out to work—“

“Why can’t she take ‘em with her, Reverend?” I asked. It was customary for field Negroes with tiny children to deposit them in whatever shade there was while their parents worked—usually the babies sat in the shade between two rows of cotton. Those unable to sit were strapped papoose-style on their mothers’ backs, or resided in extra cotton bags.

Reverend Sykes hesitated. “To tell you the truth, Miss Jean Louise, Helen’s finding it hard to get work these days . . . when it’s picking time, I think Mr. Link Deas’ll take her.”

“Why not, Reverend?”

Before he could answer, I felt Calpurnia’s hand on my shoulder. At its pressure I said, “We thank you for lettin’ us come.” Jem echoed me, and we made our way homeward.

. . .
Jem said it looked like they could save the collection money for a year and get some hymn-books.

Calpurnia laughed. “Wouldn’t do any good,” she said. “They can’t read.”

“Can’t read?” I asked. “All those folks?”

“That’s right,” Calpurnia nodded. “Can’t but about four folks in First Purchase read . . . I’m one of ‘em.”

“Where’d you go to school, Cal?” asked Jem.

“Nowhere. Let’s see now, who taught me my letters? It was Miss Maudie Atkinson’s aunt, old Miss Buford—“

“Are you that old?”

“I’m older than Mr. Finch, even.” Calpurnia grinned. “Not sure how much, though. We started rememberin’ one time, trying to figure out how old I was–I can remember back just a few years more’n than he can, so I’m not much older when you take off the fact that men can’t remember as well as women.”

“What’s your birthday, Cal?”

“I just have it on Christmas, it’s easier to remember that way–don’t have a real birthday.”

“But Cal,” Jem protested, “you don’t look even near as old as Atticus.”

“Colored folks don’t show their ages so fast,” she said.

“Maybe because they can’t read. Cal, did you teach Zeebo?”

“Yeah, Mister Jem. There wasn’t a school even when he was boy. I made him learn, though.”

Zeebo was Calpurnia’s eldest son. If I had ever thought about it, I would have known that Calpurnia was of mature years—Zeebo had half-grown children—but then I had never thought about it.

“Did you teach him out of a primer, like us?” I asked.

“No, I made him get a page of the Bible every day, and there was a book Miss Buford taught me out of—bet you don’t know where I got it,” she said.

We didn’t know.

Calpurnia said, “Your Grandaddy Finch gave it to me.”

“Were you from the Landing?” Jem asked. “You never told us that.”

“I certainly am, Mister Jem. Grew up down there between the Buford Place and the Landin’. I’ve spent all my days workin’ for the Finches or the Bufords, an’ I moved to Maycomb when your daddy and your momma were married.”

“What was the book, Cal?” I asked.

“Blackstone’s Commentaries.”

Jem was thunderstruck. “You mean you taught Zeebo out of that?”

“Why yes sir, Mister Jem.” Calpurnia timidly put her fingers to her mouth. “They were the only books I had. Your grandaddy said Mr. Blackstone wrote fine English—“

“That’s why you don’t talk like the rest of ‘em,” said Jem.

“The rest of who?”

“Rest of the colored folks. Cal, but you talked like they did in church . . .”

That Calpurnia lead a modest double life never dawned on me. The idea that she had a separate existence outside our household was a novel one, to say nothing of her having command of two languages

 

In those 767 words, Lee didn’t stop the story to provide characterization in all of the ways it can be done. The characterization is woven into the scene as it unfolds. The reader might as well be walking right along with them as a silent witness. Characterization flows from the conversation and the subjects of the conversation. Lee subtly interjects descriptions that characterize the people in the story. We learn about the black church, the level of illiteracy, the harshness of the fieldwork, and the family burdens on the black population who had no household support—their babies went to work with them. We learn the source of Calpurnia’s ability to read, but in doing so obtain insight into the Finch family and their philosophies on race in those Depression days in the Deep South. We learn that Cal leads a double life, probably so not to be considered uppity by her own folk. The characterization is woven into the questions of an ever-curious Scout and is organic to the larger landscape of the book; it’s part of the fabric of the story.

