EPUB Ebooks: Free ebook sample of "Front-Word, Back-Word, Insight-Out" by Smoky Trudeau Zeidel

Front-Word

A few years back, while I was writing my first novel, Redeeming Grace, a workman came to my house to fix my dishwasher, which was leaking badly. I sat at the kitchen table, immersed in my writing, as he sat on the floor, immersed in finding the leak.

“You’re sure typing fast,” he said, looking up from the dismantled machine. “Whatcha in such a hurry for?”

I don’t think he was trying to be nosey; but rather was just making small talk. So I answered him with the same good nature. “I’m writing a novel,” I said.

His eyes lit up. “Oh!” he said. “I’m gonna write me a novel someday, maybe when I retire.” He went back to his work.

I resisted the impulse to say, “And I’m going to take up dishwasher repair when I retire.”

His response shouldn’t have surprised me. According to one survey, more than 80 percent of Americans say they would like to write a book someday.¹ It’s the literary version of the American dream.

The problem is, many of these aspiring authors have no idea how to make this literary dream a reality. They don’t know any more about writing a book than I know about fixing dishwashers. And just as I wouldn’t attempt to fix a dishwasher without going to trade school to learn, writers shouldn’t attempt to write novels without first studying how it’s done.

Oh sure, we all learn to write in school. We all learned how to state our thesis or story premise, give three or more supporting examples, then summarize. We did this whether we were writing a term paper or a short story. State your case. Give examples. Sum it up.

Do this when writing a novel and I can promise you: No publisher will get beyond the first page of your manuscript. As a former writing instructor, I can’t tell you how many students come into my workshops and proceed to “set up” their stories, prattle on for page after page with boring prose that contains little setting description, no discernable plot, robotic characters, and boring dialogue, then summarize the entire story and call it an ending.

Writing a book is a commitment of time, a commitment of energy, a commitment of love. It’s not unlike birthing and raising a child, and like raising a child, you want to get it right. Raise a child wrong and she is poorly prepared to make it in the real world. Write a book wrong and it will never make it into the publishing world.

Children don’t come with instruction manuals. Fortunately, there is an instruction manual for writing a book. You’re holding it in your hands. While I can’t guarantee your book will be published, I can guarantee if you read this book and follow my suggestions, do the exercises provided, and diligently work on your writing every day, you’ll be a much better writer afterward than you were beforehand.

Chapter One

Getting Started

Where Do Stories Come From?

Since the dawn of humankind, stories have been used to teach, to entertain, and to enlighten. There seems to be a biological compulsion that makes people hungry to hear stories. There were more than 48,400 works of fiction published in 2007 in the United States alone, up from 28,400 only four years earlier.¹ But where do the writers of those books get their ideas? Where do stories come from?

When you’re a writer, everything is research. Everything that happens to you, everything you see happening to others, is your raw material. Places you go, things you do, people you meet, all are the ingredients from which stories are created.

Stories are in the people you meet. I once met a woman who wrote copious amounts of very bad poetry in spiral notebooks. She carried those notebooks everywhere, hoping for an audience that would allow her to read her poetry aloud. She became the inspiration behind the main character in my story, Good-bye, Emily Dickinson.

Stories are in the places you visit. Hemingway wrote many, many stories based on his visits to Africa. Eudora Welty and Flannery O’Connor wrote stories set in their beloved South. The setting for my first novel, Redeeming Grace, was a peach orchard on the eastern shore of Maryland. Windy Hill was a real place, the home of my aunt and uncle, a place I spent many glorious summers. The same goes for the setting of my second novel, The Cabin. This one is set in the mountains of Virginia, another of my childhood haunts.

Stories are found in history. Some of the greatest books written are historical novels. Think of Phillipa Gregory’s novel, The Other Boleyn Girl, or John Jake’s North and South trilogy.

Recently, I edited a novel where one of the characters was talking about the Latin American holiday, Day of the Dead. The character was saying Day of the Dead was a time of terror, when people raped and pillaged and slaughtered people who ventured out of their house. This is, of course, factually inaccurate. Day of the Dead is a time to honor the dead, not add to their numbers. It is never okay to change facts in this way, especially when the “facts” aren’t a major plot feature.

So when is it okay to change historical fact? When the plot of your novel asks the question, “What if things were different?” it is okay to rewrite history. For example, if your book asked the question, “What if Jesus had been a woman?” it’s okay to change historical fact and make Jesus female. Or, if your premise is, “What if the South had won the Civil War?” it’s okay to write a book to reflect this. But changing facts about history or cultural traditions and claiming it’s okay because your book is fiction is not only wrong, it’s going to make for disgruntled readers.

Stories are in the news. I once read a headline about a man who boxed himself into a shipping crate and had himself shipped via air express from New York to Texas. There’s a story in there somewhere. Why did he ship himself in a box? Why didn’t he take the train, or the bus? Was he running from something? Or running to something? These are the kinds of questions story writers ask themselves when they scan the headlines.

In short, stories are everywhere. Use your ears, your eyes. Most important, use your imagination.

If you don’t already, start carrying a small notebook and pen with you wherever you go. When you see something interesting, jot it down! When you hear a snippet of conversation, or see a person who is behaving in a unique way, take notes. Nothing you notice that interests you is too mundane to note down. These little snippets of daily life are the tendons and capillaries and muscle tissue that will help you flesh out your story. You may even find the backbone of your tale in such an incident.

Don’t rely on your memory to keep these images and words fresh in your mind. I can tell you from painful experience, it won’t work. If you don’t write them down right away, at least call yourself and leave a message on your voicemail detailing the interesting thing you saw or overhead. Your cell phone can become as useful a tool as your computer if you use it in this manner.

In the Beginning…

To some extent, how you begin your story depends on whether you are writing a literary, commercial, or genre novel, and whether you are writing for adults or for the young adult (YA, meaning teen and pre-teen) market. The literary novel has time to build momentum; commercial, genre, and young adult fiction by their very nature must drop the reader into a situation where the momentum is already in place. History is unfolded in the literary novel; in the others, the reader is dropped into a situation that already has a history. Literary novels may tell the entire history; commercial, genre, and young adult novels offer just a glimpse of history.

There are several interesting ways to start your story. You can begin in the middle, then backtrack and fill in details. This is often called a “frame story.” You can begin with a Big Promise to fulfill (or not fulfill, as the case may be.) You can begin with action, with dialogue, with character description, or in the case of literary novels, with setting description.

But no matter how you choose to start your story, keep in mind the best beginning poses a question, or questions, to the reader. Questions posed should make the reader curious about your characters’ motivation, or draw them into the story’s central conflict. Every story must have conflict, something your characters are striving to achieve or overcome. Without conflict, your don’t have a story; you have a character sketch. We’ll talk more about this in our session on character development.

What do we mean by “opening” of your story? By opening, we’re talking about the first few paragraphs or, at the most, the first scene. Why such a short section of your manuscript? Because, you have only three pages to attract the attention of readers, editors, and publishers. If you don’t hook your reader from the get-go, they will not read on. Think about your own experience with selecting books to purchase at the bookstore. You open a book and glance over the first page or so to see if it grabs your interest, right? Publishers and editors do exactly the same thing. And trust me, opening with page after page of “setting up the story,” as students often explain to me they are doing, will not hook a reader. (Take heart—you have three whole pages. Short story writers have only three paragraphs to do this.)

Let’s look at these different methods of opening your story in a bit more depth:

Begin in the Middle:

Take this famous opening, an example of beginning in the middle, from Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird:

When he was nearly thirteen, my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow. When it healed, and Jem’s fears of never being able to play football were assuaged, he was seldom self-conscious about his injury. His left arm was somewhat shorter than his right; when he stood or walked, the back of his hand was at right angles to his body, his thumb parallel to his thigh. He couldn’t have cared less, so long as he could pass and punt.

When enough years had gone by to enable us to look back on them, we discussed the events leading to his accident. I maintain that the Ewells started it all, but Jem, who was four years my senior, said it started long before that. He said it began the summer Dill came to us, when Dill first gave us the idea of making Boo Radley come out.₁

This excerpt obviously is an example of starting in the middle. The narrator—a young girl we later learn is named Scout—is reflecting back on the time several years early where the events unfolded in the story take place. Remember, the best story openings create questions in the mind of the reader. Has Harper Lee done this? Let’s look at some of the questions the opening poses. How did Jem break his arm? Why is this important to the story? Who is Dill, and why did he come to visit one summer? Who is Boo Radley, and why would they want to make him come out? Come out from where? The most important question the opening poses in my mind is, who is narrating the story?

That’s six questions posed by this opening, six reasons for the reader to continue on, searching for the answers.

Does this sentence drop the reader into a situation that already has a history? Clearly, yes. Something happened; the narrator speaks of “the events leading to his accident.” And during the course of the story, what happens becomes clear.

Begin with Action:

Commercial, genre, and YA fiction must drop your reader into a situation where the momentum is already built. Plopping your reader into a scene already in motion is an excellent way to do this.

Let’s look at the opening of Sarah Natalia Lee’s YA novel, Saving Amy:

On the eastern outskirts of the expansive city, beyond the lights aglow like a hundred tiny stars in the vortex of blackness, nesting innocently in the comforts of the small, secure neighborhood, a tiny house slept in the middle of a small yard, its white sides glowing in the moonlight. A dog barked from across the street, and a slender figure darted from shadow to shadow, quick as a cat, across the dark lawn and to the sliding glass back door, where it came to a halt and looked in the window.

The young woman was standing in the kitchen, visible in the moonlight seeping through the windows, her legs bare and strong, her curvy torso covered by a lacy satin slip reaching just past her bottom. Her long blonde hair shone as she tipped her head back and let the water pour from the crystal glass into her mouth; her arm lifted to reveal the moderately sized ridge that was her breast line. Desire oozed through the creature’s mouth; this one was so perfect, so young, so sexy; he knew he must have her. He waited impatiently until she put her glass on the counter and turned toward the door.