The lesson is to have your characterization come from the story and not be a coating brushed over it.

Another example: You could write, The soles of Dad’s shoes were wearing thin. He lamented he could step on a piece of gum and tell you what flavor it was. / OR /Dad eased himself down into the old, battered easy chair, and slowly slipped off his shoes and rubbed the bottoms of his feet. I could see mom would have some darning to do. The oval patch on the right shoe’s sole looked like a knothole in an old gray board. When Dad stuck his hand inside and pushed his finger against bottom of the shoe, the paper-thin leather gave way and his finger stuck out. He sighed, a tired sigh. “Well, that settles it. I can now step on a piece of gum and tell you what flavor it is.” He looked up and over and gave me a wink. “Do we have a piece of cardboard lyin’ about, Mother?” he asked. / Mother came out of the kitchen where she was making bread with the back of an old writing tablet in one hand a pair of ancient scissors in the other, and like a surgeon cut out a piece shaped like a shoe sole and handed it to him. “Bout time to dig deep into the cookie jar and get a new pair or some repairs,” she said.

A prismWe learn facts, but also information from which we can make assumptions about the characters: A hardworking father, home and tired; a poor family, as witnessed by the father’s shoes and confirmed by his wife’s temporary repair. Not unlike Mockingbird, we’re getting an eyewitness account from a child’s perspective and from a natural family interaction that doesn’t come across as a plant-on device. Writer Sol Stein would call these little identifiers of characterization “markers.”

In his 1995 book, Stein on Writing, he describes these markers as “easily identified signals that to the majority of readers will reveal a character’s cultural and social background.” They are small references that likely will connect with or create in the reader’s mind an image that enhances the detail of what has been said or described. These markers provide insights into character through the use of hints of traits, actions, and interactions that can be direct or indirect, blatant or subtle. The markers usually deal with contrasting cultural and social characterizations that enhance a reader’s own understandings but also create tensions, which he divides into “upper class” and “lower class.” A woman with curlers under a scarf in public would connote lower class. What does the distinction between a woman with “claw like fingernails and excessive rouge” and one with manicured nails and beauty-shop perfect hairdo tell you about which class they belong, and thus their character? Or, what does a man with black under his fingernails wearing a suit tell you about him? Someone incessantly chewing gum? A woman in cheap clothes and gaudy jewelry? A person’s car, choice in beverage or food, and mannerisms can all serve as markers, explains Stein.

I agree with the technique, but Stein’s examples seem to rely on stereotypes and too much of that makes one’s writing hackneyed. So be careful.

Although not as complete as Mark Twain, Harper Lee also uses language as characterization markers. Scout picks up on Calpurnia’s duo languages and Calpurnia explains not only their sources but also why she speaks differently depending on where she is—her church versus the Finch residence. Think what her different behaviors tell you about Calpurnia and her people. Some people like to show off their differences. Calpurnia hides hers.

Stein expresses a preference for “action markers” or “. . . sentences that describe what a character does and at the same time reveal something about the character’s upbringing or background.” He presents three sentences with quite different “instant characterizations” from the same setting, a restaurant:

1) Every time Zelda ate in a restaurant, she found some reason to send food back to the kitchen.
2) Louis always played it safe by over tipping the waiter.
3) As usual, Angelica let her food get cold because she was busy watching everyone else in the restaurant.

Stein mixes the concepts of characterization with the concept of conflict. By showing dichotomous character traits, a writer enhances the contrasts between and among characters and thus increases the tension with a story. Stein goes so far as to state: “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?”

Stein links characterization to conflicts that create the tensions needed for that magical ride up from the inciting incident to the climax. At first, it might seem he is mixing characterization with other aspects of fiction, but he is actually telling us about the weave of characterization and story. What Stein is saying is that sharp differences between your characters is a source of characterization that also builds the tension that makes fiction all the more powerful.

HighlighterYou won’t likely find a lot of definitive discussion about characterization, mostly lists of its elements. I suggest you read, or re-read, Mockingbird. Were you to highlight the entries where Lee presents characterization in its various forms, you’ll likely dry out a highlighter, maybe two.

Suppose that’s something the Pulitzer committee was drawn to?