Her crystal blue eyes locked onto his and widened; her beautiful red lips opened in surprise and she slowly lifted her hand to her throat. He smiled satisfactorily; he had her.²

Does this opening pose questions to the reader? Yes. Who is this “creature” peeping through the sliding glass door? And just what does the author mean by “creature”? Who is the woman? What does it mean at the end, when it says “he had her”? Once again, the reader must continue on to find the answers.

Is the scene already in motion? Again, the answer is yes. The “creature” came from somewhere. Where was he before? What was he doing? And what was the woman doing before she looked up and saw him at the window? Not only does this scene begin in motion, that motion creates an entire new set of questions for the reader.

Begin with Dialogue:

Remember my saying by its very nature the genre and YA fiction must drop the reader into a situation where the momentum is already built? Starting with dialogue is an excellent way to accomplish this. Here is the opening of Alice Munro’s Open Secrets:

“And they almost didn’t even go,” Frances said. “Because of the downpour Saturday morning. They were waiting half an hour in the United Church basement and she says, Oh, it’ll stop—my hikes are never rained out! And now I bet she wishes it had’ve been. Then it would’ve been a whole other story.”³

Opening with dialogue drops us into a situation that already has a history, already has momentum, by dropping us into the middle of a conversation already taking place. It’s like joining in a conversation that is already taking place at a cocktail party—you have to listen in for a few minutes to sort out what the discussion is about. This is exactly why opening with dialogue can work so well—the reader must read on to figure out what the conversation is about.

Notice that Munro artfully combined two opening styles into one, as this is not only an example of beginning with dialogue, but also of beginning in the middle.

What questions are posed the reader in Munro’s opening? By now, you should be able to come up with at least a couple questions that need answers. See if you can figure them out for yourself this time.

Begin with Character Description:

With rare exception, fiction is character driven, meaning the action (or plot) is generated by what ever conflict the central character is experiencing. A good novel gets to the core of that conflict, giving the reader a glimpse of the central character’s soul. Because of this, character description is often used to begin a story. Look at the opening of Ursula Hegi’s novel, Stones from the River::

As a child Trudi Montag thought everyone knew what went on inside others. That was before she understood the power of being different. The agony of being different. And the sin of ranting against an ineffective God. But before that—for years and years before that—she prayed to grow.

Every night she would fall asleep with the prayer that, while she slept, her body would stretch itself, grow to the size of that of other girls her age in Burgdorf—not taller ones like Eva Rosen, who would become her best friend in school for a brief time—but into a body with normal-length arms and legs and with a small, well-shaped head. To help God along, Trudi would hang from door frames by her fingers until they were numb, convinced she could feel her bones lengthening; many nights she’d tie her mother’s silk scarves around her head—one encircling her forehead, the other knotted beneath her chin—to keep her head from expanding.⁴

Notice this description doesn’t tell us everything about Trudi’s looks. We don’t know her hair or eye color. We don’t know how old she is, although clearly she is not a child. What we do know is she is unusually short, has arms and legs that are not normal length, and an unusually large head. Trudi is, in fact, zwerg, or dwarf, a term that isn’t used until the reader is well into the book.

But what we know about Trudi from this opening goes far beyond recognizing her physical differences. We know what her state of mind was as a child, too—her differences were “agony” and she desperately wanted to change her appearance.

What questions does this opening pose?

Begin with Setting Description:

Novels that open with setting description are almost always literary in nature. This is because in the literary novel, setting takes on a major thematic role, like the ocean in Moby Dick or the jungle in Mosquito Coast. Remember, with commercial, genre, and young adult fiction, you want to drop your reader into a story that already has a history. You can’t do this if you begin with setting description. With a literary novel, you have time for that history to unfold, and setting description is often used to open this kind of novel.

Let’s look at the opening to Willa Cather’s O Pioneers!:

One January day, thirty years ago, the little town of Hanover, anchored on a windy Nebraska tableland, was trying not to be blown away. A mist of fine snowflakes was curling and eddying about the cluster of low drab buildings huddled on the gray prairie, under a gray sky. The dwelling-houses were set about haphazard on the tough prairie sod; some of them looked as if they had been moved in overnight, and others as if they were straying off by themselves, headed straight for the open plain. None of them had any appearance of permanence, and the howling wind blew under them as well as over them. The main street was a deeply rutted road, now frozen hard, which ran from the squat red railway station and the grain “elevator” at the north end of the town to the lumber yard and the horse pond at the south end. On either side of this road straggled two uneven rows of wooden buildings; the general merchandise stores, the two banks, the drug store, the feed store, the saloon, the post-office. The board sidewalks were gray with trampled snow, but at two o’clock in the afternoon the shopkeepers, having come back from dinner, were keeping well behind their frosty windows. The children were all in school, and there was nobody abroad in the streets but a few rough-looking countrymen in coarse overcoats, with their long caps pulled down to their noses.⁵

What makes Cather’s opening work is that it paints a color, three-dimensional picture of setting. True, the color is predominantly the gray of the sky and trampled snow, the unremarkable, non-descript prairie sod dwelling-houses, the white of snow swirling about. The only real flash of color is the red railway station. But the bleak illustration of setting is thematic of the story, representing the hard, dreary life and suffering experienced by settlers on the Nebraska frontier. Even the red train station is also thematic, representing Alexandra Bergson, the protagonist of the story. Alexandra is an unmarried pioneer woman, a lone female in a world dominated by men.

Once again, opening with setting is appropriate only for literary novels where setting is thematic. It isn’t appropriate for opening commercial, genre, or young adult fiction.

No matter what method you choose for beginning your story, keep in mind your opening scene (in a short story) or chapter (in a novel) should do the following:

• Introduce the main character and give clear signals about his or her personality, appearance, flaws, and strengths. Force your reader to care about this character.

• Introduce, or at least allude to, the good guy’s (called the protagonist) adversary (the “bad guy”, or antagonist). Characterize him as well.

• Present or strongly suggest the conflicts of the story. In short story, there usually is only one conflict. A novel usually will have a main conflict and sub-conflicts, or subplots—the most important should come into play early in the story.

We will learn more about these things in the coming chapters. But keep them in mind as you do the exercises at the end of this chapter.

To Outline, or Not to Outline

Remember writing term papers in high school? You came up with a theme, then made a detailed outline of everything you wanted to cover in your paper. Only then did you dare put pen to paper (okay, I confess…I went to high school before the advent of the personal computer! I know how to use a slide rule, too, but that’s another story) and write your report.

That worked fine for fact-filled term papers. For many fiction writers, though, outlines don’t work. This is because a story is often discovered as it is written. You can’t write an outline if you don’t know what your characters are going to do.

Stories are character driven. Without characters, there is no story. But many beginning authors think they have total control of their characters’ actions and attributes. The truth is, characters often take on a life of their own, and their lives take off in a different direction from the direction their creators intended. When your characters try to lead you in surprising and unintended directions, let them! Usually, the characters know what they are doing.

When I was writing my first novel, Redeeming Grace, I started out with the intention of writing a love story. I had inherited a box of my deceased aunt and uncle’s love letters written to each other when they were courting during the 1920’s. This was going to be the backbone of my story.

But Grace and Otto, my two main characters, didn’t want the book to be a love story, at least, not entirely. The final draft ended up being the story of a woman’s desperate attempt to save her younger sister from their abusive father while examining and challenging the beliefs of her patriarchal religious upbringing. Is there a love story in there? Yes. But had I followed my plan to make the book a love story, and not followed Grace’s lead when she took a different path, I doubt I would have had a saleable manuscript.

For this reason, I do not encourage my students to outline their stories before writing them. Old habits die hard. If you have an outline and are determined to stick with it, you may end up shutting out the voice of your characters when they try to lead you down the story’s true path—their path.

That said, I realize there are some writers who totally disagree with this approach. Many fine writers outline their stories before committing them to paper. Some never waver from what they have outlined; others are flexible, and veer off course if the characters compel them to do so. If you feel you absolutely cannot write without an outline, by all means, go ahead and outline your story. Only time and experience will tell you whether this is a wasted exercise or not.

Exercises

1. Browse through your library and find three stories you like. What technique does the author use to start his or her story? What questions are posed by the story openings? See if you can find examples of each opening technique discussed in this chapter.

2. Pick a favorite story and identify the technique the author used in the opening. This should be a book you are already familiar with. Now, rewrite the opening using the other techniques. For example, if the author started off by using action, try rewriting the scene beginning with dialogue. In your opinion, which style of opening works best for the story? Did the author get it right, or do you think a different opening style would have worked better?

3. If you have a story idea in mind—and I am assuming since you’ve purchased this book you do—write the opening few paragraphs of your story. Try different opening techniques. Does one jump out at you as being superior to the others?

Chapter 2

Characterization

Characterization is the cornerstone of a work of fiction. Without characters, you have no story. The action in your story is generated by whatever predicament the central character is in. And your characters must be in some sort of predicament. They must have conflict.

Conflict stems from one thing: desire. Your characters must want something, and want it badly. It can be something big, like to traverse the Appalachian Trail in a wheelchair, or to be the first tourist to the moon. Or, it can be something small, like rescuing an orphaned baby chipmunk and nursing it back to health. The important thing is not how big or small the desire is, but how badly your character wants it.

Characters must be multi-dimensional. Flat, one-dimensional characters make for a boring read. You want your characters to feel real to your readers. Real people are multi-dimensional. They have their good points and their flaws, because no one is perfect. Your characters need these imperfections, too.

For example, your protagonist may be a kindly grandmotherly type who makes teddy bears for sick children at the community hospital. But get inside her home and you may find she’s not thrown anything away for two decades, and that she lives in filth because none of her sixty-eight cats have been neutered.

Of course, this is a rather dramatic example. Character flaws can be less obvious—your character may chew her knuckles when she’s nervous, for example, or have a short fuse in the temper department.

Just as your protagonist must have flaws, your antagonist must have redeeming qualities in order to be real. Take Hannibal Lechter from Silence of the Lambs. Pure evil, right?

Wrong. Like it or not, Lechter had some redeeming characteristics. He was intelligent, articulate, loved books and art, and had a father-like affection for Clarice Starling.

Characters must be a mixture of both external and internal character traits. External are probably the easiest to define, because these are things you can see. Hair color, physical build, gender, and other physical traits are examples of external traits you can see.

But external traits also include characteristics that may not be as obvious, like speech patterns (for example, a nasal voice, or an unusually lyrical voice) and mannerisms or habits. For example, if you were taking one of my community college workshops instead of reading this book, you’d find I pace back and forth while I lecture, and wave my hands around a lot. If I were a fictional character, these would be examples of external traits.

Internal traits are your character’s personality traits, and his or her motivation vis-à-vis his or her conflict. Your character may be an eternal optimist, a miserly Scrooge, or frightened of his own shadow.

The best characters are those that display a balance of external and internal character traits. To distinguish your characters and make them memorable, character traits must also:

• Be vivid. Having messy long hair is not a vivid characteristic, because it doesn’t create much of a visual image. Having ‘what looked like a haystack where her hair should have been ’ however, instantly creates an image in the reader’s mind.

• Be character-specific. If a character has a nose like a gourd, he should be the only character with this unfortunate characteristic. Keep this in mind where you are naming your characters. Having your protagonist named Mary Ann Jones and your antagonist Marian Johnson is probably not a good idea, as the names are too similar and may create confusion in your readers’ minds.

Whatever combination of traits you give your characters, before you start writing about them, you have to get to know them as well as you know yourself. You have to know not only what they look like, but where they work, where they grew up, what kind of car they drive. Do they have siblings? Pets? What is their favorite color? Food likes and dislikes? Do they have any medical problems? These are just a few of the things you might want to know about your characters before you start writing your story.

The best way to get to know your characters is to create a characterization chart. Think of this as sort of a resume for your characters. Here is an example of what your characterization chart might look like:

CHARACTERIZATION CHART

Name: ________________________________________

Age: ________________________________________

Height: _______________________________________

Weight: _______________________________________

Eye Color: ___________________________________

Hair Color: ___________________________________

Distinguishing Features:

______________________________________________

______________________________________________

______________________________________________

______________________________________________

Family Background:

______________________________________________

______________________________________________

______________________________________________

______________________________________________

Education: ______________________________________________

______________________________________________

______________________________________________

Religion: ___________________________________

Occupation: ___________________________________

Marital Status: _________________________________

Children: ___________________________________

Favorite Color: _________________________________

Favorite Food: _________________________________

Habits (Good ones, bad ones, annoying ones):

______________________________________________

______________________________________________

______________________________________________

______________________________________________

Opinions:

______________________________________________

______________________________________________

______________________________________________

______________________________________________

Fears and Phobias:

______________________________________________

______________________________________________

______________________________________________

______________________________________________

Hobbies and Interests:

______________________________________________

______________________________________________

______________________________________________

______________________________________________

Health Issues:

______________________________________________

______________________________________________

______________________________________________

______________________________________________

Best Friend(s): _________________________________

Car Make/Model: _______________________________

Major Conflict that Must be Overcome:

______________________________________________

______________________________________________

______________________________________________

______________________________________________

______________________________________________

______________________________________________

______________________________________________

______________________________________________

Create one for each of your major characters, and use it to get to know them. Tailor this to meet your characterization needs, or create one of your own.

Weaving Character Description Into Your Story

Once you’ve filled out your characterization chart, you’re ready to share the wealth of information you’ve learned about your character with your readers. There’s an art to doing this, however. One of the biggest errors writers can make is unloading too much about their characters all at once.

For example:

Cheri was a thirty-three year old secretary who hated both her job and her roommate, whom she was certain was sleeping with her boyfriend.

In this sentence we learn our character’s name, her age, her job, and her predicament (we’ll assume since it says she hated her job and her roommate, she has the desire to fix these things). But how is the characterization? Boring! We learn nothing about Cheri’s personality from this description, only raw facts. This is because it breaks the writer’s mantra, that mantra being: Show, don’t tell.

Let’s rewrite the sentence, invoking this mantra:

After a nerve-wracking day of answering phones for Mr. Jones, typing and retyping quarterly financial statements, and standing at the Xerox machine nearly two hours copying, collating, and stapling twenty sets of deposition documents, Cheri dragged herself into the bar two doors down from her apartment building. She ordered a Red Stripe, which sat untouched while she chain smoked Camels and absentmindedly played with the stale peanuts that were set before her, compliments of the house. “Father Figure” was playing on the jukebox. She’d loved that song when she was in college, but once she found out George Michael was gay the song kind of lost its appeal.

She’d told both her roommate and her boyfriend she was going to visit her father this week-end, and she wondered just how long she’d have to wait before going home in order to catch Emily and the two-timing son-of-a-bitch in the sack together.

In this version, we get the same facts as the first version. We get her age—not exactly, but a rough estimate, because we know “Father Figure” was a popular song when she was in college. We get the idea she hates her job—after all, her day was so ‘nerve-wracking’ she ‘dragged’ herself to the bar. And we get a very clear picture of how she feels about her roommate.

But what else do we learn? For one thing, Cheri is one tough woman. She chain smokes Camels, and she’s drinking beer, not wine or a martini. We get the idea she may not be the most tolerant person when it comes to gays. And we learn she’s devious enough to stage an elaborate set-up for her roommate and boyfriend rather than simply confronting them about her fears.

Show, don’t tell. It works for physical description, too. For example:

Prince Charming was tall, dark, and handsome.

What does this tell us about Prince Charming? He’s tall, as compared to what? Next to Frodo Baggins, Danny DeVito is tall. He’s dark—does that mean suntanned? Or are they referring to his mood? And what does handsome mean? Princess Fiona thought Shrek was handsome, after all.

Let’s try to come up with something better:

The princess could see Prince Charming peering through the transom. His eyes, green as the shamrocks that grew in her garden, met her gaze, and it took the princess a moment to realize the light shining through the glass was not a new star, but the most dazzling smile to ever grace the face of man, a smile made all the brighter when he ducked through the door and she could see it’s contrast to his skin, which was the exact color of the coffee in her cup she held in her hand.

Okay, that’s schmaltzy writing. Fairy tales aren’t my forte. But you get the idea. We know the prince is tall because he is peering through a transom, which makes him at least taller than the door. We know he is handsome because of the princess’s reaction to his smile, and that his skin is the color of coffee.

Here’s an example from a real story. Look how Chester B. Himes opens his story, Crazy in the Stir:

The stained, squashed cigaret hanging from Red’s tight lips glowed, a tiny spark in the yellow glare that spilled from the enameled reflector at the ceiling. Smoke dribbled from his mouth and nostrils, eddied upward around the cardboard sign that hung from the light by a string—“SPITTING ON THE FLOOR AND WALL FORBIDDEN."

Red put his hands palms downward on the gray blanket that was stretched out on the table and stood up, straddling the low, wooden bench. He spit the cigaret from his lips. It broke up, scattered tobacco flakes over the pasteboard poker chips piled in the center of the blanket.

The other six men in the game looked at him, looked away. He swung away from the game, moved down the aisle. The hard heels of his prison brogues made clumping sounds on the concrete floor. His tall, slim frame jerked stiffly as he walked. His hair was wild flame above his set, white face. His greenish-gray eyes were hot slits. Men walking up and down the aisle for exercise looked at his face, got out of the way.⁶

What do we learn from this description? We learn Red is tall, slim, red-haired, green-eyed, and incarcerated. We also learn the other inmates fear him.

But we can learn so much more than the obvious here. The squashed cigaret, the cardboard sign, the gray blanket and pasteboard poker chips create an undercurrent of cold despair. You suspect this is a prison before the fact is confirmed in the third paragraph.

When giving physical description, remember that you don’t need to give every detail about a character’s appearance. You need only give enough to leave a vivid impression in the reader’s mind. Look how Flannery O’Connor does it, in her story A Good Man is Hard to Find:

…She wheeled around then and faced the children’s mother, a young woman in slacks, whose face was as broad and innocent as a cabbage and was tied around with a green head-kerchief that had two points on the top like rabbit’s ears. She was sitting on the sofa, feeding the baby his apricots out of a jar.⁷

O’Connor tells us nothing of the woman’s hair color or height. We know she has on slacks, but we don’t know what kind of blouse she’s wearing, or if she has on shoes or is barefoot. We don’t even know her name. She is referred to only as ‘the children’s mother’. Nevertheless, we have a vivid image of this cabbage-faced, rabbit-eared woman feeding her baby apricots.

In all the above examples, characterization is accomplished through narration. Narration is the author giving information to the reader, either directly, from the author’s position outside the story, or through the eyes of a character/narrator.

But characterization can also be effectively conveyed through the use of dialogue. Dialogue, of course, is what your characters say out loud.

What do we learn about the father/daughter characters, Rosenfeld and Sophie, from this excerpt of Bernard Malamud’s Benefit Performance:

He lit the flame under the vegetables and began to stir the mashed potatoes. They were lumpy. The remnants of his appetite disappeared. Sophie saw the look on his face and said, “Put some butter in the potatoes.” For a moment Rosenfeld did not move, but when Sophie repeated her suggestion, he opened the ice box.

“What butter?” he said, looking among the bottles and the fruit. “Here is no butter.”

Sophie reached for her housecoat, drew it on over her head and pulled up the zipper. Then she stepped into her slippers.

“I’ll put some milk in,” she said.

Without wanting to, he was beginning to grow angry.

“Who wants you to? Stay in bed. I’ll take care myself of the—the supper,” he ended sarcastically.

“Poppa,” she said, “don’t be stubborn. I’ve got to get up anyway.”

“For me you don’t have to get up.”

“I said I have to get up anyway.”

“What’s the matter?”

“Someone is coming”

He turned towards her. “Who’s coming?”

...“Ephraim.”

“The plum-ber?” He was sarcastic.

“Please pa, don’t fight.”

“I should fight with a plum-ber?”

“You always insult him.”

...“He insults you to come here. What does a plum-ber, who didn’t even finish high school, want with you? You don’t need a plum-ber.”

“I don’t care what I need, poppa, I’m twenty-eight years old,” she said.

“But a plum-ber!”

“He’s a good boy. I’ve known him for twelve years, since we were in high school. He’s honest and he makes a nice steady living.”

“All right,” Rosenfeld said angrily. “So I don’t make a steady living. So go on, spill some more salt on my bleeding wounds.”

“Poppa, don’t act, please. I only said he made a steady living. I didn’t say anything about you.”

“Who’s acting?” he shouted, banging the ice box door shut and turning quickly. “Even if I didn’t support you and your mother steady, at least I showed you the world…You heard the best conversation about life, about books and music and all kinds art. You toured with me everywhere. You were in South America. You were in England. You got a father whose Shylock in Yiddish even the American critics came to see and raved about it. This is living. This is life. Not with a plum-ber…”

“Poppa, that’s not fair,” she said quietly, “you make him afraid to talk to you.”

The answer seem to satisfy him. “Don’t be so much in the hurry,” he said more calmly. “You can get better.”

“Please, drop the subject.”⁸

What do we learn about Rosenfeld through this dialogue? We learn he was, at one time, a fine actor. We learn he is now likely down on as luck, because he is living with his daughter and eating lumpy mashed potatoes for dinner. We learn he is scornful of his daughter’s suitor, and thinks her seeing a plumber is beneath her.

And what of Sophie? Sophie is twenty-eight, and in 1943, when this story was written, being twenty-eight and single was not an enviable position for a woman to find herself in. She’s living with her cantankerous father, caring for him, ducking his insults, and hoping with what comes across as quiet desperation he won’t ruin her chances with her plumber boyfriend. Does she agree with her father’s assessment the plumber isn’t good enough for her? Perhaps—after all, the best she says in his defense is that he makes a steady living.

The advantage of using this technique for characterization (as opposed to saying something like <Rosenfeld was a domineering father, down on his luck, who was bound and determined to ensure his old-maid daughter was as miserable as he was>) is that is allows readers to come to this conclusion on their own. Readers are intelligent people. They don’t like to be told what to think of characters. They want to determine for themselves what kind of people characters are, just as they do with real people in real life.

Show, don’t tell. Three simple words that make or break a story.

Descriptive Language in Characterization

Some words of caution when writing character descriptions: Avoid overusing adjectives. One or two should suffice. For example, don’t write sentences like:

Betsy ran the comb through her damp, tangled, shoulder-length, finely textured, straight, light ash blonde hair.

That’s a bit exaggerated, of course, but you get the idea. Lengthy descriptions of character traits get boring, and you’ll lose your readers.

Similarly, avoid clichés in your descriptions. Chiseled jaws, cornflower blue eyes, pouty red lips, and plumbers rear-ends sticking out when they bend over have all been done to death. (The expression “done to death” has been done to death, thus, is also cliché. Come up with fresh ways of describing your characters. How do you know if it’s cliché or not? Did you write it yourself, or have you heard it said before? If it isn’t a phrase of your own design, it’s cliché.

Occasionally, I’ve had students attempt to get around having to describe their characters by comparing them to celebrities. For example:

Sarah was a dead ringer for Britney Spears.

Doing this is a mistake. For one thing, the author is assuming everyone knows what Britney Spears looks like. That may be true today, but what about tomorrow? Celebrity comes and celebrity goes. Don’t do your characters the disservice of comparing them to yesterday’s news. It’s lazy writing, and publishers and editors don’t like it, figuring if you can’t even describe your characters in an original way, why should they think you can tell a story in an original way?

Exercises

1. Think of a favorite cartoon character—Bugs Bunny, Mickey Mouse, Kermit the Frog. Create a characterization chart for that cartoon character. You may use the one included in the earlier part of this chapter, or you may create your own. The purpose of this exercise is to familiarize you with the process of creating characterization charts using a character you already know well.

2. Pretend you best friend (or your brother, or your aunt) is a character in a novel. Create a characterization chart for them.

Chapter Three

Setting

Many novice writers think the words ‘scene’ and ‘setting’ are interchangeable. They are not.

A scene is the action that takes place within a certain time, place, and from one character’s viewpoint. A scene can be two sentences long, or several pages long. An entire chapter may have several scenes, or only one.

Any time you have a change in location, a jump in time, or switch to another character’s viewpoint, you begin a new scene. New scenes are indicated by putting an extra return in your manuscript to create white space, like this:

Some writers put stars or some sort of little flourish between scenes, just to ensure readers understand there is a scene break, like this:

* * *

If you choose to do this (and I recommend this method), only three stars are necessary. You don’t need a whole line of them.

Setting, on the other hand, is the location where the events of a scene take place. Setting could be a bedroom, a bar, or outer space.

Selecting the right setting for your story is crucial to the story’s success. Would the novel Gone With the Wind have been successful if it had been set in London during World War II? Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistlestop Café just wouldn’t have been the same had Fannie Flagg instead written Falafel Sandwiches at a Brooklyn Deli.

Careful setting selection can make a story more suspenseful, comic, or intense, depending on what the writer is trying to achieve. For example, take the famous car chase scene from the movie The French Connection (movies are stories, too, after all, and the same principles often apply). Would the chase have had viewers perched on the edge of their seats had it taken place across the desert outside Las Vegas? No, because the suspense was created at least in part by the harrowing way the cars involved weaved in and out of traffic and between girders supporting the elevated train tracks. The risk of a major accident was always very real, a risk that wouldn’t have been present had the chase taken place in the wide-open desert.

How much setting description do you need in a story? That depends on the story. You need enough description so your setting feels real to your readers, but you don’t want to put in so much is slows down the action of your story.

In literary novels setting often takes on thematic significance, and lengthy setting descriptions are appropriate. Think of Moby Dick, for example, and Melville’s lengthy descriptions of the sea. The sea is thematic, representing man’s struggle with nature (with God), and therefore these descriptions are not only appropriate, but necessary to the story.

But commercial and genre fiction, as I have said before, are character driven. This means the setting will take a back seat to your characters and their actions. Lengthy descriptions are usually not necessary in genre fiction.

With setting description in genre and commercial, the saying ‘less is more’ is a good one to remember. Think of your story like it’s a stage play, and your setting description your scenery. With most plays, setting is suggested by the careful selection of a few telling stage props.

If you have your character in a room, for example, don’t feel compelled to detail every item of furniture, every painting on the wall, every dust bunny in the corner. A famous writer (sorry, I can’t remember who it was) once said, “If there’s a gun on the wall, it damn well better go off by the end of the story.” That’s good advice.

Let’s look at an excerpt from my short story, The Last Flight Home:

The river roars past me, slamming a fallen tree branch against a rock and splintering it into shreds before rushing over the granite shelf that is the top of the falls. Spray defies gravity, and water droplets hang mid air in a momentary state of suspended animation before plunging to the deep pool ninety feet below.

I edge closer to the rim and look down. The pool looks different from up here, a bowl worried out of the granite over millions of years. Wondrous stuff, water. Soft enough to glide through without creating much more than a ripple, yet hard enough to shape the rock.⁹

This, of course, is a description of a river and waterfall. It is the only visual description of setting in the entire short story, which takes place in Great Smoky Mountains National Park. There is no attempt here to describe the trees, the sky, or the mountains. It’s not necessary, because the river and the waterfall are my gun on the wall, so to speak.

Notice I say this is the only visual description of setting in the story. Visual descriptions, however beautiful and prosaic, paint a one-dimensional picture. Stories that rely on only visual descriptions lack texture But looks what happens when you add other senses to the mix. Let’s pick up where we left off with The Last Flight Home:

I close my eyes and take a slow, deep breath. These mountains have a scent all their own, a signature perfume. I’ve smelled it every time I’ve come here, but this time, I realize I can break down the individual essences perfuming the air: rotting rhododendron blossoms mixed with moss-covered granite and cold, crisp water. I’ve never before noticed that granite has a scent—like the air just before a storm, vaguely electrical—or that water smells cold.¹⁰

Here, rather than describing what she is seeing, my character narrator is describing what she is smelling. Yet this, too, is setting description, because it engages our sense of smell while at the same time, adding texture to the earlier visual imagery. We now know the rocks in the river are covered in moss and rhododendron is growing along the banks.

In Flannery O’Connor’s story, The Geranium, we get a visual setting description in the opening paragraphs:

Old Dudley folded into the chair he was gradually molding to his own shape and looked out the window fifteen feet away into another window framed by blackened red brick. He was waiting for the geranium. They put it out every morning about ten and they took it in at five-thirty. Mrs. Carson back home had a geranium in her window. There were plenty of geraniums at home, better-looking geraniums…The geranium they would put in the window reminded him of the Grisby boy at home who had polio and had to be wheeled out every morning and left in the sun to blink.¹¹

This is the only visual description of setting we get. Yet we get a much richer, more textured picture of Old Dudley’s world when, several paragraphs into the story, O’Connor adds sound to her setting:

Somewhere down the hall a woman shrilled something unintelligible out to the street; a radio was bleating the worn music to a soap serial; and a garbage can crashed down a fire escape. The door to the next apartment slammed and a sharp footstep clipped down the hall.¹²

Purchase this book or download sample versions for your ebook reader.
(Pages 1-43 show above.)